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Thirty Years Later, I’m Still Grateful To Children’s Hospital Boston

I wrote this more than a year ago, but I feel as strongly about it now as I ever have…

I wasn’t happy about bringing Duncan to Children’s Hospital in Boston Monday and yesterday. I practically lived there as a kid and don’t enjoy the reminders. Instead, I’ve been reminded of the gifts that place gave me.

Duncan needed to have a broken wrist reset and pinned, so in we went. The first thing I noticed is that the main lobby looks nothing like what I remember as a kid. Now there’s a CVS, an Au Bon Pain that serves damn good coffee, and this contraption in which a series of rubber balls travel around a network of pipes and chains, hitting a series of bells and chimes.

Duncan would stand there watching it all day if he could.

Another feature that wasn’t there when I was a kid — this stairway that makes music when you walk up and down it.

These additions make the hospital experience a lot less scary for children. But what I appreciated most was the same thing that got me through all the childhood Crohn’s Disease episodes: The staff.

From beginning to end, the nurses and doctors who treated Duncan were Heaven sent. They told Duncan jokes, comforted him and put him at ease, just like they did for me all those years ago.

Duncan’s visit was for something far more routine. He was essentially in and out. But even short visits can be traumatic for an eight-year-old boy.

This post is to thank them for taking good care of Duncan. As for what they did for me in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I can never thank them enough.

Back then Crohn’s Disease was a rare animal in which little was understood. I lost a lot of blood during those attacks and it’s safe to say that Children’s Hospital saved my life more than once.

That’s what my parents have told me, anyway.

If your kid breaks a bone or catches a nasty bug, don’t panic when the pediatrician sends you to Boston for top-line care.

If you go to Children’s Hospital, everything is going to be just fine.

CHBoutside

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Facebook Defriending Syndrome Takes A Ridiculous Twist

People see Facebook as an online place to hide from the real world. But for a growing number of unstable minds, Facebook IS part of the real world.

Mood music:

A woman in Iowa was arrested and charged with setting fire to the home of someone who “unfriended” her on Facebook. Here’s the story from Internet Broadcasting (as run on the WMUR website):

Jennifer Christine Harris, an elementary school teaching associate in Des Moines, was charged with first-degree arson and was being held in the Polk County Jail on $100,000 bond, the Des Moines Register reported.

The fire broke out at around 1 a.m. on Oct. 27. People were asleep inside, but everyone was able to escape. The home was damaged and a detached garage destroyed in the blaze. According to the Register, Harris had been close friends with one of the inhabitants, Nikki Rasumssen, until they began fighting over comments Harris allegedly made about Rasmussen on Facebook. Rasmussen responded by unfriending and blocking Harris on Facebook.

I’ve touched on my own obsessions concerning my Facebook friend count in the past. In August 2010 I wrote:

My current Facebook friend count is 1,169. That may seem like a freakishly high number, but it makes sense when you consider that those connections are a broad mix of family, friends, associates in the security industry and people who “friended” me simply because they read this blog. Here’s the stupid part, though: It was 1,174 a few days ago. So now I’m worrying about who I might have offended. But I have so many connections that it’s pretty much impossible to go through the entire list to see who’s missing.

Most of us have integrated Facebook into our realities so deeply that we would take these things personally. In my case, the result is obsessing over how I might have offended people because in the end I just want to be liked.

In the case of the woman in the news item above, the thirst for revenge took over.

On some level, I understand how a person could do such a thing. If my own challenges with mental illness have taught me anything, it’s that a lack of sanity can make us do just about anything. Those of us lucky enough to maintain a sense of right vs. wrong would never light someone’s house on fire over this or any other reason. But for some people, the wiring in the brain gets far too twisted to know good from bad.

As for my own situation, the paranoia over unfriending has diminished considerably since I wrote that initial post. One reason is that I’ve made peace with the fact that I can only be myself and if someone doesn’t like it they should leave. I know of several people who have defriended me over the volume or nature of things I’ve written about. So be it. No hard feelings.

I’ve also decided that if several of my Facebook friends can constantly complain about work or significant others, or get all mushy and lovey-dovey with their significant others, or post reams of political tirades full of bad spelling and grammar, or make self-evident statements, well…

I’m going to write what I feel and post it as often as I want. Fair is fair. Once I made my peace, I braced for the exodus of my online friends.

As of Nov. 7, 2011, my friend count was 1,805 — well over 600 more connections than last year. Go figure.

