Allergies: a series of realizations, as told by a panda

Thank you to Usborne Books for
teaching me to draw a panda.

Once upon a time there was a woman and she got pregnant. It was me. In this story I am a panda.

It was 2010. I was 28 and fiercely excited to be expecting. I felt good, although I was strangely itchy around the ears.

Sorry to drop a bomb on you, but I miscarried - and then again with the next pregnancy. That's all another story, but I will say this about it: the story is uniquely mine, just as all those stories are. And so it's also the same story. I know that's confusing and weird. It's just one of those situations in life that is personal and universal all at once. Much like birth, ironically. It is, and I say this without hyperbole, devastating. Unbelievable. Physically and emotionally scarring.

But there is good news, too. I had a third pregnancy and we were lucky to have a healthy baby the next summer. I wrote more about it here if you're so inclined, but that's really not what this story is about.

Itching. While the pregnancies and job changes and life in general just kept on keeping on, I was still itching and the location had spread - rather quickly - from just around my ears to my right thumb, and then eventually to include:

When we went to the cabin the summer before August was born I vividly remember stepping out of Joyne's Ben Franklin in Grand Marais, MN and walking toward the White Pine gift shop across the street with one thought on repeat:

[Do NOT start itching your boobs in public. Do NOT start itching your ...]

It. Was. Torture.

And so came Realization Number One: something was not right.

I had just sort of assumed it would eventually go away, like childhood eczema. And then it didn't go away but I was like ugh, I don't want to go to the doctor. Who would I see? Primary? Dermatologist? Allergist? Do I need a referral? It might be gone by the time I get in to see someone anyway. I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

And so months went by and I ended up sleeping with ice packs and only finding relief for the sweet, sweet five minutes after bathing. Fresh and clean ... until the spark was there again, deep underneath. The spark would grow into a burn and eventually I'd be trying to scratch an itch that was so far under my skin I could feel it in my bones. That sounds like an exaggeration, but it's really not. The expression "toe-curling" is applicable, in a bad way. And while I could sometimes, thankfully, grit my teeth and not itch my boobs in public, the eczema on my hands and elbows was becoming embarrassingly visible and harder to hide.

Sad, sad panda-me.

I was not totally unaware. We'd come across a laundry detergent once that caused my hubs to break out, so I knew it was probably something I was touching or that was touching me. Which is great, except it's hard to psychically tell this to people who see your splotchy, flaky, cracked hands and probably think you have a communicable disease.

Also, it's not that great because knowing it's something doesn't really help you much at all. Of course it's something. But WHAT IS IT?

Imagine you have to make a list of everything you touch over, let's say, one week. In addition to all the products you use on your body and in your home, there's the stuff you use everywhere else too. Public bathrooms, friends' houses, work/school. And not just the stuff you apply to yourself or otherwise actively make use of - think of the furniture you sit on, the clothes you wear, the food you eat, those five vases you handled at that one store. The scents of a thousand perfumes and candles that you or your loved ones or your favorite stores use.

And so came Realization Number Two: I. Am. Screwed.

And yet it was clear that the list was the key. Only my list needed to encompass much more than one week's worth of data, and testing all of it was simply not manageable. I needed help. I started calling doctors to find out exactly who could help me, and by and large they were all pretty much stumped. And I was miserable - trapped in a body that apparently hated me, and in a world that was in cahoots with it.

I'm guessing anyone with any chronic illness can relate to the feeling of being vaguely insane. Like most of the time you're able to go about life as if you're ok, but you're actually on the verge of slapping the next person who asks you to do something your disease prohibits, then enlightening them with a hysterical analysis of all your symptoms, the medical and insurance systems, and what it means to be "normal" in a wider social context.

Between the actual symptoms and the mental stress of accepting a possible fate wherein I would spend the majority of my life living in a plastic bubble, I was feeling vaguely to moderately insane. But then, somehow, by the good grace of the heavens and whomever rules them, I stumbled upon a bit of info about something called a patch test and I was suddenly like WHY DIDN'T ANYONE KNOW ABOUT THIS! I mean, a few people knew, obviously.

