Wow. Ordered a nice fat footlong sub from Subway for tonight’s dinner and it says it will be here in 17 mins.

I am used to waiting around 45 minutes for my food, so that’s pretty frigging impressive.

We will see if they make it.

---

Fiiiiiinally got that frigging ultrasound today.

So that’s a load off my mind.

Got the call at 8:30 am. Thank goodness I happened to be awake. Normally I would be asleep at that time,

So,,, yay insomnia, I guess. I had a very hard time falling asleep, even after the phone call. I was feeling very agitated and tense for no readily discernable reason.

Could be that what I really needed was to ejaculate. Empty those big ol’ balls of mine. I have spent most of my adult life kind of ignoring whatever they had to say and as a result, I think I have blamed a lot of feeling ill on other things when it was just a case of the good ol’ blue balls.

I ignore my sexuality in general, to be honest. It is as childlike and underdeveloped as the rest of my instincts and drives. I know that on some level, I would love to have lots and lots of high quality gay buttsex , please, but like everything else that should make me want to do things, it goes nowhere.

And when I try to imagine it actually happening, that freaking-out feeling starts and I know damned well that even if the sexual opportunity of a lifetime fell into my lap, I would have to fight an incoming tide of deep, deep anxiety to take advantage of it.

It makes me wonder if sex is ever going to be a part of my life. Between my very deep seated issues with it and the level of performance suppression from my antidepressants, and my profound social damage, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where I would actually get it on and get off too.

Makes me kind of wish I could just skip the whole thing, to be honest.

Of course, it might be a different story if something appealing to either of my two illegal sexualities came along. That might be stimulating enough to blow that clog on my energies away and let me have a good time.

The illegality of them, though, presents some spectacularly difficult logistical issues not to mention a strong element of risk.

So (irony intended) I guess I am just plain screwed. At least until a more enlightene world that can tell the different between moral consent and legal consent comes along.

Like i have said many times before, it is a hell of a thing to be told by society that you should never, ever, ever get the kind of sex you really want, that if you ever did it would be a terrible crime, and that people like you should be locked up (or even killed in awful ways) for even wanting what you want.

Well I can’t stop wanting it. That’s hardwired. Human sexual imprinting is not, as far as science can tell, alterable in any way.

You get what you’ve got and that’s it. That’s your primary sexuality and absolutely everything else will always be an inferior substitute.

I have two. One is illegal. And the other is really, really, really illegal.

So illegal that it would be far too huge a risk for me to do anything to seek that kind of sex. So in that sense, the system works. I will not act on my impulses.

But I refuse to believe that getting that type of sex is inherently wrong. That’s just mindless taboo talking. I am positive that it is possible for all parties involved to thoroughly enjoy themselves and even grow emotionally closer through it.

But due to the extremely hostile social and legal climate, it would take meeting the exact right kind of people for me to ever get what I really want, and I haven’t the slightest idea how to find such persons.

Guess I will just have to never, ever, ever have what I want.

God, that’s depressing.

---

The ultrasound was painless, of course. Partly that’s because it’s so noninvasive, and partly it’s because my leg demon is not very sensitive to touch any more.

Not long ago, just having my pant leg rub against the dressing hurt like a son of a bitch. But that’s not true at all any more. In fact, I can poke the thing or squish it around a little and it doesn’t hurt. And it’s not red and inflamed at all any more.

This leads me to believe that the infection itself is dead and that further treatment is mostly a matter of wound management.

That’s not going to be easy. I won’t go into the (literally) gory details, but the centerpiece of the whole gruesome tableau is a cavity in my flesh about the size of your thumb.

It’s so freaky to even know that’s there.

I assume that, at the point in the infection before it self-perforated and began draining on its own, this cavity is where the fluid collected.

Thank goodness for that self-perforation then. Probably saved me far worse damage.

The ultrasound was super thorough. Ended up taking a lot longer than I thought it would. But I was lying on my back and being touched by a cute Asian guy the whole time, so I didn’t mind too much.

And hey, if Doctor Kwok (around the Blok) wants a highly detailed and rich dataset from which to draw his conclusions, I am all for it.

I just wish I could have a copy of the file. I would love to have a highly detail 3D scan of the wound as a memento of this whole fiasco.

What can I say, I am a very strange man and I find information comforting.

One last thing – when I got to the ER for the day’s IV antibiotics, I realized I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was almost 3 pm.

I was too sick to eat before leaving for the hospital.

So I asked for something to eat, knowing that Richmond Hospital pretty much always has sandwiches and juice around for just such an occasion.

And yay me being assertive to get my needs met! *applause!*

And as a reward for that, what the nurse brought me ended up being exactly what I would have asked for if I had been asking : egg salad sandwich and apple juice.

