Day Late B*TCHFest: come on in!

I have to jump in with one more: surgeons (and their staff) who treat their patients like **** I'm appalled by the number of people on OH who are ignored, intimidated, berated, etc. by their surgeons. 

I've said it a thousand times and here, and I'll say it again: your doctor works for YOU. YOU - either directly or through insurance - pay his or her salary. DO NOT allow yourself to be pushed around by him/her or the office. If need be, remind them - quote and unquote - what I just said.

If you were at, say, Target and were ignored or treated like **** would you take it lying down?

I am sick of people at my work trying to tell me what to do even though they are not my boss.  And it's not even like it's stuff that I don't already know.  One person in particular likes to monitor my every move and then point out the obvious and treat me like I don't know what I'm doing.  My boss tells me that she trusts me and wants me to be self sufficient.  And that's how I am.  SO LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!

I awoke to an outbreak of poison oak this morning. It's all down the INSIDE of my left thigh, and my left calf. The right thigh has some, too, and strangely, my forearms. I have bathed in calamine lotion. taken benedryl. and aspirin===foir the rib I broke falling over the dog. Now it's 2:29 AM, and I am NOT asleep...*sigh*

I'm mad as hell I have to do the "healthy life coaching" at work for a discount on my health insurance again this year. If I'd known there was a specific number they were after, I'd have had the nurse pull the measuring tape a little tighter during the screening. I am ONE inch too big in the waist to skip the calls. ONE F-ING INCH. This will be at least the fourth year I've done them and have never had so much as one useful takeaway. The "coaches" don't listen to a thing you say, they read a script and quite frankly, I could tell them a thing or two about losing weight!!!  What a total waste of time and money. Couldn't my employer better use that money by giving us a gym membership or healthy employee cafeteria?  SO HORRIBLE!  I'd rather stick needles in my eyes than do these calls. 

Thank you for letting me *****  I just discovered this thread and desperately need a safe place to unload this, as I have few outlets for it offline.

Nine months ago my life completely turned upside down.  My husband, without consulting me, told a young woman friend-of-friends that she could move into our home *temporarily* because she had lost her job in a different state and was moving back to our state to find a new job.  When I found out about it I decided to be a grownup and let her stay, thinking it would be a couple of weeks.  I knew of her through the grapevine that she was a decent person, and I decided to be charitable.  It was not the first time my husband had acted so impulsively, either.  More on that later.

My kids ended up loving her to bits and seemed to prefer hanging out with her rather than with me.  My husband just went nuts over her and spent most of his free time with her in our home, talking religion and helping her grade papers (she was a teacher for a very brief period of time).  I increasingly got more and more depressed withdrawn and angry at being thus ignored and devalued and felt as if I was walking on eggshells in my own home.  Seeing my kids and my husband so wrapped in her company and so delighted to have her as a guest made me hesitate to do anything, though.

"A couple of weeks" turned into two months.  I could barely stand the sight of her by the time she left for a job in yet another state.  It's not that she was not a good houseguest -- she was picky, to be sure, but it could have been worse -- but I was relieved beyond words when she left.

Then my husband began to grieve her absence and the lack of the intense discussions they used to have.  I honestly believe nothing physical or romantic happened or would have happened.  She is half his age.  No, trust me, it wasn't that sort of thing.  If I thought it was I would have picked her scrawny ass up myself and would have tossed her out onto the lawn.  Rather, her  presence awakened in my husband this deep sense of vocation and calling not unlike hers, and not having her around to talk about it all the time made him fall apart somewhat.

That falling apart stuff led him and then me to do some online research.  We learned that he probably has Asperger syndrome and probably always has. He literally can plug his life from early childhood into the symptoms and find solid matches.  Also, a psychiatrist acquaintance of ours said, oh, YES, Asperger's, all the markers.  Another acquaintance of ours who has a son diagnosed with Asperger also said, uh, yes, it's pretty obvious that he has all the signs.

Okay, now we had a name for all of the crap that he went through his whole life and all the crap he put me through during our 20+ years of marriage, including hyperfocusing on my weight.  There is no treatment for it, but only awareness and coping mechanisms.  It did plunge him into further turmoil, though, because he finally bought into his own cluelessness over social situations.  Now we were both walking on eggshells.

He decided, on the coaxing of that girl, to begin courses for his master's degree in theology.  No matter that I had been telling him for years that I thought he should do that.  So now that consumes a great deal of his time and attention.

Meanwhile, I have stopped caring for myself so well and have regained about 40 of the pounds I so viciously fought off preop and postop.  Now I find myself on a diet again.  My sleeve still works great if I pay attention to it and if I let it, but now the difference is I'm interested in food again and have to fight off compulsions to eat out of stress or whatever.  He has decided to play food cop again, but not to the degree he once did, admittedly.  My depression and sense of worthlessness have also come roaring back. 

We are both walking on eggshells around here now.  His driving need to do things for others all the time, but not so much around here, are making family life difficult, and I am having to fill in the gaps for him with the children and around the house.  What little time he has open after working full-time and doing the master's work seems to go to fixing other's problems.  I'm pretty angry about that, but it's a very tricky situation given what we now know for sure about the way his brain works.  He finds himself in his 50s thinking that he has wasted most of his life on worthless pursuits and thinking that it might be too late to make his life meaningful.  That's the best way I can describe what's happening at this time.  Very tricky for me to disrupt that with demands unless absolutely necessary. 

We have lost friends over this who finally had enough of his hovering, make-it-better behaviors.  I really feel abandoned IRL by these people who have their own issues, but at least a couple of whom find it convenient to blame their own problems on interactions with my husband IMVHO.  I am ready to toss their not-so-scrawny asses out on my lawn as well. 

Thanks for listening, anyone *****ads this.  All I can do at this point is claw my way back to self-worth one finger at a time and try to balance my husband's lack with my coming forth, which is frightening and frustrating and empowering all at once.