Either enough people find value in what I’m doing or they’ve just learned to tune out my noise.

Whatever the case, if you decide to unfriend me, have no fear. I’m not the type of guy that will torch your house over it.

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Christian Intolerance Or Universal Snobbery?

Though I’m a devout Catholic, I sometimes shake my head in disgust over how some of my Christian brothers and sisters behave.

I’ve mentioned before how some in my church community are quick to judge other people and how others seem to think you have to be a member of a specific political party to be entitled to Christ’s love. Democrats are often labeled as abortionists. A friend shared this cartoon this morning and I think it speaks a lot of truth:

There does indeed seem to be a lot of anger among so-called right wingers when you try to offer a more moderate position.

That last frame in the comic, where the woman screams about being persecuted, rings especially true. When a person’s beliefs are questioned, they instantly become victims.

To be fair, Christians have not cornered the market on hypocrisy and intolerance. I’ve had many a conversation with people who think anyone who believes in God is a sheep or an idiot.

I’m a Christan. I believe Jesus Christ died for my sins. But that doesn’t mean I think everyone has to believe the exact same thing. I really don’t care if you’re a Wiccan, Buddhist, Jewish or Atheist. A good person is a good person. A bad person is a bad person.

When you label someone a bad person because their beliefs aren’t perfectly aligned with yours, that makes you an asshole.

Here’s the element people seem to be most consistently daft about across the board: The idea that a person can be figured out and branded for life based on what their current belief system is.

Today’s right-wing nut job isn’t necessarily tomorrow’s right-wing nut job. Today’s satanist isn’t necessarily tomorrow’s satanist. We are constantly evolving.

We should really stop haggling over this stuff and focus instead on being the type of people we want others to be. Not Christian or Agnostic or Islamic, but kind, open-minded and willing to admit along the way that our belief systems need fine-tuning.

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Old-School: A Photo Essay

Erin recently scanned in a bunch of photos I’ve collected of days long gone. There’s my late brother Michael and friend Sean Marley. There’s me as a fat kid. There’s the old house. Come on in…

Sean Marley, left, and me, in the living room at 22 Lynnway, Revere. Halloween 1990
Memorial page for my brother in the 1984 Northeast Regional Vocational School yearbook
Me and Stacey Scutellaro Cotter, graduation day from the Voke, 1989
Me, Nana and Papa, 1986
I'm the obese kid in the middle, July 1 1984
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Learn From My Mistakes

In all my efforts to get sane a few years ago, I did a lot of stupid things. I’m sharing it with you here so you don’t make the same mistakes:

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/l4Xx_vjGnlo

–Don’t try to control your compulsive binge eating problem by fasting. You won’t make it through the morning, and then you’ll binge like you’ve never binged before.

–Don’t mix alcohol with pills that have the strength of four Advil tablets in an effort to kill your emotional pain as well as your physical pain. That sort of thing might kill you.

–Don’t hate the people in your life for the bad things they’ve done. Remember that they’re fucked up like you and that hating them will never make the pain go away. In fact, it’ll just make it worse.

–Avoid the late-night infomercials. Those things were designed for suckers, especially suckers who can’t sleep because they’re so overcome with fear and anxiety that they see knife-wielding ghosts around every corner. You might find yourself falling for it and spending stupid sums of money on fraudulent bullshit like this.

–Don’t spend every waking hour worrying about and rushing toward the future. You will miss all the beauty in the present that way, and that’s a damn shame.

–Don’t try to control everything. Doing so just makes you look like an asshole.

–Don’t put down others just so you’ll feel better about yourself. You’ll just ruin another life, and you will not feel better. You’ll feel worse.

–Don’t try to eradicate your mental disorder. Learn to work with it instead, because once your brain reaches adulthood, there’s no turning back.

–Don’t spend your life trying to please everyone. You never will, and they usually won’t deserve the effort.

—Don’t over-think things. Thinking doesn’t make you smarter.

—Don’t bitch about your job. You’ll just annoy people. Change yourself and your attitude first. Then, if you still don’t like the job, work on finding a new one and keep doing your best at the current job in the meantime.

—Don’t whine about how tough everything is. Life is supposed to be tough at times, and wallowing in it keeps you from moving on to the good stuff. To put it another way, stop seeing yourself as a victim.

Class dismissed.

OCD Diaries

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Does This Child Beater Need Help Or A Trip To Hell?

It’s a video that fills a parent like me with rage: A judge giving his 16-year-old disabled daughter a vicious beating.

