Symmetry, grocery stores, and the significance of 3

My first memory of dealing with symmetry that has stuck with me in a more profound way was in the second grade when we were learning how to write in cursive.  it wasn't the act of writing the letters perfectly the first time that i was so concerned about, it was how the piece of paper that was on my desk was lined up in comparison to its position on my small desk.  then came where to put my pencil when i was done writing.....did it go to the right of the paper, the left, the top, the bottom? what about the eraser? did it go with the pencil or did it have its own place? was that piece of paper really parallel with the sides of the desk in the exact center of the desk? these were the questions that were going through my head (obviously i wasn't using parallel in my vocabulary back then but in reality everything to me must be either parallel, perpendicular, or at a 45* angle).  I remember bringing home a note to my mother that said your daughter seems more interested in organizing her desktop than focusing on the lesson, please have her complete this work sheet and bring it back tomorrow.  Still I continued focusing on the symmetry of my desk and then the symmetry obsession expanded off of my desk, to the rows of desks, to the items up on the decorated boards, to the ceiling tiles, out into the hallway how were the floor tiles laid, the door frames, lockers, windows that were open, blinds.....it goes on and on and on. Even now the symmetry obsession is the strongest obsession i have and the one that seems to resist the CBT therapy so well.  If I am feeling particularly stressed i will start to line up everything around me in a symmetrical manner, and i mean everything.

I am sure that i will come back to symmetry later in this post but for now lets move on to the grocery store, which actually is a prime trigger for my symmetry to kick in hard core.  I have to say that one of my favorite stores to go shopping in is Market Basket not just because the prices are awesome but also because they keep their shelves so neat and tidy, i find it visually soothing there.  But there is still the compulsion to face all the items on the shelves and make everything even and neat.  I have another problem at the grocery store, it is that i never want to take the first of anything on the shelves.  I am the person that will take the middle or last item from the very back of the line of items.  Doesn't matter where....bulk purchases, small purchases.  Many people are able to run into the grocery store and get the following items: baby food, milk, eggs, bread  (we will keep the list simple), and it might take them 10 or so minutes to get in and out.  they walk over grab whatever milk is in the front of the line of cartons, eggs on top of the pile, whatever loaf of bread is right in front and grab what ever baby food they need.  I will walk you through my process when getting those four items... Milk- is there anything that is dirtying the outside of the carton, does it leak if i hold it to one side, is it cold enough, reject it if it is the first item, someone might have picked it up and decided they didn't want it when they got up to the counter and it could have taken an hour to get back into the cooler section.  Now i realize that may be a little extreme for the average person, and i have done the research you can technically drink milk that has been sitting out in 98F weather for 12 hrs before you are in trouble, But remember this isn't about rationality this is about OCD.  Ok since we are in the dairy section already obsessing about the milk lets go over to the egg case, i prefer the large or jumbo brown eggs (there really is no difference).  First i have to check the exterior of the carton to see if there is any visible damage (reject if there is) don't take the one from the top it usually has a cracked egg in it, check the bottom of the carton for signs of a cracked egg- discolored cartons are a dead give away.  Now time to open the carton, holding it in my left hand i open the lid with my right and gently rock each egg, if they stick in the cradle it is cracked and i reject the whole thing.  I will do this with 6-12 cartons until I find on that is satisfactory (on a bad day that is) alright on to the loaf of bread...this is a touch one, i can't open the bag and inspect every slice...which given the opportunity i might actually do.  first i have to check for bag integrity around the bread, is it squished? are their flies in the bag? is there mold in the bag? does it look contaminated at all? Sometimes i am lucky and settle on the first bag that i pick up.   So now for me comes the absolute nightmare.  Buying jars of baby food, and i don't even have a baby!  I am getting it for my terminal rabbit.  This is the object of many of my obsessions:  She is the one that i am getting the food for.  And i obsess that i am going to in some way harm her because i am careless.  So i feel i must meticulously check each of the small jars of food, i fear they are spoiled or poisoned or something awful.  I can't go into much more... my SUDS (subjective units of discomfort) is approaching a 9 and if i hit a 10 i am going to have a psychogenic nonepileptic seizure.  Too late, but it is ok.

Lets move away from the grocery store and I am going to reveal my obsession with the number 3 and its multiple.  It is simply this, lets say you lock the door and walk away.  Well if i had my way all the time and sometimes this snowballs into multiples of three.  So for me locking the door was lock the door, push on the lock a second time, and then push the lock a third time because i may have unlocked it somehow on my check of the first time i had locked it.  it is the action, then the check of the action and then the check of the check.  Alright i think that is enough for now.

