old news: tourette; new news: aspergers
You know how sometimes I go online and google all sorts of weird diagnoses I may have just so that I can classify myself into some category of weirdo?
It’s really different when it’s somebody else trying to classify into a category.
I guess I should know that the psychiatrist is there to give diagnoses so that it can be treated but for him to throw so many (familiar) names at my face like OCD and ADHD, it gets rather overwhelming.
I don’t know why it’s kinda OK for me to say I’m OCD or thta I’m ADHD but when it comes from him, it’s just that much harder to take, I just want to bury myself in some hole somewhere.
So, ok, I meet Conner’s and DSM-IV-TR’s criteria for ADHD-I, inattentive. So what’s a sane psychiatrist to do (oxymoron intended) but to put his patient on drugs. I’m complaining about the drugs as it is already but I cannot say no to the drugs on principle that I believe psychiatry can entirely be explained by neurology (someday).
So there’s this drug, can’t remember the name, I need to bitch about it sommore before I start remembering how to spell it. But it’s not used in people with Tourette because it may make the tics more pronounced. So I told him that I’ve actually always suspected that I have Tourette. Then he said Tourette isn’t something that goes away so if he hasn’t noticed that I have tics, I don’t have Tourette. Which is fine by me because, believe me, I really like it when he shoots down my imaginary diagnoses. The more he shoots down the better, really.
The curious incident of the dog in the nighttime. That was my first time hearing about Aspergers. Naturally, when I read the book, I thought that maybe I could have it but I’m really no where near the level of [insert main character of book here] so I passed that off to med-school syndrome. Like how I thought I may have leukemia because of a total of one pinprick like thingamajiggy on my skin. Or how I have kidney stones because I have a backache. Or how I’m pregnant because I crave for peanut butter toast
Psych said that the OCD might be my brain’s defense to the ADHD-I. Which makes total sense because, as I was thinking about it, ADHD and OCD are quite contrasting. I mean, you’ve got to be pretty attentive towards something to obsess over it.
Have I mentioned that OCD and ADHD are co-morbid with Tourette? Over 40% of the time, people with Tourette also have OCD and ADHD.
But psych says that through his observation, he thinks I may have Aspergers. If you think about it, it’s really a lot more cool than Tourette and that dude on Boston Legal had Aspergers (not Tourette as I had mistakenly posted before). Asperger’s is a type of autism and if you think about it, autistic people tend to be extraordinary. Remembering Pi up to the gabazillionth decimal place or, like my cousin, plays the piano very well. So to have a mild form of a mild form of autism really rocks because that’s (once again) my ticket to being extraordinary without being completely weird.
So why Aspergers? He said the combination of the OCD, ADHD and the fact that I tend to be rather unsociable.
While I agree that I’d much rather be alone than with other people, I’m not entirely unsociable. In that, I’ve made pretty good friends in church and I do have quite a few fairly close ones in college, even if I can feel myself slowly starting to move apart from them while consciously trying not to let myself break away into my loner self like in JC. I can be sociable when I want to but most of the time, I’d rather be alone.
I’m not saying that I have aspergers, I’m saying that the psych said that there might be a possibility that I have aspergers.
On a slightly side note, when we were shifting house the other day, the mess really got to me and, being as avoidant as I am, I “ran away”. I went and sat inside my one door cupboard in the dark and just be alone. That was one of the moments when I thought, again, that I may have Aspergers.
Well, that’s all the psychobabble for today. Yun, hope I gave you lots of psycho stuff to think about. 
Millon’s reagent
Because I can’t seem to find anything of this content on Google, I shall post it up.
What does Millon’s Reagent taste like?
As an introduction, Millon’s reagent is used to test for the presence of protein (aldehyde and ketone group, I think). It’s mercury (II) nitrate, nitric acid and something else that’s nice and poisonous.
So we were in Bio lab the other day, doing tests for glucose and protein and starch and other yummy stuff. Our teacher made us read up, or tried to make us read up, before hand on the tests we were going to do. Millon’s test was the only one I could remember last minute so I googled that one and found out that Millon’s reagent is really poisonous.
So what’s a psych
don’t wanna
don’t wanna breathe
don’t wanna live
don’t wanna cry
don’t wanna die
don’t wanna hold
don’t wanna try
don’t wanna be
don’t wanna lie
y’know how sometimes, you just don’t wanna?
No? Oh right, my bad, of course you don’t know.
Nobody will ever know.
classmate
I’m directly copying and pasting this from my classmate’s blog. Singh is one of my other classmate:
Singh : Ah yes I got the answer!
Mr Kow : Now only u got the answer? Good, you have something to celebrate today. *laughs to himself* He always gets the answer so late. What school are you from?
Singh : EC.. *poyo face*
Mr Kow : EC summore! I was from there. Don’t bring down our reputation. I think after my time, EC died.
Singh : When?
Mr Kow : After the 1970, my time, EC just died.
Singh : Why ah? Oh……. the japanese people!
*whole class laughs*
Mr Kow : *surprised face* What japanese?! That was 1945!!
