Happy 22nd Birthday to my chica Eucharis! I hope Mike cherishes you extra special today.

Congrats to Krissy who just graduated with her B.A. in Psychology! You are now a member of that super cool group of us known as “Bachelorettes of the Arts”!

My interview with the guy from Caribou Coffee went well yesterday. I got asked back for a second interview this Saturday morning. Happy Jen! 🙂

My interview at Second Presbyterian Church went well, I think. They were impressed by my computer skills and my web skills and I was able to articulate a lot of my thoughts relatively well. I hope I appeared reasonably calm and personable. They’ll let me know if I make the short list of people. I’m thankful that I even got an interview — it’s really good if you even get one interview if you’re just out of college. They loved the layout of my resumé (thank you Monster.Com for the template) and I think I made a good impression. I’ll hopefully hear back in the next couple days about if I made the short list of 3 people or not.

So… thanks for the many prayers and please keep praying. I feel blessed to even have made it this far and to even have these interviews after months of nothing.

Job Interviews
I have two job interviews in the next couple days. One is tomorrow at 15:20 EST at Caribou Coffee to be a barista and the other is Friday at 8:00 at Second Presbyterian Church to be their administrative secretary. Prayer for both would be appreciated. I’m feeling blessed to have two interviews because I know that if the one at Caribou goes well, I’ll feel much better going into the one at Second Pres.

Web Schtuff
Easter is barely 3 weeks old and I am considering a new layout for my site. I don’t really want to do a Pentecost one per se because we have 26 weeks of it and a layout that’s up for 7 months has been up too long in my estimation. I’m thinking something Celticy and natural. Any ideas?

Happy 25th birthday to my cat-loving, Canadian, blogging/snail mail friend Michelle! It’s hard to believe we’ve known each other for 10 years and it’s been a very big 10 years as far as changes. She’s the reason I’m into CCM and it’s been wonderful to watch her go through high school and college and now grad school. I hope your day is wonderful chica!

I was a domestic goddess yesterday. I made a batch of veggie burgers, a batch of pesto orzo, and 2 dozen black n’ tans. It was 6 hours of cooking and I got all the dishes done.

2 hours later, I have a MASSIVE panic attack. Jon is holding me as I am raging for a good two hours before my energy level drops and I crash. Thankfully, I took the last of my antibiotic last night, so I know that I can rule that out if it happens again. I see my big, fat, Greek doctor tomorrow morning, so I’ll explain to him what happened and see if he has any thoughts on what to do with this. I only pray that if he wants me on Zoloft that he has samples because we can’t afford for me to be on it without getting it well subsidized. *curses at insurance company who is refusing me meds and creating bills that are causing me additional stress*

This morning, I went in with Jon at 7:30 and crashed on his couch for 2 hours. I then got up and made my way down to the nursery for Sunday School. My attendant had failed to show up and so the grandpa (J) of one of my kids was there. I went upstairs to the other pre-school class to see if we could combine for the day. Upon returning to the nursery, I found that my nursery school class had quadrupled… three more boys under the age of 4. J looked at me with my puffy eyes and vacant expression and said, “I’m staying.” Believe me, I was (and still am) at the point of bowing down and kissing his feet for doing so. For one thing, one of my kids had to be held THE ENTIRE TIME and his parents forgot to pack another pacifier, creating an unpleasant situation when he finished his bottle. The older of the three brother set also kept picking on the middle child and was an absolute pill. Then… there’s J’s grandson who was having a bad day — meaning that he was being a holy terror. In the midst of it all, J is reassuring me that all will be well as I am profusely apologizing for not having everything together. He and his wife have been so supportive of Jon and I and they are the best gradnparents. They take their grandkids to church and teach them the faith and are *ALWAYS* willing to back me up in the nursery when I need a hand. They always greet me with a hug and ask me how things are with me. If I’ve been away, they ask me how my trip went. When I left to go to choir, I ran into J’s wife S in the bathroom while I was putting a cold cloth on my eyes. She hugged me and told me that it would all be OK — not knowing what was going on but knowing that I probably needed that hug.

After church, I actually got something done in my insurance mess (typing a letter to one of Jon’s doctors explaining about our evil insurance company and asking for their help) and we went and got me an Iced Cap at Tim Horton’s. Yes… it’s caffeine (which is not doing good things to me right now) and yes we are flat broke, but I needed something comforting. (I *RARELY* eat out so it was indeed a treat.) I talked to my mother-in-law who told me to talk to my (big, fat, Greek) doctor about my antibiotic situation and we cleaned the cat’s commode. Tip: if you use Feline Pine for kitty litter, make sure you change the whole box every few days because it gets ground into a fine powder otherwise. It took two vaccuum cleaner bags to contain all the cat dust and then little allergic Jen had to Clorox every part of the vaccuum cleaner used because we use this vaccuum cleaner on all our floors and it was MAJORLY filthy. It took me about half a container of Clorox Wipes to get it disinfected and all the dust out. While sitting on the porch cleaning it, I noticed several BIG patches of poison ivy that have sprung up in the last few days. I called around to see how we should remove it and my mother-in-law (when I talked to her later) suggested finding someone who is *NOT* allergic to it (as I am about 90% sure I am and we’re equally as sure Jon is) to do it and pay them because paying someone $20 to dig it up beats a $65 doctor’s bill as well as Technu, calamine lotion, and the potential to go into anaphylactic shock.