3 Furry Ativan Please!

Furry ativan is the running joke in my support group.  we talk about how calming our animals are for us and how under circumstances that normally would have required medication to get through, we have discovered that our animals can take the place of the medications and act alot faster on our anxiety than any medication on the market.  For me this is 100% true and always has been, whether it has been for depression, anxiety, pain, or an OCD flare up.  Looking back to my childhood it was the guinea pigs that would pick up on my anxiety and when i would sit with them they gave me a strange sense of calm while it seems they relentlessly bit my sister.  Flash forward to us getting our dog, a normally active beagle, who would sit quietly with me while i had a panic attack and would follow me around when i would check all the doors throughout the house and then again and again during the middle of the night.  The dog was a god send to my mother who suffered and then succumbed to colon cancer in the summer of 2001.  My mother would sit with the dog for hours just petting her in bed and would refuse pain medication saying that she didn't need it when the dog was cuddled up next to her. 

In my case, my furry ativan are my three rabbits.  Each with a different ability to pick up on what is distressing me in the moment.  It is very interesting to me, our newest addition, a baby sable point holland lop, is the most intuned to my high anxiety and my episodes with psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES).  It is almost like she knows that i am gong to have one and will sit very still in my lap and start to lick my face or hand and will wait with me until the seizure is done, she then perks up when i come out of it and looks at me as if saying see it is ok i was here the whole time.  when i sit with her it is like my anxiety and panic just drains out of my entire body and for at least a moment my mind is quiet.  My older lop, is admittedly my favorite of all three.  She was my first ever rabbit and when i got her i had no idea how interactive rabbits could be and how much of a personallity they could have.  it is astounding to me.  over the two years that we have had her i have relearned that i can't control all of the situations that life brings to me, i used to hover over her and she was for a while completely free to roam around the house.  Not any more thought, a genetic defect is taking her from me and we have reached a point where she can't reliably use her litter box, it may seem cruel to keep her around but the lights in her eyes haven't gone out yet, when they do it will be time.  when it comes i don't know how i am going to handle it.  after my diagnosis she is the one that got me out of the house more, i would carry her around with me when i would go to weightloss meetings, got me to go outside period.  she is always my friendly face in a sea of faces that are strange and sometime bewildering.  these days our relationship is less about me and more about her, and that is ok with me.

which brings me to our third bunny, a mixed breed chocolate brown male that we adopted almost two years ago from our local rescue league.  he is an odd character, he has formed a strong bond to my fiance and it seems will only occasionally give me the time of day.  he does redeem himself though, he is my second favorite rabbit to take with me when i leave the house to go to the store or bank or mall.  you name it he goes everywhere, and when he is out with me he is a completely different rabbit.  He checks in with me as if to say look down at me, i am not scared why should you be?  and everytime i tell him you raise a good point, pet him and feel my anxiety levels go down. 

when i am in the middle of a panic or anxiety attack i look to the bunnies, the only rational thought that will go through my mind at that point is well the rabbits aren't afraid so my fear must not be real right now, they are living in reality every moment of their lives and some how they pull me back when it seems nothing else will.

I should go back an explain what psychogenic nonepileptic seizures are events superficially resembling an epileptic seizure, but without the characteristic electrical discharges associated with epilepsy. Instead, PNES are psychological in origin, and may be thought of as similar to conversion disorder. It is estimated that 20% of seizure patients seen at specialist epilepsy clinics have PNES.  Shamefully i cite wikipeadia with the definition however the definition is surprisingly accurate.  For me the seizures feel as real as real can feel.  I was hospitalized in 2009 for "seizures that were not responding to conventiational treatment".  At the time it was terrifying, 30-60 seconds of sheer terror running through my head, i was having cyclical convulsions of my upper body, i couldn't breathe through my mouth, i blinked in time with the convulsions and would loose control of keeping myself upright (though i never fell).  it is such a strange thing to endure, i can/could hear and see and feel everything that was going on, but there was absolutly no way of getting a message out of help me i am scared, help me i can't breath, just help me.  for a good episode it was just 2-5 sets of the seizures, if it was a bad episode it could go on for 30 minutes.  the neurology team seemed baffled by the condition and it actually turned out to be a brand new MD and the head of the neurology department that put the pieces together.  I had an EEG with video recording, the only way to definitive way that i am aware of to diagnose psychogenic noneplileptic seizures.  I forget where i found the statistic but something like 2-3% of people with OCD also have psychogenic nonepileptic seizures.  Guess i won the lottery right? yeah right.  well the psych team at the hospital changed the medications that i was on and put me on a SSNRI (selective seratonin norepinephrin reuptake inhibitor) and on the first day my seizures dropped by 75% the same day i got the diagnosis of obessive compulsive disorder.  one more sleepless night and then i was discharged with these two new diagnoses and poorly connected to the resources that i needed to get through this new chapter of my life.  I was to spend the next two months on disability and move out of state in the process.  My therapist at the time (and i use the term therapist loosely) said that maybe i should call McLean Hospital, (www.mcleanhospital.org/) they were able to get me the names of a couple therapist that would be able to help me in when i moved to NH.  I am still in therapy and doing pretty good most of the time, when it is good it is good when it is bad it is bad but i guess that is how life is for everyone.