LOL
everyday things
Four people in my class, excluding myself, know that I cut. Three was told by me. They are my close friends in class and one day we were talking and I found out that one of them used to cut, one of them burned herself before and the other was once bulimic so I decided to tell them.
The other person who knows. Apparently has known for the longest time, since last month when he saw the cut on my wrist (yes I cut my wrist, go away) during Physics lab. And only today, he told me. I appreciate it that he didn’t judge me for it and he was sensitive enough to not tell the whole wide world (I’m assuming he didn’t tell the whole wide world). He only told me today because he caught me alone. We were walking to Chem lab and I was walking slightly behind the rest of the class and that was when he said, “so, you slit your wrists don’t you?” and I replied, in these words, “Where the fuck did that come from?” I don’t use fuck liberally, I close to never use it. We didn’t have time to talk about it then because we soon entered chem lab but I smsed him just now and apologised for my language and stuff.
I’m really grateful for his sensitivity and his lack of judgment of the person that I am just because of what I did.
Physics test, we finally got back the much awaited results today. The teacher started by telling us he was not satisfied with our marks. That’s bad. He wrote on the board that the highest was 93% and the lowest, 38%. He said he didn’t see why there was such a big difference when everybody was given the same notes and all to study. Right at the beginning of class, he actually got everybody to write down their study strategy and got the top three scorers to share without letting on that they were the top three.
The top three marks were 93, 80 something and 74 (which was then corrected to 78 because my physics lecturer is blind and cannot tell a minus sign from a dot, ok fine, I do have bad handwriting)
Get it yet?
…
I got third highest marks. While I am rather happy that I got third highest, I am highly unhappy that I only got 78. If other people can get 93, why couldn’t I? Physics is my favouritest subject and I felt that I didn’t do too badly in that test.
But not all hope is lost because he’s gonna “cheat” and let us resit the test, a different paper of course, because he wasn’t happy with the class’s marks in general. So my marks wouldn’t be counted too which means I have an opportunity to try harder.
I’m spoiled. I walked back to the student house today in a drizzle. I like the drizzling but I miss the car…
And I need milk. I can’t go buy milk when I have no car…
That’s all.
friday morning blues
missed. school. bus.
Yesterday, it took me about half an hour to get from Kranji to my school bus stop. Today, it took more than an hour. I was like, five minutes later than I was yesterday. My classes actually start at 1130 today, I only went early so that I could take the bus and save my money but because I missed the bus, I ended up spending about the same amount of money that I would have if I woke up at eight.
I also exceeded my this week’s budget by, brace yourself, forty two ringgit. And I haven’t even eaten lunch today. And this doesn’t take into account my spending in Singapore. I can’t live like this, yeargh. I have a total of negative two ringgit in my wallet. Must. Learn. To. Spend. Properly.
I’ve started wearing a Tau cross, a Catholic one. On the chain are three knots symbolising the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience.
As can be inferred by my previous paragraph, I’m failing quite badly at this poverty thing.
And chastity? That’s the knot I chew on during physics to remind me about CHASTITY.
Just can’t help but love me.
Had a long talk with Jc yesterday. I seriously don’t know where Daddy is leading me to. I can feel Him puhing me towards certain things (and in the process, away from other things) but I’m not sure if it’s really Him directing me or just me getting bored of the things that I am doing.
There’s this Fides et Ratio thing, faith&reason. And there’s this whole world of philosophy that I recently peeked into and found so very intriguing. And then there’s my illness, something has to be done for people who suffer needlessly the way I do. Overarching all this is my desire to just go Home. And underarching these, supporting me and pushing me upwards, is a God whom I know loves me. A God who is guiding me, calling me, leading me, loving me, supporting me, caring for me, helping me, saving me. What I cannot understand is why I sometimes push Him away from me.
Completely irrelevant is that because I had the debate yesterday, I dressed formally (not that I don’t dress formally everyday because I’m just weird like that). Formally including my shoes. I will never understand why women wear high heeled painful shoes that give them blisters after just one day. I really will never. What I will never understand even more is why I wear high heeled painful shoes. Blister.Hurts.
quickie from bakerzin
I don’t know what happened two days ago but my blog traffic went up to FIFTY from it’s usual 3 to 5… It’s strange. And apparently, no search engine terms or referrals. My blog’s pretty low profile, so what did you people do? click reload fifty times over?! Or just having fun reading my archives?
Anyway, don’t remember (as I always forget) if I mentioned that I shifted house over the last weekend. So now I’m back in Sg despite it being a weekday on the pretext of unpacking although I really know that I’m just going to collapse on my bed and think about suicide and self-injury like I always do.
We don’t have internet there yet, for whatever stupid reason, it takes SingTel FOUR days to relocate the number.