Enter the superheros of my world, complete with eyedroppers and lab capes (coats):

Here is what I learned:

A patch test is what you do when you are so desperate to find out what you're allergic to that you purposely put little dollops of allergens all over your skin and hope you react to some of them so that a supervising doctor can identify the villains. Each patch is a little ring that contains a particular substance, and these patches are then taped to you, mostly on the back. It takes five days. The patches are on for the first 48 hours, during which you cannot shower and you can't scratch (!) because doing so might create false results. There is a lot of pacing and a lot of ice packs during this time. The patches come off for the first reading of reactions on the third day, but since contact dermatitis is a son of a bitch and reactions sometimes don't appear for a day or two after the exposure and can last for WEEKS afterward, the final reading isn't done until the fifth day.

A very accurate representation of patch application. Sometimes they also put patches on your thighs. Not an accurate representation of range-of-motion, as you can not raise your arm above shoulder level because of the tape. Getting dressed is difficult.

There are standard patches and patches they make from all the stuff you use at home. They test surfactants, dyes, preservatives, woods, metals, fragrances, etc, etc, etc. Between all of them, chances are they'll find out what you're allergic to, as they did for me.

Say it with me: methyldibromo glutaronitrile.

It was mostly a huge relief. I left the clinic jubilant and on a mission. I threw away all the bottles of stuff I had been putting on myself not knowing that it was toxic to me. I went shopping that night for new stuff. I cleansed my world of the bad guys as much as I could.

As much as I could? you say? Why would you continue to put that crap on yourself? you ask? Because there will always be bad guys in the world. And so came Realization Number Three: knowledge actually is power.

CAMP /kamp/ verb:
1. To sleep in a tent.
2. To highlight the absurdity of certain cultural notions - often gender or beauty - through exaggerated or ironic performance.

CAMP /kamp/ noun:
1. A fun place.
2. A group of people with a common ideology.
3. A Contact Allergen Management Plan.

The American Contact Dermatitis Society (ACDS) maintains a database used by doctors to help their patients avoid any number of allergens. Insert random Futurama reference:



CAMP lists provide a breakdown of safe products by category and manufacturer, with the limitation that, of course, only companies who report their full ingredients can be included. As consumers want to be more aware of what they buy, companies are disclosing their ingredients more and more - but the fact is - and here is where I get preeeeetty cynical - customer ease, safety, and satisfaction do not come first. Profit does. If those things happen to be profitable, cool. But there is no requirement to fully list ingredients. Many companies avoid it by stating their formulas are proprietary. This may be true and I agree they are fully within their rights to storm the basements of anyone involved in the black market laundry detergent ring and prosecute.

Companies also benefit from the lack of regulation in both formulating products and labeling them ... So even when companies do disclose, they can, if they want to, easily hide things they might not want you to see. Take the catch-all "fragrance." Thanks, I guess, but if I don't know what the fragrance is actually made of, your list does little good for someone with allergies.

Also consider the many pseudonyms of chemicals that a company can list without sending up any red flags for the customer.

Case in point: formaldehyde. You probably wouldn't buy anything that says it contains formaldehyde, because it's mostly known as the caustic preservative that kept our dissection projects in biology class from turning bad. But it can also be called formalin or methanal, and there are dozens of other formaldehyde-releasing chemicals used in personal and household products. Lotions, soaps, hair care, mattresses. It is sometimes used on clothing to create a wrinkle-free finish and on shipping containers to ward off bugs or rodents. It can be used in the processing of paper. It is released in cigarette smoke. It is very commonly found in building materials (many sources, including Mayo Clinic, DermNet NZ, and World Allergy Organization). Nevermind that it is considered a carcinogen (CDC).

Fun fact! The ACDS has an "Allergen of the Year" list. It was formaldehyde in 2015 and in 2016 it was cobalt.

