Man, I feel your pain. Dealing with the mail order pharmacy seems to complicate things by an order of magnitude.

More and more I'm thinking I'm on the spectrum. It explains so much. But there's no point in getting a diagnosis now, if I could even get one.

Yeah. A big reason I don't talk about it is there's a lot of scorn towards people who self-dx (again, not that you guys would be dicks; it's just something I don't talk about). But it's useful to me because it explains my entire fucking life, puts a lot of shit into a context, and it's pointed me toward useful resources to develop coping skills in certain situations that are consistently problematic for me.

ION, Tim has his actual pulmonary function test numbers back, and I'm trying to make sense of them. This is the first time he's gotten test results where they aren't presented in a chart that shows your result on Test X, and then the normal range for someone your age/sex/race. It's just numbers next to the test name, so I'm googling to find normal ranges and then matching up the numbers with the normal ranges.

I like data. It may calm me down.

Okay, I am pretty weak on pulmonology knowledge, but I can compare numbers (his results vs the normal range for his age, sex, and height). Tim's test results look decent. Lots of measures have totally normal results (yay) and a couple have results that seem low, but towards the top of the range for "low" (like, if "low" starts at 70%, his result was 67%).

Granted, I have no way of knowing what this means, but it seems...not horrible. Most likely deal-with-able.

Mmmmm, data! Being well informed is helpful, at least it is for me.

I found my learning disability about 8 years before it was confirmed by a professional, from an article at the dentist that was, like "Your Kid's Hidden Learning Problem(dyscalculia. I would have felt dumb, except I had almost everything.) I am a little better at arithmetic than, apparently, one might expect from most dyscalculia people so nobody thought to look. Or else they spent too much time on whether I had clear handwriting or was worried that boys wouldn't like me if I "worked to full potential"(Still the stupidest in a lifetime of stupid conversations) And I suppose they call it a spectrum for a reason, after all.

And I suppose they call it a spectrum for a reason, after all.

Yeah, and the frustrating thing for any disability/developmental disorder/mental illness is that it tends to get defined/stereotyped by the extreme end of the spectrum. You can do some math, so you "don't have" dyscalculia. I'm happy sometimes, so I "don't have" depression. Tim never loses his keys, so he "doesn't have" ADD.

Very very frustrating. (Of course, the flip side is the people who say "If it's a spectrum, then EVERYONE is autistic!" No, honey. Everyone is NOT.)

I think self-diagnosing when you get new information, after dealing with certain circumstances you just learn not to talk about because *everybody else **doesn't** deal with them*, which makes you weird and broken and you just don't talk about it, is a huge relief.

Learning as an adult and into my forties and fifties that I'm not weird and wrong and strange, that I don't just have ADHD, I'm actually on the spectrum, that eating nightshades or wheat make me sick, that asexuality is a thing and I'm not just wrong and broken, has been huge and empowering information. The doctors and counselors I've seen have concurred with my conclusions. I've been offered tests to confirm, but I wouldn't feel any better with "proof" in my hand, or my file, than I do when a doctor accepts a self-diagnosis from empirical evidence, and we proceed accordingly.

Even when it's a deviation from "normal," putting an accurate label on something means I've not just been a screwup from childhood, there's a *reason* I don't do well in some circumstances. And that's both validating and a huge relief.

It also sucks when everything you do gets labeled, but I'm not sure the answer to that is that everyone makes up their own name for everything. There is part of me that thinks that would be just peachy, but the part that, you know, does interviews thinks if that part takes over, she may have to add things to her own list, like "tongue-biting" or "eating your feelings." It's helpful to consider commonalities, but also "We ALL have limitations...I couldn't be a jockey." doesn't really help unless that really was your dream and you shot up six inches, don't have another goal yet and live with all the other would-be jockeys asking you to reach things and calling you stretch.

Things I need to let go of: that it takes TCG twice as long to feed ltc and it's twice as messy.

Oh, so true, sj. On all 3 counts.