Hi, everyone. I'm back. As you can imagine from my last few posts, a lot has been happening lately. Between my trip to London for the fMRI study, my mom/aunt's stroke, hunting for consulting opportunities while waiting to hear back from universities for full-time professorship opportunities, and a spur of the moment trip back to DC last week to meet with potential clients - not to mention pulling together information to file taxes - I feel like a Ping-Pong ball!
My mom/aunt is doing better. Found out she was transferred to a sub-acute rehab facility earlier this week. She's improved a LOT since the initial stroke, but she's still not well enough to be back at her home by herself. (My dad/uncle still works full-time.)
The trip to DC last week was pretty last minute. I had been trying to meet up with a potential consulting client for nearly a month before my London trip and when I got back, she asked if I was planning to go to a design event held last Thursday, something I used to attend every year when I still lived in the area. Although I hadn't planned to attend, I figured it would be an ideal event to not only meet up with the client as well as reconnect with other colleagues with whom I might be able to do consulting. All-in-all, a very worthwhile business trip.
In addition to work related errands in DC, I was able to take a side trip to meet up with Judith Krauthamer, the author of "Sound Rage," with whom I have become friends not long after her book came out. We had a lovely discussion catching up with what's been happening over the past year, as well as my experiences with the fMRI study. I'm not sure how it came up in our discussion, I think we had been talking about the lack of misophonia awareness by medical practitioners, but I commented that although I saw a therapist for nearly seven years (starting around the time of 9/11), I really never brought up any issues of being annoyed by sounds, visuals, or certain other stimuli. There was so many other things happening in my life - such as a bad boyfriend break-up, being laid off for the first time, and minor health issues - that had been causing so much stress on my life that I never thought to bring up sensation sensitivities as another stressor. I just thought my being sensitive to sound and visual triggers was just a weird quirk for me, not a medical issue that needed to be discussed with my therapist. I wonder how many other people with (misophonia-related) sensitivities don't feel it necessary to bring them up with their medical provider...
I did reach out to my therapist while I was in DC, just to see if she received the copy of "Sound Rage" that I sent back in October. We talked a little bit over the phone and she agreed that I seemed to have other things on my mind that took precedence over any trigger annoyances that I may have been feeling at the time. She did remember one occasion when I mentioned an incident where I asked a guy on the metro platform to stop clanging his ring on the handrail and he just kept doing it more. Other than that, sensation triggers never came into our discussions.
As much as I'd like to update everyone about the fMRI study experience, I feel that it'd make this blog update WAY too long. Hopefully, I'm going to be "grounded" for a while, instead of running around like a chicken with my head cut off, so I'll try to post the fMRI experience within the next couple of days. (I definitely don't want so much time lag between posts and website updates.) Which reminds me... For those of you who haven't noticed, I added two more pages to the SenseHaven.com website: Potential Coping Tools and links to Other Misophonia Blogs. Please let me know if you have information to contribute to those pages. (The only request I have for links accepted for the misophonia blogs list is that you in turn link back to the SenseHaven.com website.)
My mom/aunt is doing better. Found out she was transferred to a sub-acute rehab facility earlier this week. She's improved a LOT since the initial stroke, but she's still not well enough to be back at her home by herself. (My dad/uncle still works full-time.)
The trip to DC last week was pretty last minute. I had been trying to meet up with a potential consulting client for nearly a month before my London trip and when I got back, she asked if I was planning to go to a design event held last Thursday, something I used to attend every year when I still lived in the area. Although I hadn't planned to attend, I figured it would be an ideal event to not only meet up with the client as well as reconnect with other colleagues with whom I might be able to do consulting. All-in-all, a very worthwhile business trip.
In addition to work related errands in DC, I was able to take a side trip to meet up with Judith Krauthamer, the author of "Sound Rage," with whom I have become friends not long after her book came out. We had a lovely discussion catching up with what's been happening over the past year, as well as my experiences with the fMRI study. I'm not sure how it came up in our discussion, I think we had been talking about the lack of misophonia awareness by medical practitioners, but I commented that although I saw a therapist for nearly seven years (starting around the time of 9/11), I really never brought up any issues of being annoyed by sounds, visuals, or certain other stimuli. There was so many other things happening in my life - such as a bad boyfriend break-up, being laid off for the first time, and minor health issues - that had been causing so much stress on my life that I never thought to bring up sensation sensitivities as another stressor. I just thought my being sensitive to sound and visual triggers was just a weird quirk for me, not a medical issue that needed to be discussed with my therapist. I wonder how many other people with (misophonia-related) sensitivities don't feel it necessary to bring them up with their medical provider...
I did reach out to my therapist while I was in DC, just to see if she received the copy of "Sound Rage" that I sent back in October. We talked a little bit over the phone and she agreed that I seemed to have other things on my mind that took precedence over any trigger annoyances that I may have been feeling at the time. She did remember one occasion when I mentioned an incident where I asked a guy on the metro platform to stop clanging his ring on the handrail and he just kept doing it more. Other than that, sensation triggers never came into our discussions.
As much as I'd like to update everyone about the fMRI study experience, I feel that it'd make this blog update WAY too long. Hopefully, I'm going to be "grounded" for a while, instead of running around like a chicken with my head cut off, so I'll try to post the fMRI experience within the next couple of days. (I definitely don't want so much time lag between posts and website updates.) Which reminds me... For those of you who haven't noticed, I added two more pages to the SenseHaven.com website: Potential Coping Tools and links to Other Misophonia Blogs. Please let me know if you have information to contribute to those pages. (The only request I have for links accepted for the misophonia blogs list is that you in turn link back to the SenseHaven.com website.)
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