Yeah. The patch test was a relief, but it marked the beginning of a lot of sobering research. Thankfully, the vast majority of us will not get cancer or even an allergy due to formaldehyde exposure. In fact, most people with a formaldehyde allergy have to breathe the fumes, so my contact allergy to it, along with the cocktail of other things, is quite the anomaly. When I had some answers after all those months of itching, I think what struck me most was not the pervasiveness of the things I suddenly had to avoid, it was the irony of being someone who couldn't tolerate a bunch of chemicals but who had a deep, dark secret:

They clean stuff better. They treat and heal many, many medical conditions. They make your hair shiny. They make certain foods taste really, really good.

Plus I have a history with germs and hating them, which is another story.

Chemicals can be super helpful, but they can also be poisonous. Your body can only handle so much. My body can only handle so much.

This is my sad liver, so tired of trying to cleanse me of toxins. 

Fast forward to 2014. I had managed to control my reactions for the most part, with some nuisance eczema on my hands. I had a happy, cuddly four-year-old and our family was complete. I made a very grown-up decision to get an IUD and was pleased with myself for being so responsible! Everything went along mostly as expected until about six months later when I just didn't have a period. I'm a pretty regular gal, and I was not pregnant, so it clearly had to do with the IUD. The IUD had to go.

Why is this part of the story? Because around the time the IUD was removed I felt a spark. I can't pinpoint the timing of it all, like this little far-away flame was coming closer and closer at such a slow pace I didn't give it much credence until it was right up in my face. Again.

Now I love a deal, like my mother before me. I also know the clothing and textile industries are HUGE polluters. So I like shopping the thrift stores, where everything has already made the biggest part of its footprint and nothing is more than $5.00. My mentioning of this, too, relates to the timing of things. It's all foggy memory and late-night internet research and good old-fashioned speculation - but I know these three things happened sometime in the early part of 2015:

And just like five years before, I figured it would pass. I thought I had unfortunately tried on some article of clothing that happened to be laced with formaldehyde from whatever detergent it was last washed in. Sure, now I was scratching myself bloody over some dress or pants or whatever, but by this time I knew how reactions generally played out and I was willing to be patient.

Weeks went by.

I was not better. I was very confused. And life kept on keeping on, and I kept itching, and I was back at the very beginning.

And so came Realization Number Four: life doesn't always look like you imagine it will.

I began to have wild ideas about what the problem could be. Hormones. I always thought the first round of allergies was triggered by pregnancy. If it wasn't the new-to-me thrift clothes, could this round be related to the IUD? For that matter, could it be the hormones themselves that I was suddenly allergic to? I mean, it is a thing. There are people - bless them - who are allergic to parts of their own body. Their own hair, their own saliva ... you can become allergic to literally anything.

Back to the impossible list! Even though I had come to rely on that CAMP database like it was a religious text, formulas change every so often and hey, I spontaneously acquired allergies once so who's to say it couldn't happen again? And so, again, everything became suspect.

Good news: I did have an idea of a possible culprit (a blue dye) which was supported by certain evidence and as I started avoiding clothes I thought would be a problem, my skin got better. Bad news: I have always survived on a clothing diet of blue jeans and sweaters, blue jeans and t-shirts, blue jeans and jackets, blue jeans and blouses ...

It may sound petty but I resented not being able to wear jeans. I was tired of being on alert at all times because I had to worry about everything I touched. And then I couldn't wear the one thing I was most comfortable in and made me feel like me. And because I know "things could always be worse," throw in fair amount of guilt for all this self-pity.

My mental state was perilous. For one reason or another (moving, quitting my job because of my allergies, totally unscientific trial-and-error on my part, long-lasting panic attacks) I had again spent months in varying degrees of agony before scheduling a patch test. I've put together a helpful graphic about that time of my life.

Do not let the calming colors fool you.

Yes, it was quite the shit show. But I did finally make the call for my brilliant angels of petri dishes to put on their lab capes.

I don't think they saw my watery eyes as they put the patches on. There I was again, worn out, anxious, and on the precipice of relief and life-changing answers. I guess it's typical to have between 25-150 patches, but for this test I had 228.

On day five, I drove home in tears. Relieved to have my answers. Emotional about the (joyless) journey. Terrified about the future - because I felt forced to wonder will there be a next time?