Today was pretty fun. Call me a spoiled brat out to face the world if you want, but for the first time in my life, I took a public bus in JB. It wasn’t very far, just from Pelangi Plaza to CIQ. A taxi ride would have costed me about RM7 but the bus was only RM1.20. I’m into saving money now that I’m on a fixed allowance. A fixed allowance that I keep exceeding. (I’m eating in Bakerzin now, if you’re wondering why)
Had an English debate today which went… hilariously awful…
I wasn’t prepared to begin with but I didn’t really care, I don’t really care these days. I was the third speaker, so my script was hard to write. Especially since I’ve NEVER been in a debate before. My team members (and my opponent’s team members) had rather poor English. I was the proposition. Because everyone was nervous, everyone spoke really really fast. When the opposition’s first two speakers spoke, for half the time, I had no idea what they were saying. I don’t know if it’s because I just wasn’t paying attention or if it was really because their English was so hard to understand.
The third speaker is quite a good friend of mine with an English competency level comparable, if not better, than mine. We figured it would be best that we pick on someone our own size so we had the two lesser English competency levels fight against themselves and we would fight on a level battleground.
The thing about me is that my hands shake really easily. I don’t get stage fright much but it only takes a very very little amount of nervousness for my hands to shake.
As I was speaking, holding my paper, I got rather excited and I was also trying to hide the fact that I had no idea what to say so I was just blabbering about this and that with no real point and hoping that nobody would notice it because if my immaculate English. My hands started to shake, so my paper was… vibrating. It’s pretty funny but I’m not allowed to laugh when I’m speaking in a debate so I refrained. But my friend and honourable opponent saw my paper vibrating and she tried not to laugh but she couldn’t so she burst out laughing which caused me to burst out laughing. I know I probably got a heap load of marks deducted for that but I couldn’t help it. And then we were in laughing fits where I was trying not to laugh but it was really hard not to laugh when I looked at my own hands. As if the suppression of laughter was not difficult enough, my hands were shaking so bad that I could not read what I wrote on the paper. It was hilarious. Seriously. Right after I finished, the both of us ran out of the classroom into a laughing fit.
It’s not that I don’t take it seriously because I would really really like to pass English as an additional language (no, I’m not even taking real English) but I just couldn’t control myself.
ok, fine, so my quickie has turned into a 700 word blabber. But hey, at least I’m blogging normally again with the word suicide occurring only once (not including this time) in the post. (how many times it occurred in my head is besides the point.
Stomach hurts. Thinks milk was… unfresh.
It takes me an hour of pain and one trip to the toilet before it occurs to me to take charcoal. Upon which, I realise that six of the ten tablets are now gone. I have taken six tablets of charcoal on three separate occasions since living in the hostel.
As compared to that whole untouched strip of charcoal which sat in my house for perhaps a year.
Note to self: throw milk away.
Stomach hurts. Tight trousers not helping.
Speaking of which, I put on weight, I’m certain. I’m faaaat…
When I have a stomach ache is when I hate the fact that I do not have an attached bathroom and that I have to climb down a short ladder to get off the bed.
If I needed to go, I’d probably roll off the side of the bed and have the crap squashed out of me by the force of 50kgs* accelerating at 9.81 m per second per second 1.5 m down. (I can totally hear the splat as I write it)
The physics test, how did it go? Well, I went to Jusco after the test and rewarded myself with green tea ice cream. I survived all one hour and forty minutes without excusing myself to the toilet to cut.
The test in all honesty wasn’t that hard and I finished it too fast to feel comfortable about the test. Results aren’t out yet.
p.s. I’ve decided not to flirt with the physics teacher. It’ll never work out. lol
I’ve been, for want of a better word, emo lately. I’m just rambling emo sentences and writing emo poems all over my notes and just… moping about. I thought I was ok when I was around friends or other human beings but truth is, I’m not. I can suddenly see through the my own facade. I can see how I am faking everything, the laughter, the chatter, the… everything.
Ok, this post is getting to deep. Until here it is then.
pre-physics test ramblings
I’ve a physics test tomorrow, as the title implies. I have not studied. I want to study, at least that much I know. But I’m so distracted. I’m just flipping pages and looking at the pictures diagrams and then squiggling and scribbling all over the place.
This is when I say I have the attention span of a baby goldfish.
Other random stuff would be…
Killed a cockroach today in the bathroom. Sprayed it silly with the insect killing spray thing and then it turned upside down, kicked, and died. All I can say is that I’m glad it wasn’t a spie
Samuel Johnson
I was talking to a friend today. Her child has Tourette’s and, along with it, OCD and ADHD.
And then it hit me. I may have Tourette’s too.
It felt kinda like how it felt when I was told somewhat that I had OCD.
So I came online and Googled up Tourette’s because I can’t remember much about from what I had read before. (Yes, I’ve read about Tourette’s before, I’m weird like that)
Before Googling, I envisioned myself asking the psych for permission to die, because I didn’t want to live as a sub-human all my life.
Images from the show Boston Legal came to mind and although the character with Tourette’s there was pretty intelligent, he was weird. He was not exactly someone I wanted to be.
After googling, and finding the life of Samuel Johnson, I am inspired and if I do have Tourette’s, then I’m glad to have at least one thing in common with such a great writer.
Maybe if I do have Tourette’s, that’s my passport to being extraordinary. After all, many of the extraordinary people before me all were “weird” in one way or another. Dyslexia, OCD, Tourette…