That hit the spot perfectly and gave me what I needed to keep my blood sugar from taking a nosedive.

So that’s pretty much been my day. After that, Joe drove me home, and I’ve been my usual lump of a self ever since there.

At least I’m a cute lump.

So there’s that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling kinda trapped in my life right now.

The truth is, my life as it is right now keeps me busy and distracted but it doesn’t satisfy me at all. There is a lot more to life than merely making it through the day and I am never going to be able to move on to the next phase of my existence until I learned to go get what I really need.

And yet, thinking that way only leads to greater frustration as I strain to get where I want to go but only end up causing myself pain as that energy goes nowhere.

So then I try to take things in the opposite direction by trying to calm myself down and learn to accept my life as it is and be harmonious with it instead of fighting it.

And that might seem to work for a while. But the lack of satisfaction always creeps in sooner or later and makes me all frustrated again.

What I want is to exit the conflict entirely. To hell with you and your war, old man!

But it’s not that easy, obviously. And so I pace back and forth in my cage, never getting anywhere, but unable to stop.

It’s all that damned clog’s fault. That enormous wad of compacted psychological scar tissue and frozen emotions that keeps my energies all bottled up behind a wall of fear and dread and existential horror.

So really, the only way out is to clear that frigging clog. Otherwise, I will continue to be paralyzed by fear colder than the interstellar void whenever I try to even think seriously about escaping this existential cul-de-sac from Hell.

It’s not a very fun thing to think about because it means there is no quick or even linear solution to my problems. No light at the end of the tunnel to guide me, no finish line to drive towards, no predictable end to the process at all.

So all I can do is keep digging away at that fucking clog without ever knowing how much further I have to go or where it all will end.

In other words, I have to walk down a road without knowing where it is going or how long it is or even if it’s going in the right direction.

And I have to do so out of faith that if will eventually take me where I want to go.

Faith. Lovely. It’s never been my strong suit, to put it mildly. Instead, I built my world view on things I could rationally verify, thinking this would make for a strong, safe, trustworthy house I could believe in.

But nope. There’s just too much about life that does not and cannot be accounted for by such a structure. Needs unmet, desires unfulfilled, dreams broken.

Life requires at least a few leaps of faith, but I am too scared to make them.

So here I stand at the end of life’s high diving board, looking down at the water, far too scared to jump.

Even though I know it’s my only way out.

---

Heresy : Porn does not hurt children.

Not in the slightest. A kid could watch two straight hours of an orgy that would make Nero blush with shame and it would still do them no harm.

Odds are, they won’t understand what is going on. Not really. They will realize it’s sex but that words means very little to a pre-pubescent kid.

To be honest, they will probably just get bored. Whatever they do not understand will sail right over their heads just like all the other adult things like death and having a job and people getting sick does.

What does do them harm is their parents freaking out over finding them watching porn. After all, despite its harmlessness, anything that violates the extremely powerful child/sex taboo creates a massive emotional reaction in us.

That’s how taboos work, after all.

The mistake comes when that huge emotional reaction is translated into a feeling of harm to the child when the real problem is the parents’ taboos.

Ironically, it is this kind of reaction and blame-placing that transmits the taboo.

Seen from this angle, this over-application of the child/sex taboo is a pernicious meme. It replicates itself by getting transmitted from parent to child, and causes undue psychological distress and suffering by doing so.

Responsible parents, therefore, should do what they can not to freak out at this kind of thing. Not easy, I know – like I said, the taboo is incredibly strong, and produes extremely powerful emotional responses.

But if you can pull it off, you will really be doing your kid a solid by sparing them future weird issues about sex., as well as a lot of pointless shame.

The key, I think, is to remind yourself that the child has not been harmed and whatever you are feeling in that moment is all about you, not them.

That’s the fact to hang onto as the intense desire to react to this massive emotional response like it’s an external threat to your child washes through you.

The kid is fine. Mom and Dad might need a good stiff drink or two.

And obviously, if pornography can’t hurt your child, the mere sight of another human being’s bathing suit areas does them no harm either.

It’s the same deal. Because in our society nudity is strongly associated with sex, nudity plus child sets off the child/sex taboo.

But as with full on porn, the child is not harmed. There are no evil child brain scrambling rays emitted by the genitals of the world. The only result of a child seeing someone else naked is that they will know genitals can look like that, too.

At least we, as a society, got past the masturbation taboo. It, too, was a product of the child/sex taboo. and students of history know that at one point it was a full on moral panic that swept the world.

But I think nearly everyone is cool about that now. You catch your child masturbating, you just apologize and depart, and maybe talk to them later about discretion and privacy and when certain things are and are not appropros.