Eight things from the first round, eight things from the second. Amcinonide, bacitracin, balsam of peru, benzalkonium chloride, benzophenone-4, budesonide, cocamidopropyl betaine, decyl glucoside, ethylhexylglycerin, formaldehyde, lanolin, limonene, methyldibromo glutaronitrile, neomycin sulfate, quaternium-15, and shellac.

Sixteen things - but no dyes! Naturally, the first thing I did when I got home was dig out all my jeans, wash them, and revel in them.

As of January, 2017, I am managing reasonably well, and I'm still learning. After all this time, I'm still learning. My CAMP list is very short, with just a few options under a lot of categories, and literally ZERO shampoos for me to use. I am very, very careful and have been getting better about wearing gloves to do certain things, yet there are setbacks. The sources of my exposures still largely elude me, although I know I can expect a flare-up during a remodel project, or maybe after shaking an acquaintance's freshly-washed hand.

I've also begun to trade in my beloved and extensive wardrobe of thrift shop items for clothes that are not only organic fibers, but that are certified from farm to manufacturing to store to consumer. Except the jeans - I haven't given those up yet.

***

Your perseverance is admirable if you've read this whole thing. It has been a kind of a diary for me (I also kept a timeline of how the second patch test went), but the most important purpose of this post is this:

I'd like to know if anyone else has a similar story. I know you're out there because the patch test clinic is a busy place, but it's been rather impossible to find you. I want to chat and let you know I get why you carry your own soap everywhere and travel with your own sheets. You could tell me how you manage. We could talk about how to lower the chances that more people will have to deal with this, if that's possible. We could talk about the total disaster that is navigating the medical and insurance systems. You could tell me about your awesome dog, too, and just be content in knowing that I get it. I want a network of people who are informed so that none of us has to live this way in isolation, but with support.

My husband has worn my tears when I've been particularly uncomfortable, and he's done more research than I have on certain fronts. My family allows me to keep my own stash of supplies at their houses. Until I felt like I had to quit, my coworkers took up tasks that I couldn't do without fear of exposure to an allergen, even though they were in no way responsible for doing so. And August, as always, has just made me laugh. I owe my sanity to these people.

Please contact me, because I want to be one of your people.


A few more good resources:
EWG article on hidden hazards at home
EPA facts about formaldehyde
OSHA article on formaldehyde in hair products
GOTS textile certification

2015 patch test journal

Day 1 Observations

7:30 a.m.: I put on the gown and am examined by two very pleasant women. Every inch of my face, neck, back, arms, hands, legs, and feet are scrutinized and I realize, not for even the hundredth time, this body is not beautiful in many ways. But it is mine.

8:30 a.m.: Two more very pleasant women bring three lunch trays full of patches into the room. They begin applying the patches to my back, and I don't think they notice that a couple tears escape. I'm overwhelmed with the memories of the first time we did this - willfully exposing me to potential toxins and actually hoping for reactions so that conclusions can be drawn - and with the uncertainty of how this round will go. 

9:30 a.m.: I'm walking out of the office feeling stiff from the tape all over my back and biceps. The adhesive smells like gas or exhaust or something similar.

8:30 p.m.: I think I'm starting to get itchy. But maybe it's just the discomfort of not being able to move properly. I can't lift my arms without risking disturbing the patches and muddying the results, so I can't do my hair, get a glass out of the cupboard, or change my shirt. This is a fantastic excuse for why I didn't make my son's bed. 

9:30 p.m.: I get into bed and reflect upon how glad I am that I don't feel like something is crawling underneath my skin and I'm not allowed to itch it. Is that where I was at the 12-hour mark last time? I don't remember the timing, just the insane feeling. I'm glad I'm not pacing the room unable to concentrate on anything, and that I'm lying here sans ice pack. On the other hand, if I expect answers to the mystery of what's been giving me this under-the-surface, eating at my soul itchiness I need to react to these patches. I need hives and eczema and angry red splotches under some of these little circles so that I can know what substances to never, ever touch again. But I'm tired, and for all I know I could be miserable and sleeping on ice in a matter of hours, so I'll be thankful just now. 

Middle of the night: I think the smell is tires.