We head out to Kroger to get a newspaper (for the coupons — which turned out to be missing) and some groceries and I inadvertently picked up some Lactaid milk that was outdated, so we had to return later and exchange it. So now I’m sitting here blogging and waiting until I’m tired so I can curl up in a ball and make this day end.

Question: How is it with Jen’s soul? (Nobody guessed the origin, so nobody got the 50 mythical points. The answer was John Wesley. Are some of ye not Methodists that read this blog????)

I’ve gotten out of the house in the last few days — Monday to fill out job apps, Tuesday to go grocery shopping and ogle household/sports/camping stuff at Walmart, and today to get a vaccum cleaner at Walmart ($48 for a decent vaccum cleaner is nothing to sneeze at) — and this has made a huge difference in my mood and all. I think that I am getting cabin fever and I look forward to being able to get my bike fixed so I can go on long rides and get some exercise. I don’t have to be as afraid of dogs when I bike (and the people here think that dogs should roam the neighborhoods which is why my babies stay indoors) and I can run errands or even bike to work if I find a job that is close enough.

For some reason, I go through phases where I am die hard into household stuff. I really wasn’t when I got married and then I was walking through the Hudson Bay Company in Toronto and started ogling bedsheets. It was strange and now, I *LOOOOOOOOOVE* walking through the household section of Walmart or Target for some reason — maybe because I’m excited to move again and be in a place where we can buy more permanent stuff or something. I’m looking forward to being a housewife in a house that we can decorate ourselves and where I (hopefully) have a laundry room on the ground floor. (I have a strange and probably unfounded fear of finding a snake in our basement, so Jon does the laundry in the house.) One of the reasons I started Domesticated was to indulge my girlie/feminine side a bit with others who were like-minded. I actually don’t mind being a housewife and cooking and dusting — just not when I’m sick. I’m also in the process of cleaning my study, which means that there will be quite a few nights of paper-organizing merriment at Casa K-M.

I was a bit harsh toward the person I was quoting in my last post and I thank those who pointed this out. However, those kinds of posts still incense me because it shows a lack of understanding for what I deal with daily and have dealt with in my past.

As far as medication is concerned, I would agree that anti-depressants are definitely over-prescribed. People take them as happy pills and ignore the fact that the meds would be most effective when coupled with therapy and other forms of treatment. I don’t know a single person on Paxil or Zoloft that hasn’t also benefitted in some way (however small) from therapy. In my case, it took the edge off of the extreme mood swings and depressive episodes so that I could deal with some issues (self-esteem, deaths of people I knew in high school, the sexual harassment,…) in psychotherapy. I was blessed to have a wonderful Christian woman as a psychotherapist and I remember praying with her on occasion. It *does* take two to three weeks for the meds to work; but it is a marked change when they do.

This person also commented on the fact that most of these drugs are tested on animals (as most research is — there are some similarities in physiological chemistry and there is at least some similarity in anatomy with mammals) and we go on the basis that it works in the brains of those animals. As we can’t do experiments on humans for many of these drugs, we’re having to trust that there is a connection. There’s also the fact that some medications may work better for some people than they do for others and there are quite a few new drugs on the market these days, so many doctors have a choice of what they use or what combination they use.

As far as the assertion that the drugs really only treat symptoms, that’s really what most medications do anyway. Colds are viruses so taking a Coridicin tablet isn’t going to make the cold go away but it lessens the impact of the symptoms so that people feel functional again. In the case of depression, the symptoms of it can be so debilitating that people can’t get out of bed. I know that my Xanax wasn’t a cure — it treated my insomnia, which enabled me to get more sleep and get into a better sleep pattern, which in turn helped my body to start regulating my seretonin levels again. Serzone *is* seretonin and norepinephrine (a neurotransmitter) and the extra seretonin as well as a delivery system for it helped to correct the imbalance that they perceived me to have. Medicine is not an exact science in the least and there is quite a bit of guesswork involved in much of it. You have to go on what has been proven to work in the past, which is why doctors tend to prescribe certain antibiotics for certain infections — they’ve seen enough cases where it has worked positively in other people. I *know* that I’m not cured of my depression — I *still* have some hard times and some hard days; but another part of my treatment was learning some coping skills for dealing with those days. Making sure I’m eating, sleeping, and getting exercise are all things I do to control the depressive episodes and I’ve only had one really awful one in the last two years. I also do *try* to maintain constant spiritual disciplines because those help immensely — prayer is calming and does much good when I am in a depressive state.

Lastly, this person claims to have “spent many hours reading case studies, pouring over counseling books, examining secular teachings on depression and sputtering over the nonsense that many popular Christian psychologists are teaching” which is all well and good; but they haven’t dealt with it in the same way that I have and they don’t mention having watched anyone in their family suffer with it. You don’t know how bad it can be until you’ve lived with it yourself or with someone who has it. Scholarly research only goes so far and there is also a need to read work by secular psychologists in addition to the Christian ones because they do some worthy research as well and deserve an ear.

I am not saying that prayer shouldn’t be part of the treatment and that Scripture doesn’t have a place in counselling. I’m saying that there are times when more than the simple Word of God is needed and other forms of treatment would be more effective. There *are* spiritual and emotional causes to depression as well as some physical ones (such as thyroid problems) in addition to the simple chemical imbalances; and I think that we need to look at each situation holistically and treat it as such.