i should've known

[lilamp]

getting in the car after my doctor appt, the radio comes on and it's a woman giving a talk about the time she spent in iraq during the first few days of the "shock and awe" campaign. it is so horribly sad, what she describes. she talks about the children of some of the people who are all staying at the hotel where she is, friends and relatives of the family who runs the hotel, staying there because it is safer than their homes. the teenagers and pre-teens spend all of their time obsessively playing Risk. (Risk!) when told that they should go to bed, as they can pick up the game again tomorrow, one replies, "but we might not be here tomorrow." the toddlers grind their teeth incessantly. the 3yo girl's favourite game is putting her hand up like a plane and shouting out the word for airplane, then crashing her fist into her chest as if to show that she has been hit by a bomb from the plane. whenever the speaker brings out a flashlight, the little girl wants it so that she can pretend to shoot first her mother, then the flashlight's owner, while making machine gun noises. my heart breaks, crumbling to dust as the tears flow. the speaker goes on to describe how she would think about all the young iraqi men she knows who were involuntarily conscripted and what might be happening to them in the bombing. she imagines them torn limb from limb, bleeding, gutted. she has to tear herself away from her thoughts and force herself to pick up a book or go find someone to talk to. she says she heard on the news statistics saying that 70% of the iraqi army forces were being "degraded" in the attacks. somehow they are always coming up with new euphemisms to describe the horrors of war. 70% of these young men who probably mostly didn't even want to be there, pulverized, shredded, dead. "degraded." i park my car and turn the key. silence. i sit and cry. i should've known better than to listen to the news.

the visit to my doctor went well. had a general physical plus gyn, brought them uptodate on the past few years, got a form to give to planned parenthood so they can send over my records. i should've known that it would be no problem at all to get them to prescribe meds. sure, no problem! here's some free samples! i know many doctors are free and loose with drugs these days, but nonetheless i expected a bit more from them, some questions about my situation, about whether i was in therapy, who my therapist was... but they don't care. here's a scrip and call back in a few weeks to see how it's going. so now i have some lexapro to try, a new ssri related to celexa but requiring a lower dose and supposedly having lower incidence of side-effects. whee.