Wow, guess I've been posting everywhere else but on my own thread!
My middle son graduated with his masters in social work. We had a celebratory lunch afterwards with my oldest son, my mom and CMM, and my ex and his wife. It went fine. His wife asked me about my music so I had the opportunity to mention how I played in Central Park last year with Jose Feliciano and Maria Muldaur etc. - nice opportunity to "one-up" my ex who thought HE was the musician in the family lol! But really, it was all quite civilized and even though seeing him still makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck a little bit everyone was quite polite which is great.
I've come to the enlightening but somewhat disturbing conclusion that CMM's OCD may not be simple OCD but actually OCPD - Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. The biggest difference is lack of insight - people with OCD are usually somewhat bothered by their compulsions, whereas OCPD are not - they just think their way is the right way and nothing is wrong with it. Harder to treat unfortunately because they don't perceive it as a problem. SSRI's are supposedly somewhat helpful even in OCPD but I doubt I could convince him that he needs to try them.
There was a fly in the kitchen the other day - one - and it was a major Hazmat issue in his mind. (We actually are bothered very little by bugs here in So Cal compared to most other parts of the country.)
Meanwhile his iron deficiency anemia remains mysteriously resistant to diagnosis or treatment. We cannot find a cause, even after I advocated for additional testing based on hematologist's common diagnoses for "unexplained" iron deficiency. And the iron infusions only bumped his levels up very temporarily. If we could fix this problem he would definitely have more energy. Otherwise his cancer treatment has him very stable at present. Considering I kind of expected him to be half-dead by this time when he first got his diagnosis (13 month median survival with standard chemo/radiation for his type and stage of cancer) he is doing very well and these new checkpoint inhibitor drugs are changing the game for lung cancers.