If it hurts why do you keep doing it?

so back in February i had hurt my thumb lifting groceries, well it was more the tendon that moves your thumb.  i ending up having to get a cortisone injection to get movement of my thumb back.  i have been doing physical therapy ever since.  i bring this up only because i feel that for a person that doesn't have OCD you probably wouldn't engage in behaviors that would aggravate your conditions.  Well that isn't the case for me.  I was stress cleaning our bed room last night and had taken my protective brace off because i felt that it was slowing me down.  i should have kept it on because yet again I have further injured my hand by doing rituals.  That wasn't the first time that it has happened nd it won't be the last i am sure, and that realization scares me.  i will give you another example.  Back in April i got contact lenses and on the first day i was already ritualizing over them.  i was trying to get the lenses out at the end of the evening and successfully got one lens out but not the other (or so i thought).  i spent two hours trying to get the lens i thought was stuck in my eye out.  I tried everything, rinsing it out, blinking, and the two fingered pinch approach.  Forty five minutes into it i was almost in tears from the pain i had caused myself going after the contact lens.  Finally my fiance looked in and saw what i was doing and came it and held my hands down until i stopped trying to get at my eye.  well then we went to bed and by we i mean he.  i stayed up trying to get the contact lens out, i finally stopped when i almost passed out from the pain.  the dawn brought my a left eye with broken blood vessels and conjunctivitis.  I had to go to the urgent care clinic and they gave me antibiotics and told me in addition that i had scratched my cornea.  When they asked me what happened all i could answer was i thought that the contact lens was still swtuck in my eye and i had to get it out.  the nurse asked me well didn't it hurt?...Yes it did....If it hurts why do you keep doing it?  I said I have OCD, if i am ritiualizing and it is causing me pain there is a slim to none chance that it will stop me.  she just looked at me and all she could say was well you really shouldn't do that you should just try to stop when that starts to happen.  yeah right, if i could stop the rituals i would is what i wanted to scream at her, but instead i kept my mouth shut. 

it is the same thing that my father tells me to do, he just keeps saying you just need to relax and calm down and not do those things.  it hurts because it is so clear to me that he doesn't understand at all what is going on inside of my head.  i know that i can't expect everyone to understand what is going on inside of my head but i wouldn't have thought that he would have at least read the Wikipedia entry about ocd.

there is a driving force inside of my head that eggs me on to continue these certain behaviors however painful they might be.  when i am stuck in a checking ritual, especially checking the locks (which at my worst including getting up 40 times a night to check that the door was in fact locked) there is no rationality or reality in any of it.  I am in a desperate scramble to make sure i have done something perfectly and that i will not be the reason that someone comes into the house and kills me or my fiance or our three rabbits or our fish or the list goes on....  It is all to just feel in control of what is going on around me. My thoughts are always filled with What If questions that always have some devastating horrific answer, why wouldn't i try to prevent these horribly possibilities from happening.

Where to begin?

I am not quite sure how to do this without sounding completely lame.  But I feel like I need to tell at least part of my life to someone.

I guess I will just start.  I have obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD as it will be referred to), I am about 2 years out from my diagnosis but have been suffering (and i do mean suffering) from this disorder since as long as I can remember.  I check things in groups of 3's, have issues with symmetry and perfectionism, hyperresponsibility and some contamination issues.  There are a whole host of other things that bother me but I am not sure how to categorize them.  I am working with a therapist to do cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) and do exposure response prevention therapy (ERP's).  Yes i see a psychiatrist and am on a couple medications that seem to keep some of the symptoms at bay enough so that I can sleep at night.

I hope that someone finds this whether they have OCD or one of their family members have it. My experience with my illness and my family is one that is divided, it seems that my more removed relatives almost seem to care more, they ask questions about how I am feeling these days, how my therapy is going, etc; while my immediate family seems to be in complete denial.  My fiance has been through a good portion of this with me and has stood by me the entire time.  I don't know where I would be with out him.   At my worst times, he is the one my OCD and rational mind turn to to see how to get back to reality.  His family is really supportive of me, or at least it always seems to be that way at least.  I am blessed to have them in my life.  

The media has done such a good job of blowing this condition so out of proportion that I am at times terrified to tell doctors that I have OCD in fear of being locked up in some hospital away from the rest of society.