If you watch the video itself, it’s nothing but terrible. The father is pissed because his daughter was apparently grabbing music and videos off the Internet and proceeds to lash her for several minutes. For much of the video, you hear the daughter screaming. The mom is in the video, too, joining in on the beating, though the daughter claims her father forced her mother to do it.

Here are more details (and the video) from CNN:

The graphic video drew international outrage after it was posted by a woman who said she was the victim of the beating seven years ago and that her parents — including her father, Aransas County, Texas, Court-At-Law Judge William Adams — were the ones seen beating and cursing at her in the video.

On Wednesday afternoon, Judge Adams was temporarily relieved of his duties for the next two weeks, and a visiting judge will take over his caseload while the matter is being investigated, according to the office of Aransas County Administrative Judge Burt Mills. No court dates were scheduled this week, Mills’ office said. In an interview with KZTV outside his Rockport, Texas, home Wednesday, Adams confirmed to a reporter that he was the man beating his daughter with a belt and a board on the video, taped in 2004.

“She’s mad because I’ve ordered her to bring the car back, in a nutshell, but yeah, that’s me. I lost my temper,” Adams told the TV station. “Her mother was there, she wasn’t hurt … it was a long time ago … I really don’t want to get into this right now because as you can see my life’s been made very difficult over this child.” Adams continued: “In my mind I have not done anything wrong other than discipline my child when she was caught stealing. I did lose my temper, I’ve apologized. It looks worse than it is.”

Speaking via phone to Texas television station KRIS, a woman who identified herself as Hillary Adams, the daughter in the video, said she posted the video, and criticized her father for “making light of the situation.” “I just can’t believe he would say something like, he doesn’t think it’s a big deal,” she said.

She told KRIS she set up the camera to record the incident seven years ago, but waited for “the right time” to release the video. “Waiting this long to publish it has enabled me to look at it with hindsight and not be so caught up in the passion of the moment,” Hillary Adams said. “I think we do, my mother and I, we do need to try to move on past the anger and just concentrate on getting counseling and help.”

So let’s try to see his side of things…

His daughter appears to be a challenge, the type who drives a parent over the edge. I can relate, because my children can certainly drain me of all patience and sanity. But that’s how most kids get, and I don’t beat my kids over it. When you have children, behavioral challenges is one of the things you sign up for, so to speak.

If you can’t control your rage, maybe the problem has more to do with your ability to be a parent than anything else.

As you can see, I’m having trouble seeing his side of things.

The reason is simple. Most of us lose our patience with our children on a daily basis. We punish them for their transgressions. We even yell when the situation is particularly bad. But most of us keep our hands to ourselves. We don’t smash our children repeatedly in the face.

When I was a kid, my mother took her rage out on us plenty. My sister bore the brunt of the most vicious attacks. Usually the catalyst was over cleaning. My sister was required to do house cleaning every morning before school, and if she missed a spot, she paid for it.

My mother was going through a lot of her own hell back then, and she has admitted more than once that she wished she had acted differently. I forgave her a long time ago. Ours still isn’t a very strong or healthy relationship.

Seven years later, this guy doesn’t think he did anything wrong. No remorse.

Yeah, it’s hard to see his side of things.

I think I speak for all the parents whose kids drive them crazy from time to time; the parents who are driven to the brink but are able to control their fists:

Fuck this guy.

As my friend Joe Yuska said on his Facebook page, “I (and the human race) have no use for someone who beats their kids like this. And to top it off this guy is a judge. Maybe he’ll get locked up with some of the guys he put there.”

OCD Diaries

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Being A Misfit Is Your Saving Grace

We often come undone when we start comparing our quirk-infested selves to so-called normal people. Instead, we should celebrate our insanity and put it to work for us.

Mood music:

[spotify:track:3d8yD2C8kNbs54mL9wboE1]

I used to despise myself for the things I thought were weird and out of place. The windmill hands. The inability to sit up straight in a chair. My big nose and ears. My laughter toward things others would consider serious and even tragic. My tendency to tell stories that are way out of context with the conversation around me. My inability to feel at ease in a room full of people.

In hindsight, I wasted a lot of nights worrying about all these things. I was certain nobody else had the strange behaviors I had and still have.

As I get older, I realize two things:

1. A lot of people have the same strange behaviors as me, including the constant pacing and talking to myself.

2.) People who fail to act out of the ordinary at least once in awhile bore me. Our quirks make us interesting. Our funny dress and way of talking can brighten up someone else’s otherwise ho-hum day.