That gives me hope. Hope that the rest of the madness of the excesses of the child/sex taboo can be curtailed and we can create future generations of people with way less neurosis about sex.

And isn’t that a future worth fighting for?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

To all my fellow creators :

Always remember that the one true purpose for all bad art you see succeeding in the world is to encourage you in your own endeavours by prompting you to say, “Well I can sure as hell do better than THAT.

Just posted that to Facebook. Hope folks like it.

Still have not heard from the ultrasound people and it’s 2:30 pm. Hope i didn’t get lost in the shuffle. Technically, I should be at the hospital getting my IV antibiotics right about now, but I don’t want to miss the call.

Ironic, ain’t it.

Today, I have gone to therapy, then I got Joe to drop me off at the 7-11 a few blocks from the apartment, did some shopping there, and walked home.

This was both to compensate for the fact that Joe starts work at 2:30 pm this summer and therefore can’t take me to 7-11 after therapy (not enough time) and a small experiment in giving myself a small bit of exercise, fresh air, and sunshine in order to potentially boost my mood.

My mood could use a little boosting, to be honest. All the medical shit is depressing. That’s why I bought myself some sugar free ice cream at 7-11.

Ice cream is like the opposite of depression.

Also the opposite of depression : encountering a totes adorbs fat little black/dark grey bunny wabbit on the way home.

For those of you who don’t know, the city I live in, Richmond, is on an island rather adorably named Lulu Island.

At some point, someone’s pet bunnies got loose here, and as there are no bunny eating predators on Lulu island, they did what bunnies do best and multiplied.

So now we have loads of fat little bunny wabbits hopping around on people’s lawns and nibbling on their roses and raiding their gardens.

I love telling that story. Can you tell? It makes Richmond magical to me.

The one I saw today was just sitting there casually on the sidewalk, thinking lapine thoughts. The bunnies here have the same attitude as city pigeons – they will run off if you get close enough, but they are kind of lazy and apathetic about it.

He (or she, it’s not like I got THAT good a look) hopped away when I was like three feet away. Such a cutie!

So yeah. That boosted my mood too. Yay cute little fuzzy critters!

I am prettty annoyed about this ultrasound BS though. Like I said yesterday, I hate this kind of uncertain waiting, and the longer it goes on, the worse my nerves get.

I just want to be done with it already.

Well if I don’t hear from them before 5 pm, I am going to go in for my IV antibiotics at the usual time tomorrow and find out what’s up.

They got an hour and a half left. I kind of want to take a nap now but I dare not.

I sure as hell hope they don’t call and say “COME RIGHT NOW!”

I hate that shit.

---

Still no fucking word from the ultrasound peoiple, and it’s 7:54 pm, so I kind of think it’s just not going to happen today.

Which means I am going in tomorrow. Get my IV antibiotics and inquire as to WTF is going on with my case.

I am glad I don’t have the kind of assertiveness issues that keeps me from speaking up for myself in all situations. I have no problem doing it if I am actually mad.

And I am willing to make as big a scene as I need to in order to make sure I am not neglected, forgotten, or ignored.

Trust me on that one.

That’s when my usually (far too) heavily suppressed firey, combative side comes in real handy. Feels good to know that I can kick ass verbally if it’s warranted.

That doesn’t necessarily mean getting mad on the outside. In fact, I always start off super sweet and gentle and reasonable and 99 percent of the time, that works like a charm and everything is cool.

You really do catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

But then again, who the fuck wants flies?

No, for the most part, I am my father’s padawan in the art of getting your way by being polite, reasonable, and firm.

But I think that works best if, somewhere deep inside, their lies the possibility of you being a lot less nice and reasonable and such.

Otherwise, there will be some who see my shy and gentle nature as meaning they can walk all over me and without the presence of what I have been thinking of as “the dark side of the Fru”, they would be right.

Speaking of people who walk all over me, I talked to my therapist today about my problems asserting myself with doctors.

And he said the necessary things, like that the doctor’s office is one of the most important places to assert yourself (yup), and that I should make a list of things I want to talk about before I go in (have done in the past, worked great).

But I know the issues go deeper. One thing that only occurred to me now is that it’s also a boundaries issue.

I sometimes have trouble telling where my emotions end and other people’s emotions begin. It’s one of the perils of being an empath.And the easiest thing for me is to let what they want override my own needs and desires.

And what they want, of course, is to get me in and out of the office ASAP.

It’s like I am a very frustrated chameleon.

So the real solution has to involve my shoring up my own limits before I go in. Resolve to stick to my agenda and to hell with his.

This might involve stepping on his toes (metaphorically) till I am sure I have his full and undivided attention and he is listening to me.

And that will be hard because he’s a sweet guy and I am pretty sure he has no idea what he has been doing to me.