Day 2 Observations

9:30 a.m.: Twenty-four hours in and I'm not going crazy, but I feel the itch.

9:30 p.m.: I'm not any worse ... so is this working? Because if it's not, this is one expensive failure. And I'll still be wondering what has made the last nine months periodically unbearable.


Day 3 Observations
7:30 a.m.:  I'm back on the table, gown on, and some of the smartest women I've ever met are ready to take off the patches for the initial analysis. They go one by one through the patches, looking and feeling along the way for reactions and declaring "negative," or "doubtful," or "one," or "two." Having done this before, I know what I'm hearing, and what I'm hearing is mostly negatives but also quite a few ones and twos. I'm relieved the reactions are there because that means the test will be worth it... but damn, that's a lot of reactions.

8:30 a.m.: We finally face each other and talk. I reacted to several personal products and several other patches. No dyes, which is what I had suspected. But these results are not final. The nature of skin allergies is such that they know a true analysis can't happen until the patches and their substances have been off for two days, and anything could change in that time.

9:30 a.m.: I leave wondering if the itch will continue to get worse, because I know that just because the allergen is gone doesn't mean its gone.


Day 4 Observations
8:30 a.m.: I slept well enough, without ice. Knowing that reactions are happening without suffering the misery I know they can bring gives me a refreshing sense of good luck after so many months of setback after setback.

2:30 p.m.: The discomfort has grown. Still not miserably so, but I'm now also feeling vaguely itchy at my hairline, on my face, and at the back of my neck. Light bulb! I don't always use shampoo but knowing I wouldn't be washing my hair all week I gave it a really good wash with both shampoo and conditioner the night before Day 1. And the shampoo was one of the personal products that created a reaction, now four days later.

Day 5 Observations

8:30 a.m.: I slept ok again and my mood is great today. Last day. The day I find out. The day I can shower. The day I can take back control.

11:00 a.m.: Back in the gown for the last look. My brilliant scientists go over all my patches just like they did 48 hours ago, remarking on the rarity of some of my reactions and murmuring about things that make sense according to my last test and what they saw the previous day. They ask to take pictures of me and after doing so they leave to draw up my papers.

12:00 p.m.: The doctors and I sit together to finally discuss the results. News. Real facts. This is not just another appointment made out of desperation with another specialist who will prescribe something to (probably poorly) mask my symptoms. Now I get answers.

1:00 p.m.: The elevator is small and I'm sharing it with a woman who's business in this building is unknown. I wonder if she's wondering about my business like I'm wondering about hers. The hallway to the parking ramp is similarly stifling, but I'm thankful that, once I get to my car, I'm alone. There's no parking attendant because a machine has replaced that job here and I'm glad. I cry because I'm relieved (answers) and scared (future) and angry (past) and hopeful (also future). Now I can start to move on and I will try not to dwell on the possibility that I might find myself repeating this all someday, again.

Sign of the apocalypse no. 33

Google has failed, y'all.

I feel almost as lost as when I discovered Target doesn't carry lint traps. Not online either. You can't even search "lint trap" because when you do the internet gnomes turn it into plain "lint," like you never typed the word "trap" in the first place, but YOU DID DAMN IT.

Look at the top where the tabs are ... LINT TRAP. Lint. TRAP.

Anyway, when preschool started two years ago I wrote a poem outlining my feelings about it. With kindergarten starting tomorrow I'm having many of those same feelings, only now they are 80% stronger and accompanied by panic attacks. So today I turned to Google to help me sort this out.

I was in search of an image that would communicate my feelings in a succinct way, because I felt like expressing those feelings but did not wish to bore people who've heard the exact same thing from approximately 58 of their other Facebook friends, and, in fact, from me two years ago.

You go to Google for anything - everything - and expect it to display an array of results that will surely encompass the very item you're looking for. A recipe for chicken noodle soup, famous people named Beyonce, what to do when mice fight, and so on. But Google straight up failed me on "first day of kindergarten."

To be fair, the web search did come up with all the appropriate terms and phrases:
"what to plan"
"how to organize"
"celebrate"
"cry"
"exciting"
"happy dance"
"collapse"
"survival"

But the image search is pretty much just a bunch of adorable graphics.