I didn’t fully appreciate these things until I started working with my current boss, Derek Slater. One of the first things I noticed about him three years ago is that he was different from many of the editors I’ve worked with in the past. Journalism is a career inhabited by a lot of misfits who don’t always know how to walk in step with the rest of the crowd.

I’ve heard editors complain bitterly about how difficult these people were to work with because they were always off step with the newsroom machinery. They tended to ignore deadlines. Their writing wouldn’t conform with standard journalism 101. The people you report on can be infuriating to deal with, pulling tantrums over quotes they give you once they see the absurdity of their words in print.

I used to be one of those editors who couldn’t deal with these people, even though I was every bit the infuriating misfit myself.

The thing I immediately noticed about Derek is that he enjoys all of the above. To him, the folks who don’t behave and wait their turn to speak are simply interesting and entertaining. They help keep the world spinning.

Which is probably why I’ve lasted in this job. Not that I haven’t pissed him off more than a few times. And I don’t think he particularly enjoys it when people ignore deadlines.

I knew a reporter once who was always maligned for his aloofness. He would come in at strange hours, file stories and leave without telling anyone. His stories would just appear in the queue out of nowhere. He wore the same stained pants all the time. One day, he went into a gun shop to take lessons in how to handle the weapon. He pointed the gun at his temple and shot his brains onto the people and things around him. I was not kind to him back when I had the chance.

I sometimes wonder if more compassion for this kid — acceptance of his weirdness — would have made a difference.

My speculation is that not fitting in was too much for him in the end. He wouldn’t be the first person to end it for that reason. He won’t be the last.

I was lucky. I learned to see my misfit ways as a saving grace, the thing that gave me the strength to accept the strange and out-of-place things that have littered my life.

I see it as a gift, really. Like many gifts, it comes with a lot of baggage and can make my life and that of those around me unmanageable at times.

But when properly nurtured and controlled, it can help you make the big differences that make life worth living.

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Throwing Away The Blueprints Saved My Creativity

Like many text-book OCD cases, I’ve been known to put massive effort into planning things before doing them — particularly writing. Somewhere along the way, I got more disorganized and started having more fun.

Mood music:

http://youtu.be/5dxEfs6HV1g

I think my earlier affinity for over-planning goes back to childhood. I was a prolific drawer, always working massive amounts of detail onto a page. I think I started doing it because in a world full of chaos (vicious childhood illnesses, parents divorcing, etc.) the page was a world I could control. And control it I did.

As a teenager still reeling from his brother’s death, my drawings took a decidedly more violent turn. I started sketching people dead on the ground with knives protruding from various body parts. A teacher at the Paul Revere School caught me one day and said, “If you are ever assaulted, you will never draw stuff like this again.” I think she was worried that I’d be the one to start assaulting people. I did, verbally.

In high school I went to a vocational school and studied drafting and design for three years. I excelled at it, and loved the order and attention to detail the work required. I also loved the drafting tables we used, which were high enough that you could draw while standing. Being the fidgety type, standing helped me focus much better.

Somewhere in my senior year of high school, I decided I wanted to write instead. My architectural skills served me well in this regard, giving me the attention to detail needed for good writing. My writing still sucked, mind you. I was still too young and inexperienced to know what I was doing.

All through college I pursued writing, specifically journalism, and I was in a band where I wrote all the lyrics. I’ve torn my father’s warehouse apart looking for the notebooks I wrote them in, to no avail.

When I started working as a reporter and editor, I treated each story like an architectural design. I would lose myself in the same story for hours and hours, moving words, sentences and paragraphs around like pieces on a chess board.

It served a purpose, but I wasted so much time doing it this way, mainly because I feared imperfection so much that I was terrified to let a story go to the other editors until it was flawless. The stupidity there is that no story is ever flawless. You could rework a story for days whether it needed the work or not.

In more recent years I’ve been known to draw up elaborate blueprints for stories, specifically series work. One former colleague at TechTarget once told me I was the most organized writer he had ever seen. If he could see me now, he’d be either amused or horrified.

Somewhere in the last four years, I stopped making blueprints for story series and I even stopped keeping a daily list of stories in progress. I’ve become more spontaneous in my writing. I pound the keyboard until everything is out of my head. Then, without giving it a second look, I send it straight to the editors.