But I have to look out for number one, as hard as that can be for me.

It’s all part of the process of finally growing up and becoming a real live person.

And that always sucks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I managed to get my ass to the hospital in time to see Doctor Kwok at 8:30 am.

Actually, I quite impressed myself in the process. I woke up at 8 am, looked at the clock, and despaired. Only half an hour? I was never going to make it.

But then I rallied and pulled myself together, got dressed, called the cab, and was at the hospital by 8:20 am!

Not freaking bad, if I say so myself.

And I do!

Of course, he didn’t end up seeing me until around 9:20 am anyway. Typical specialist. Appointments are for patients, not them!

But it doesn’t matter. I rocked it either way.

Just digressed into Facebook for ten mins. Mental note : having trouble focusing right now. Turning off MP3s to compensate.

So where was I? And how often do I say that?

Right! Made it to the hospital. Doc Kwok took a look at my leg demon and decided that what was needed was for a wound care nurse (which is a thing now, apparently) to have a go at it to clean out the necrotic tissue and see what’s underneath.

He also ordered an ultrasound. More on that later.

So I end up in an exam room. I read, I mellow. Really wish my tablet hadn’t died on me, that would have really made the time fly.

Then again, I sleep better now, so…

The session with the wound care nurse was not fun but not as bad as it might of been, because the thing about necrotic tissue is that it’s dead and hence feels no pain.

But there was still some pain. When she told me to look away, I did, because I ain’t no fool and I figure she knows what is what.

And I have to say, she removed a lot more than I thought she would. And despite the pain, it feels good to have it gone.

Kind of like peeling a scab. Hurts, but then feels better after.

The nurse was quite sweet and sensitive about the whole thing. All said, the quality of care I have received has been quite high.

And yet, what with that poor lady yesterday, and a fellow in the waiting/IV area today who has been there for three hours without anyone saying boo to him, clearly not everybody is having that great an experience.

So I have to wonder what the difference is. Is it because I’m a white male?

I don’t think so. I think it’s more likely to be that I have a big personality and I am very likable and that helps me connect with the nurses and doctors.

The fact is, I bring out nurturing responses in people, especially when my mind is relatively unclouded by depression and especially especially when I am in distress.

It’s a survival instinct of sorts, I suppose. Comes from being the youngest.

So now I am waiting on a phonecall about the ultrasound. Should be today or tomorrow.

It’s a pain in the ass because I hate uncertain waiting. I am very patient when waiting for something happening at a specific time but this sort of thing makes me antsy.

But I know demand for ultrasounds is high, so I understand.

Doesn’t mean I like it, but I understand.

---

Being too sick to go out sucks.

I am getting really bored and restless. Even a hardcore introvert like myself needs social time now and then.

I’m getting that “tiger pacing in its too-small cage” feeling.

I mean, yeah, technically I’ve been out a lot lately, but only to the hospital, and whilst that did involve a certain amount of socialization, that’s not what I had in mind.

What I crave most right now is a good party. A house party, of course… I am dimly aware that there are other kinds but where I come from, not so much.

Just a nice little party with snacks and drinks and decent music (classic rock is fine by me) and, of course,. the most important thing of all : good conversation.

I guess I now know what it takes to make me feel social : being told I can’t have it!

Seems obvious in retrospect.

Still no word about the ultrasound. Dammit. That means it will probably come in tomorrow, and that means I will get the call and have to rush on over there, most likely, and I hate that kind of shit.

Like I said once before, want to see the dark side of a Taurus? Rush us.

But I will mentally prepare.

Not sure if I am supposed to go do the IV antibiotic thing tomorrow as well or not.

If I am lucky, the ultrasound will be scheduled for some time nearish to when Joe leaves for work so I can catch a ride.

Or if not that, I hope it will be a nice sunny day so that taking the bus will be an option. It was rainy and cold today. and so I ended up takling a cab each way.

There’s another $20 down the drain.

My appetite is being a pain. One minutes I am gnaw-a-limb-off ravenous, so I prepare a big meal for myself, then like three bites in, the steel door in my gut slams shut and I am full to the point of being slightly nauseous.

Make up your fricking mind!

Because of that, and a general feeling of instability as well, I have not taken any insulin today. I didn’t want to set off a low blood sugar incident.

Those feel like dying. They are terrifying.

If high blood sugar was as awful as low blood sugar, all us Type II diabetics would be in perfect compliance all the time.

OK, maybe not. There are a lot of people far worse at regulating their own behaviour than I am. Makes me realize that while I have the same food addiction as any other fat guy, mine is not nearly as bad as some because I have never made junk food a huge part of my diet.

Largely that’s been due to financial constraints. But still.

Right now, I have way too much junk food in my diet and I would like to work towards getting rid of most of it. Make it a once a day thing.