The only feeling this conjures is inadequacy.

Even if you refine the search with the "mom" button, the results HEAVILY favor the celebratory mother who is occasionally fist-pumping, often jumping for joy, and always white (but that's another matter). There's a couple of cryers. Nothing that evokes the actual range of emotions at play in real life.

So I went ahead and Googled some other phrases and finally landed on "crazy happy scared," which yielded some really irrelevant shit but also this:

Source

So there you have it.

Squirrel Murder Part 2

I should preface this by saying that I just finished Allie Brosh's book, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened. It's based on her blog. So that pretty much explains this whole situation right here. If you're unfamiliar then let me prepare you. There will be run-on sentences, and also brief declarative statements, and exaggeration of minor details, and a lot of grammatical license taken. There might be swearing. There will most definitely be some crazy. Brosh has a way of inspiring me to embrace the twisted ways of life and just write it out, and that is what I'm here to do. 

I will also preface this by saying that while Brosh and my other biggest source of inspiration (the Bloggess - a.k.a. Jenny Lawson) both write autobiographical stories that are a brilliant combo of fantastical, funny, and poignant, I'm just trying to document how mundane my life really is so I can look back someday and say to myself, "see? See how there was nothing to be anxious about?"

Let me finally preface this by saying thank you to Inkscape for offering a free and supremely awesome illustration program that I could spend hours and hours learning to (poorly) use in order to tell stories that actually probably don't warrant having that much time spent on them.

......................

Trees are nice. But this one is under investigation.

We had lived in our South Minneapolis house for a year and a half when the bodies started appearing. My three-year-old son and our five-year-old neighbor were playing together adorably. The neighbor boy ever so gently tossing a ball into my son's arms. My son dropping it, pointing at it, and saying, "GET IT!" Like a good parent, I was on my phone.

We were playing in the backyard; what was once a
summer sanctuary of lush greenery and where
the only animal waste came from the wild bunnies
and my dog whenever she was too lazy to eat her own crap.

So the kids were playing and talking and I don't know what because, again, I was on my phone. Until the neighbor came over to me was all, "hey! There's a chipmunk that can't climb up the tree!" like it was a super silly chipmunk. And I just thought, look - I know you're five, but that doesn't make any sense. ALL chipmunks can climb trees. He beckoned me over to the tree and I was right! He didn't know what he was talking about! It was a squirrel laying strangely at the base of the trunk, not a chipmunk!

Before I could stop him, the neighbor reached right out and touched that squirrel. He poked it. He poked it just as I was realizing that that squirrel was not dead. I wondered which was worse, touching a dead squirrel or touching a squirrel that looked pretty normal except for a smallish tail wound and for the fact that it was laying on its side, on the ground, with people approaching it and flies hovering around it? It was ... really cute. It's little face made me want to be its friend. But the flies made me realize I was going to have to kill that squirrel.

Thankfully, the immediacy of getting the neighbor's hands thoroughly washed allowed me to put off that task. I'd never killed an animal bigger than a centipede, and I feel BAD when I kill centipedes. I only kill them if they've touched me. I don't kill spiders. I'll kill a mosquito or a tick, though. Thems some bad mamma-jammas.

How was I going to kill my squirrel friend? A shovel? What if I ... didn't quite do it the first time? Would it make a mess? Would my dog be forever drawn to the spot where I spilled the blood of an innocent creature?

Well, I needn't have worried. I got the neighbor to his house to wash up and met his grandma, who engaged me in a very pleasant conversation while my son slid down their slide 30 more times than I told him he could, and by the time we got back into our yard to face the dark deed, the squirrel had disappeared. Great! I thought. Now it's gone and hid itself amongst the 87 hostas the old owner planted all over the place and either it'll jump out at me while I'm looking for it and give me rabies or I won't find it at all and it'll die and fester until my dog finds it and brings entrails into the house on her snout. I didn't find it and was glad. I chose to believe that its squirrel friends came along and gave it a respectful procession and then set aside my remaining fears by reminding myself that my dog's instincts were so non-existent you could put a rack of pork ribs two feet from her face and she wouldn't notice. Case closed. I thought.

