See what I did there…? “Classical Gas” (the song), Gaslighting (the term used when people are intentionally making you think you’re going crazy when you aren’t)… Never mind, maybe I’m the only one old enough to know where the fuck I was going with that…

If you’ve never watched the movie Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, I highly recommend it. Not only is it an excellent and well constructed movie for its time, but it’s also where the term “gaslighting” originated from. The husband was making his wife feel as if she was slowly losing her mind by claiming she had purposely moved things in the home and she was imagining the gaslights growing dim every night. She eventually learned she wasn’t imagining it. Her husband was sneaking back into the attic to look for jewels that had been her aunt’s. He was using the gas in the lights…

I’ve been under an awful lot of stress as of late and a good deal of it has to do with gaslighting… A good part of that is the worst type which is medical gaslighting. There’s nothing worse than going to a doctor because you don’t feel right, you know something is off and having them tell you, “It’s fine, you’re fine, everything is fine,” when all the tests prove something is definitely off. Yet they still talk to you like you’re in that meme with that dog sitting in that burning building with a smile on his face because everything is “fine”… I’ve been going through this since February with two different doctors about my thyroid. It actually started before this with more minor symptoms I didn’t think much of. But when I started sleeping my days away and gained 10 pounds in two months despite not changing my diet (and eating less than what little I did eat because I was always sleeping), I went for a checkup. My T4, which had always hovered around .85-.9 (which is fairly low) and I felt “okay” at, suddenly plummeted to .6… But it still wasn’t that low by the lab standards and my GP only looked at the current numbers, not the past pattern. I finally got him to see something was up and he put me on a low dose med (despite my nurse practitioner sister and the endocrinologist saying they wouldn’t have put me on anything). The next time, it had come up slightly, but my T3 dropped. This time my T4 was a tiny bit higher still, but for the first time my TSH has now plummeted. But it’s fine…

Honestly, what the fuck does male Siri hear when I speak?!? At least he’s good for a laugh, which I desperately need… So even though my thyroid is getting progressively more fucked up, the doctors don’t want to do anything. And this isn’t good… I still have the cold intolerance, I’m still having weight gain issues, I’m still sleeping too much and have no energy, my hair is falling out (even on my legs which I’m not bitching about but I’ve lost most of my eyebrows now), the hair I got cut at the end of June has only grown an inch, maybe two and I’ve never had it grow so damn slow in all my 51 years… I feel a lump in my throat, especially when I try to sleep at night. My body temp and my blood pressure are both really low no matter what I do… I have a lot of other symptoms but they don’t exactly fit hypothyroidism. They do, however, fit secondary hypothyroidism, Hashimoto’s disease. But that takes different tests and the doctors don’t want to hear me. The endocrinologists thinks it’s more logical that all my issues are anxiety…

I’m glad the doctors are comfortable with that assessment, but I’m not… Just because I suffer from anxiety doesn’t men that everything is caused by my anxiety… My osteoporosis certainly wasn’t… But by all means, let’s dismiss everything as anxiety just because I happen to suffer from it. Assholes… So I put on my resting bitch face (see right) and tell them I disagree but to no avail…

So fun facts… I’ve had some appointments that didn’t go well recently. I saw my cardiologist late in November and for all the times I was told my tests and monitor things were fine… I was having more palpitations than I knew which was upsetting. To them the amount was minuscule, sure. But for me to have so many I never even felt? That was terrifying… Then he told me he wanted me to get a genetic marker test done because of the calcium buildup in my heart (thanks, I’d forgotten about that, so I guess my echo wasn’t exactly “fine”). If the results were high, it meant more meds… So Tuesday I went for that test as well as my thyroid. The thyroid is all fucked up, but the genetic marker is low, thank god… I then went for my yearly breathing function test, which seemed the same as last year, and I had my 6 month lung CT that I’m still anxiously waiting for the results from…

Needless to say, all this waiting is taking more of a toll on me than the tests themselves… It’s stressful enough to have to keep going to all these different doctors just to have them gaslight you (well, some of them do) and have the ones who don’t send you for tests to keep an eye on things so you can sit in fear waiting for results that the hospitals will fuck around and wait until the last possible second to give you. I even called the pulmonologist to see if they could kick someone in the ass to read my CT scan faster. For one, my appointment with the doctor is next week and two, I’m more than a little anxious every time they do the damn things. That lung nodule is already a little bigger than a Cherrio… Go grab a Cherrio right now. See the size of it? That’s in my fucking lung… I somehow don’t think that’s good. It’s actually big enough that they could biopsy it and, had they caught it earlier, they probably would have. But it’s been 11mm for a while. Still, you always dread the day that they might tell you that it’s now bigger than that…