I am not even sure I would miss it that much. Especially if I replaced it with good wholesome healthy food that is tasty and good.

And not so carb-laden.

Hey, a guy can dream, can’t he?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Don’t ask me anything about whatever anime that is from. I just liked the thumbnail.

So I tried, and failed, to see the infectious disease specialist today. I really tried to get out of bed at the right time, but then I totally failed my saving throw versus sleep, in a manner of speaking.

Basically, after getting up out of bed and getting, then drinking, a glass of water, I still felt like a particularly disoriented mummy. So I figured, nerp, not today.

I will make a better attempt tomorrow.

Turns out his name is Doctor Kwok (must…. restrain…. urge to mock name… ) and I think I might have an actual appointment with him tomorrow at 8:30 am.

Or that’s just when he shows up. I’m not sure.

Because I didn’t go see the person with the authority to stop my IV antibiotic treatment, I had to go to my IV anti-biotic treatment. No big deal, Joe dropped me off.

And my treatment was uneventual. My nurse seemed a little green, but she did a fine job. I got more bandages for my leg demon.

Look, I’m getting really sick of calling it my “wound’ or my “infection” and “leg demon” sounds so much cooler.

One of the people with me was having a very bad day, though, and I felt bad for her. Apparently she had extreme arthritis pain in her shoulder,. worse than she’d ever had before, so she called the ambulance around noon and arrived at the hospital not that long after, say like 12:25 pm

And I can personally attest to the fact that she wasn’t seen by a doctor until 3:35 pm, leaving her in brutal fucking agony for over three hours.

And they only remembered her after she started voiciferously complaining.

And when I say “remembered her”, I mean she wasn’t even on the fucking board^[1] yet. Son of a bitch.

She said she was an RN, and that Richmond hospital was the worst one in the GVRD.

And I am thinking, a) Really? Have you been to Royal Columbian, the people who totally fucked up my gall bladder removal? But more importantly,

b) I forgive you because you are in terrible pain, but if you really are an RN, you know that technically, that’s not something you should say around us patients who are also currently depending on said hospital to save our fucking lives.

So I felt bad for her.

An ER can be a pretty rough place for an empath like myself. And yet, on another level, I kind of enjoy it.

Gets me out of my own head for a while, for one.

Saw one person admitted with no fewer than 16 members of their extended family along for moral support.

Boggles my mind. My family was so insular. Good for them, though.

Lois was there again. She told her nurse about how it took three people to get her current IV dongle in, so he’d better be careful with it.

I like her. And she seems healthier.

It’s things like my repeated visits to the hospital that get me thinking about my own quiet and passive nature because it reminds me of who I was before the Internet came along and gave me a way to expore and express myself, and who I still am more often than not when I am out there all along.

And that is a very quiet, passive person. Very unlike my usual persona, even in RL. I am quite shy RL, although less so than before and far less painfully so.

And I can totally see how someone like myself might become a stalker, with this whole imaginary relationship with a celebrity. When your emotional life is cut off from the world by your shyness and you are starved for social input, a sufficiently charismatic celebrity might well fill that massive void in your life.

I have never been much for celebrity worship myself. If I went crazy that way, it would be a lot more like One Hour Photo.

In the movie, Robin Williams plays a guy who runs a photo developing shop (remember those?) who develops this fixation on one of the families that comes in often. He is drawn to the emotional warmth and happiness represented in their pictures and starts to feel like he is part of the family.

I have never connected with a Robin Williams character more. I am drawn to the same things and desperately want to be part of a wholesome, strong, supportive family that takes care of one another and has a great time together.

As I kid, I would look into people’s windows at night^[2] and wonder what it would be like to be part of the warm, close-knit, everyday world of these people who seemed at the time like they lived in a kind of Heaven.

Of course, they probably would not have agreed. Their lives were ordinary, nothing special, and no doubt some of them had it far worse than I’ve ever had at and some of them were no doubt just as miserable as I was.

But from the street and through the lens of my lonely little heart, it looked…. perfect.

Relatedly, I realized just recently that one of the reasons I loved Halloween as a kid was that on that night, I felt…. normal.

After all, for once, I was doing exactly what all the other kids were doing. And people were opening their doors and smiling at me and giving me candy, so I was getting the positive human interaction that I needed so badly.

For one night a year, I was just another happy kid.

Equally sad is the revelation I had today that despite the nightmare currently attached to my left leg being largely a negative thing, it actually has had the effect of getting me out of my bedroom and out into the big wide world and in close proximity to normal people and normal life.

And that’s been quite good for me, actually. I might come out ahead in all this.

And that is, when all is said and done. truly and unutterably sad.

And that’s okay.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It does not exist.