The next day we had a gruesome discovery across the street.

Could this be the same squirrel who vanished from the back yard?

There were pieces of what was definitely once a squirrel staining the sidewalk outside the elementary school. I began to think it was more than natural selection at work here. I began to wonder if maybe victim A and victim B had gotten on the bad side of a squirrel mob boss, or maybe a bunny king. Or more likely a hungry fox that roamed over from the woodsy areas around the lake a few blocks away.

The suspects.

Or maybe victim A was victim B? I came to think of it as victim ? because we'll really never know. A day or so later, victim ? was gone. A memory, just like victim A. Scraped off the sidewalk by some brave city worker.

And then there were three.

The remains of victim C were found a week later, scattered between our house and the neighbor's, in such a state of ruin that we had trouble deciphering if it had been a squirrel or a rabbit. Either way, if I'd learned anything from watching Dexter, it was that we had a textbook serial killer at work. Somewhere up in the canopy of the trees, I imagined, some psychopath was amassing a collection of little kill trophies - teeth or ears or a bit of fur from each crime.

And the saga wore on.

At the base of the same tree where victim A appeared - and then disappeared - the dog actually sniffed out victim D. I was amazed. She's really a terrible dog. And thank god for that, because instead of sniffing it out and eating it or hauling it over to me so proud of her find, like a regular dog would, she just stood a foot away from it until I finally was like what is that crazy bitch doing? Oh, of course, there's another dead squirrel.

It really is nice to have those moments where you just know someone, somewhere in the cosmos, is looking out for you. I had this kind of supernatural experience one time when I had my first (unrequited) love at the age of twelve. I was so lost in the intensity of my emotions that I sat crumpled on the floor of my bedroom, sobbing and rocking myself and wondering how a person could possibly live through this. I felt like I was the only one, and I felt that way for a long time. It probably wasn't until about ten years later that I really understood the universality of "the total agony of being in love." But that day in my room, I had this odd sense that someone was holding on to me and comforting me. Like someone was trying to tell me, "it's ok. You can handle this."

Point is, victim D was dead. I didn't have to do the killing. AND victim D was in one piece and pretty fresh, I guess. I don't know how long it takes for decomposition to start. But this guy was like, 100% normal looking and not smelly at all, so I knew the angels had my back by not giving me some gag-worthy, rotted corpse to dispose of. Was it kind of hard to feel the weight of that little body on the shovel? Yes. But I could handle it.

Four dead animals, one suspicious tree.

Ok. Two squirrels at the bottom of a tree - whole or nearly whole, and two squirrels massacred within twenty yards of said tree. WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? The nanny next door threw out the "poison" idea, but poison doesn't disembowel. Conversely,* an evil killer surely wouldn't be satisfied by throwing its victims out of a tree. Would it? I just could not get a handle on the killer's M.O. And with a twelve-pound dog with little to no common sense ... well, survival of the fittest, indeed.

As if to prove how prolific the killer could be, victim E showed up not more than a month after victim A spoiled the neighbor's innocent finger, throwing another scenario at me. This one was a chipmunk. Whole. Appearing all the way across the yard from the tree of doom. Again, who knows how long it had been there or how many times it had gone unnoticed by the urinating dog. We only found it because my child nearly stepped on it. Rigor mortis had begun, but it was still a cute little thing. Once more, I felt the sad weight of the animal in my shovel as I wondered how long this would go on.

But that was the last. It's been half of a summer with no more bodies, although there's still a little fur stuck to the path in front of the neighbor's house. I wonder now if it was all just coincidence - if this type of mayhem happens all the time and I just happened to notice this one small string of it. Or was it really something sinister? If so, why did it stop? Maybe it didn't ... maybe my house just isn't the epicenter anymore. The people on my street are real friendly and I'm sure I could find out, but I'm still relatively new here and I don't want to be that crazy lady who introduces herself and then chats about squirrel murder.


* I can not use the word "conversely" without thinking of my high school trigonometry teacher, Ms. Hayden. Kudos, Ms. Hayden; you were great.