The program I use for this blog includes a nifty queue where you can store drafts. I only use it to write down headline ideas so I won’t forget them the next day. I rarely review a piece of writing more than twice now.

Amusingly enough, the stuff I write today is about as clean as it was when I would plan and re-plan. It’s not that the material is perfect. It’s far from it. But in hindsight, the material has always been imperfect.

At some point, more secure in my feelings and abilities after years of treatment for OCD, fear and anxiety, I just stopped worrying about the imperfections. As a result, I’m having a lot more fun and getting more of an emotional release from writing than I ever have before.

Now I can’t let a day go by without writing something. Since I plan less, I write more.

I guess you could say I’ve given up on trying to maintain total control. I’ve learned to trust others — my editors, specifically. Erin reviews most of my posts here before I pull the trigger, but that’s more to share what’s in my head with her before the rest of the world sees it than for copy cleaning.

Of course, she is an editor and does point out things I should clean up. I usually heed her suggestions.

Sometimes I laugh at our differences in style. She sometimes rolls her eyes over my recklessness at the keyboard. But it all seems to work out now.

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It Changes In A Second

This weekend my kids learned that life can change for the worse in a split second, and that there are rarely do-overs.

Mood music:

Saturday we drove an hour north to Nottingham N.H. for an outdoor gathering of some friends in the security industry. Duncan was delighted to find they had a playground, and ran for the monkeybars. Before any of us had a chance to react, he slipped and landed on his wrist, breaking bones in two places.

We spent the afternoon at Exeter Hospital and the staff was terrific. They quietly moved Duncan to the front of the line (you should never leave an 8-year-old sitting in agony, after all) and got him x-rayed. They had to take him to the operating room to re-set the bones and now he’s walking around with an enormous splint on his arm.

He’s taking it like a champ, and in the hospital, when they had to repeatedly stick him with a needle in search of a vein for the IV, he was much tougher than I was at his age, when my veins were equally elusive during hospital stays for Crohn’s Disease flare ups.

But Sean was particularly upset to see his brother in pain like this, and it brought him to tears more than once that afternoon. On the car ride home, he kept talking about the suddenness of it all. If we could just go back that one second and prevent what happened, he said.

Erin and I explained that sometimes in life these things just happen, and the key from that moment on is how you react to the unexpected. In this case, we did the right things. We got Duncan to the ER quickly and have followed all the doctor’s instructions since getting home. But Sean still has trouble accepting what happened.

At one point I laughed and told him we’re shocked it took this long for one of them to break something.

By age 10, I had already been to the ER for a broken finger (I flipped my brother off and he promptly grabbed the finger and snapped it in half), a butter knife through the hand and a broken leg. The leg cast used to make my skin itch something fierce, and I tried to get at the itch by shoving my father’s golf tees into the hole for my toes. When they finally cut the cast off, a bunch of golf tees spilled onto the floor.

And this stuff was in addition to all the Crohn’s-related visits.

Either we’ve shielded these kids exceptionally well or we just have an abundance of dumb luck.

Sean wasn’t comforted by the explanation. He kept obsessing about how he wishes we could have traveled that second back in time.

We’ve all played that game. We love to go over the what-ifs and think about how much rosier life would have turned out if we had just done that one thing differently.

But it’s never worked that way. We break bones. We crash cars (multiple times in my case). We get sick unexpectedly.

Trying to go back never makes things better. Never has. The key is in how we respond to the rude surprises life hands us.

You all knew that already. Now Sean and Duncan know.

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Snowstorm Gratitude

It’s 6:14 a.m. and it’s still snowing. But I am big-time thankful for one thing:

The power was on when I woke up, and may yet go out. But I managed to get my coffee made first.

It’s the little things. Or, for this coffee addict, the huge things.

I also stepped outside and found that in my corner of New England, the snow accumulation was not nearly as bad as predicted. Clean up should be easy here. A lot of folks are without power and got up to 2 feet of snow, particularly west of here. My heart goes out to them.

Whatever the weather outside your door, just remember: It could always be worse and this too shall pass.

My neighborhood got off easy so far, but I’ve lived through many catastrophic storms in my day (The Blizzard of 1978, the 1991 Halloween “Perfect Storm” and the 2008 ice storm, to name a few). After all of them, life moved on and it was all good.

Family and friends always helped us through, making sure we had warm shelter and food, especially in the wake of the 1978 blizzard.

It’s like Mister Rogers’ mother once told him: When bad things happen, watch for the helpers. They always appear.

Take care, folks.