Time to lay a little high quality cynicism on your asses.

We have all been there. You do nice things for people. You’re always there for them when they need you. You selflessly sacrifice of yourself for them.

All with the certainty that they appreciate all you do for them and that if ever you need something from them, they will not hesitate to give back.

Because that gratitude you think you have been banking ain’t there. When you thought you were establishing a bank account with interest, all you were really doing was establishing that you do everything without expecting anything in return, and the person you think will be grateful likes things fine that way.

Not that they are necessarily bad people. Even the best of people will stop offering gratitude and.or reciprocation if you keep turning it down. What you saw as being an awesome unselfish person they saw (and felt) as you being a nice person with no respect for themselves who rejected their gratitude and seems eager to be everybody’s doormat and so while they might like you, they do not respect you.

And so it’s easy to do exactly what all your selflessness has been begging them to do, and take you for granted, never giving a thought to your own needs.

And that’s fine, you tell yourself. That only proves what a super amazing friend you are. Surely that means they will be there when you need them!

But again, nerp. When you finally get around to asking for something, from their point of view, you are suddenly changing the terms of the relationship out of view, and the easiest thing in the world to do is put things back to normal by saying no.

You made it clear you wanted and needed nothing. And now you want something?

How very strange. Um…. no.

Now this isn’t some embittered anti-niceness tirade. Being nice to people is great and I heartily recommend it to one and all. It’s the way I choose to live and it’s a vitally important part of who I am.

The problem isn’t the niceness, it’s the selflessness. It is never a good idea who emotionally invest in something you, by yourself, have just assumed was there without ever talking to the other person about it.

It’s an easy trap for us shy folk to fall into. It’s also extremely deadly.

Especially when it comes to gratitude and selflessness.

See, I remember the topic!

The trick is to rid yourself of the habit of self-minimizing. By that I mean always saying things like “think nothing of it’ or ”I was happy to help” or “no problem” when you do something for someone.

Also strike these phrases from your vocab : “Oh, either is fine with me. ” “Oh, whatever you have is fine. ” “I don’t want to be a burden. ” And so on.

These things all say “my needs and desires are not important and I am actively encouraging you to discard them now and forever. ”

That doesn’t mean you have to become bossy and demanding and selfish. It just means you have to stop giving those “ignore me” signals.

Often, people treat you how you tell them to treat you.

So stop telling them you don’t matter!

As usual, I will be back later.

---

I’m such a complicated guy.

Not a huge amount of medical adventure today. Got more of the big kneecap-covering bandages, which is good.

I failed to ask for more on Sunday, meaning the one I was wearing got, um…. full. So I had to take it off.

It was…. *shudder*.

In fact, those bandages get so disgusting that it presented me with a strange problem I find amusing.

The first time I took one off, I didn’t know what to do with it. It was far too disgusting for me to even contemplate throwing it in the trash, and yet I had no idea if the damned thing was safe to flush.

Event I just flushed it and prayed. I’ve flushed a bunch of them now.

So far so good!

The IV antibiotics thing went off without a hitch. It’s becoming routine. I am trying to learn the names of my favorite nurses.

It’s rough going. I am not good with names. But I am determined to do it.

Oh, Lois is always there when I am though. Weird that I remember her name and not the name of any of my nurses.

I will learn them if it kills me! They are nice people who treat me well. I need all of those in my life that I can get.

One thing I can say for sure : that ER rocks my world. The whole place is both efficient and relaxed, and I am so totally down with that.

Relaxed efficiency is like, my #lifegoal

Oh, and about the whole infectious disease specialist thing : I was told I “missed” him, and that if I wanted my medically mandated consultation with him, I should come to the ER in the morning, where he “usually” shows up “around” nine and hangs around “for a couple of hours”.

And I thought, ahhh. that’s more like the specialists I have known/.

So now I gotta haul my ass into the ER at 9 am. Lovely. I am usually asleep then, so this should be fun.

At least the 407 bus can take me there. I don’t relish the thought of paying $10 each way for a cab. And I can hardly expect Joe to get up early in the morning to drive me there and pick me up after.

It will be….. an adventure.

That sounds better than my first choice, “a huge pain in the ass hassle fosted upon a helpless sick person by a specialist too precious to ‘do’ afternoon. ”

Yup. Sure glad I didn’t go with that one.

It would have made me sound like a total #asshole!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

One addendum to yesterday’s tale : tomorrow I have an appointment with the hospital’s infectious disease specialist.

Emphasis mine, obviously. When the nurse told me that, those two words hit me like a knee to the groin. All my feelings about being toxic got triggered. I had the urge to run and hide in shame.

It passed. But, it sucked.

---

Took 60 units of insulin last night. Immediately felt a lot better. Going to take another 60 units after lunch.