I’ve never spoken much about the person I am with you, dear readers… Oh, I share pictures now and again so you know who this character that calls themselves Jackie Blue really is. I share pictures of my pets, my possessions… I tell you stories about my friends and some family (always with false names). But I never tell you about who I really am, like what goes on in my personal life otherwise. I’m not sure why, I just don’t like to share that. I guess I feel it ruins some of the mystique? That should really leave you scratching your heads because I’m very candid with other things going on in my life, just not excessively personal things so as to keep the mystique going, hahahaa… I’m sure some of you have drawn your own conclusions about my personal life already from your imaginations. Tell me about them! Leave me a comment, let me know your theories! They can be as crazy as you can think them up… I’m secretly an AI bot or a CIA agent and this is my cover, I’m an alien from another planet trying to infiltrate Earth’s society by writing relatable and random blog content… Let me hear your thoughts!

When you go out driving looking at Christmas lights, see deer in a field, take a picture and they end of looking like the Children of the fucking Corn, hahahaa…

So I recently had an altercation with someone close to me who has been gaslighting me, not always subtly, for a very long time. It’s not that I don’t have altercations with this person at other times because I do. I stand up for myself when I’m spoken to poorly and when I’m just so sick of the gaslighting… We had words and, as usual, this person got angry and the shouting began. I’m used to that and I didn’t back down (as I usually don’t). But this was the first time the person was so angry that they shoved me out of the way and I had to catch myself. I still fell onto the second to last step, but I did manage to prevent myself from whacking my back or my head on the steps. It was also the first time someone else had to physically intervene… Things were so bad, horrible things were said by this person, claiming I always paint myself as the victim when I see it as the other way around. But they do such an excellent job painting themselves as the victim that I feel no one would believe me if I spoke up. I’m always the bad guy…

Before you all get concerned, no, this was not someone I’m in a relationship with. I was in a relationship that was abusive many years ago and, quite honestly, I couldn’t believe I’d allowed myself to get into such a predicament then… After having to grow up watching my mother and that sponge she moved in? Yeah, being in that type of situation was not an option, but there I was. And I learned from my stupidity that time. I would never do that to myself again. However, this is someone close to me that I would be hard put to tell to go to hell, that I never wanted them anywhere near me ever again. The entire situation was so bad that I literally freaked the fuck out and pretty much had a nervous breakdown (again). I’m just under so much stress right now and having this happen was something I really didn’t need to add to my already taxed psyche… I literally broke that day and I’m not sure I’m feeling any better now than I was the day it happened. Like I said, this person has been gaslighting me, telling me I’m forever falsely playing the victim when I am, in fact, the one who is always in the wrong and, for all intent and purposes, the biggest bitch and the most horrible human being to ever walk the face of the planet. But once things have settled down, it’s a different story. They’re overly saccharine about everything yet never offer an apology. They act as if nothing has happened. I’m sorry, I can’t play this game… After a while, you start believing those words…

Dear readers, if there’s one thing you take away from this and the old lady writing it, take this with you… It doesn’t matter who the fuck it is: your parent, your significant other, your child, your friend, a stranger. No one should put their hands on you in any way when they’re angry. No one should twist things around and make you feel as if you’re the bad guy in every single fucking situation just because you’re asking for a little respect from them which is something everyone deserves. They shouldn’t make you feel like you’re crazy, you’re the “problem” or that you’re unjustly playing “the victim”. In a scenario like this, if you’re playing the victim, it’s more than likely because you are a fucking victim. You don’t need to put up with that shit and you need to put a stop to it immediately. Are you reading me? Good…

Hey, and don’t forget to drop your Jackie Blue theories in the comments! Am I a crazy cat lady that hoards them by the hundreds? Am I really a dude in disguise (a very good one by the pictures)? Am I secretly a crime fighting ninja? Seriously, I could use the laughs. Make them as outrageous as you can!