I’ve been such an idiot, letting all that slip. The injection took so little effort.

But then again, I know that’s not what this is about. Self-neglect is self-abuse. It’s the most passive-aggressive form of taking your anger out on yourself.

It would be easy to talk about depression making me lazy, or how my video game addiction has hollowed me out and keeps me from doing most other things, or talk about how I never learned to care for myself because I was never cared for, and all of that would be one hundred percent true.

But only up to a point. Because one of the sublest ways we lie to ourselves is with true statements that miss the point.

And the point is, I have been passively self-harming. In fact I still am, more than likely. This is the sort of thing that runs very deep, and it will probably take me a long time to unravel all the layers.

So once more, I reach the place where I have to admit to myself that what is really behind it all is anger.

It’s always anger with me. I should get “IT’S THE ANGER, IDIOT!” tattooed on my inner eyelids so I am reminded of it every time I blink.

But that would hurt.

I am working on uncorking my anger. Being sick and therefore crankier than usual has helped. Over the last three or four days, I have been letting loose more on Facebook.

If something pisses me off, and it’s not from someone I know, then I vent. I mean, why the fuck not? I have the right to be just as snappish and irritable as everyone else on the internet these days.

Well, okay, maybe not. But it feels good to not just passively absorb everything – to be able to express how I feel even if how I feel is mad.

I have decided to label my new attitude “feisty”. That way it’s still kind of cute. Like I’m a cranky old man, or a scrappy little dog, or a fainty patronized woman.

The point is, that’s a lot closer to my real personality. I’m a firey, passionate person. That comes with a certain amount of natural combativeness, and that is something I have dealt with so far by just blanket suppressing it.

And that makes me so angry!

Kidding, mostly. But obviously that’s not nearly good enough. The biggest delusion of the ego and superego is that the id can be suppressed forever without consequence.

But it is the lifespring, the source, the place from which all energy flows. Cut that off and you kill yourself inside.

Trust me on that. I know of what I speak.

As uaual, I will be back later.

---

Well I just fucked up big time.

See, I already wrote this half of the post. Had it all perfect and dynamic and kewl.

But by not paying attention to a warning message, I ended up losing all that work and now all those words are victims of entropy.

And that hurts. Losing our precious words hurts writers like a death in the family, or losing a limb. Any writer worth their caffinated beverage of choice feels like what they write is a part of them – an extension of themselves.

And it hurts like a son of a bitch to have that ripped away.

But oh well. Life goes on. I won’t bore you (or me) with the technical details, but sufficith to say that I could not have diddled myself better if I had hired a team of elite hackers to rappel down my walls and do it.

They don’t have to do that. But it makes them feel special.

So I am choosing to see this as a spiritual growth experience. The experience of rewriting this damned thing will begood for me as it is a valuable lesson in not letting life push you around.

A previous, lesser version of me would have run away from the situation. I would have given up immediately and flopped down on my bed in despair and maybe even just plain given up on finishing this blog entry entirely.

And I was tempted. Those thoughts went through my head.

But fuck that pansy-ass shit. I am way stronger than that. I knew that this was a ‘get back on that horse’ type situation. The kind where delaying would only give the wound time to close and form a scab over it, and the best thing to do was to get right back there and do the only thing that will heal it instead : write, goddamn it. Write.

So here I am, re-doing work I thought was already done. And it sucks. But it ain’t that bad. Most things aren’t nearly as bad as fear makes them out to be.

I feel like I am developing an inner Sam Elliot. And I like it. I’ve never had decent male role models in my life, so I guess I have to make my own.

And if my little life lessons – which are mostly for me – seem harsh to you, listen to this bit of wisdom I have just deduced :

It’s not about teaching myself to be a man. Not in the old sense anyhow.

It’s about teaching myself to be happy. Those old unreconstructed males knew a thing or two, and one of those things was that in order to be happy you need to have strength. Grit. Power. Toughness. And above all, courage.

Those are virtues even in a candyass city life like mine. And they come straight from the core – the id.

To be happy, you have to raise and tame the beast inside, not just cage it.

Damn I wish I had a mentor for all this.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I had my second session of IV antibiotics today. And that was pretty uneventful on my end. Pretty much just a rest with a needle in my arm.

But it did provide some very highly quality um, passive observation of human behaviour.

Known to the ignorant as “eavesdropping”, or as I like to think about it, “being a writer”.

I am endlessly curious about the actual content of people’s actual lives. And I got to listen to some real life while I was in the little lounge for IV patients.

Very comfy chairs, by the way. And I am hard to please in that area.

So to speak.

There was Lois, an elderly lady in an utterly camptastic floral print sun dress with sequins! Can you imagine? Sequins all around the collar.

It was actually quite tasteful, Nothing garish or tacky about it. Just little patterns of sparkly (but not shiny) sequins the same color as the dress.

And Lois was there to teach me to count my blessings, because before I observed her struggle I thought I had difficult to find veins, but nope.

It took at least an hour and four different people giving it a go WITH A VEIN FINDER before they got an IV line into her.

What’s a vein finder, you so helpfully ask? (See, I know there was a reason I liked you so much!). A vein finder is a wonderful modern device that shines a bright light into the area in question that makes the veins more visible.

I learned so much today.

Actually, sign of the times, most of my fellow patients were elderly. No surprise there, what with the aging population and whatnot. Some of them were there in the care of their children, who were about my age.

I wonder how my Mom is doing.

I also enjoyed listening to one of the ER doctors, Doctor (I swear I am not making this up) Low-Beer, interact with the patients.

I have no way to evaluate the quality of her diagnoses, of course, but I can evaluate her bedside manner, and it was pretty good. There was one time where I thought she was being a little too argumentative with a patient, but it still worked out fine.

She’s no Patch Adams but she’s good enough that it wouldn’t effect outcomes, and outcomes are the bottom line every time.

Like yesterday, I sort of dozed my way through time. Not really awake, not really asleep, sort of half way between the two.

I was very mellow. Admittedly, the fatigue brought on by the infection helped.

My two main symptoms of infection are fatigue and bouts of fever. The fatigue sucks, but the fever is far worse.

The fatigue makes me feel like napping.

The fever makes me feel like I’m in Hell.

But again, just as I thought I was about to be free, my nurse told me that I had to wait around because the doctor wanted to consult with me.

I’ll tell you how that went after the break.

---

Aaand we’re back.

So once my IV treatment is done and I cool my heels (by now they’re freezer-fresh) a bit more, they put me in a rather snug but acceptable exam room and tell me to strip down and put the gown on.

What’s with those gowns, anyway? To put them on properly you have to go against what every other garment in Western society has taught you and put it on “backwards”, and there’s no instructions to that effect anywhere on it and the nurses don’t tell you either. The only way to learn is to do it the logical but wrong way and have the nurses smirk at you as they tell you to do it the other way.

And I hate that kind of thing. A lot.

Anyhow, I suit up and await the doctor. And it’s Doctor Low-Beer again! And she is looking kind of freaked out.

And that’s something you never wanted to see. Your ER doctor looking freaked out and really worried. So I am, shall we say, alert.

She gives me a talk about my case, but that rapidly turns into a talk about how I really, really, really should be looking after my diabetes and that because my blood sugar is so high that it’s making it hard for the antibiotics to do their job.

Well I always was too sweet for my own good.

She said straight out that if I don’t start taking my insulin, I will die. And it will not be a pleasant death. It will be nasty.

She then apologized for being harsh, but she didn’t have to. That’s exactly the sort of thing I need in order to penetrate the thick fucking fog in my mind and force me to take my own health seriously for once.

I think she was thinking about admitting me at one point.

The very last thing she said to me was, “Thanks for coming back!”.

Yowza. That really hurt. I bet she has dealt with a lot of us stupid-stubborn fat dudes in our forties who blithely neglect and abuse themselves into an early grave while their doctors look on in helpless horror as all their very important advice is ignored.

Well I sure as fuck don’t want to be one of those idiots.

Oh then, just to drive the message home, my nurse repeated the highlights of the talk to me just to make absolutely sure I understood it.

Got it, ladies. I promise to do better in the future.

Because that’s the thing. This all left me feeling deeply ashamed of myself. I felt lower than a snake’s nutsack.

And that’s a good thing too, because clearly, my own self-interest is not sufficient motivation to get me to act. I need externalities to be involved.

In fact, I kind of wish they had yelled at me some. Remember, I have never had anyone to do that for me in my life.

Luckily, that “harsh” statement about it being insulin or death got through to me because as it turns out I do not want to die. Death scares me. I want to live.

Hell, I can’t die yet, I haven’t even lived yet.

So tonight, I will take my first dose of insulin in years, and as of tonight, my hunt for a blood sugar monitor that doesn’t require me to jab a jagged need into the densent nerve cluster on the human body begins.

Wish me luck.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

>

When I am sick, I mostly want to be left alone in my miserty. Having other people around forces me to be “up” (I have no choice) and that increases my stress and my strain and makes things way worse.

So I went through the usual stages. Registration. Wait for the triage nurse to see me. {{2}} Then wait in an examining room for me doctor to see me. Then wait for the various things the doctor orderd to show up.

The male mind is so messed up : when the doctor looked at my baby monster and said “Whoa! Holy crap!”, I was oddly proud.

She took a swab and sent that off to the lab. And she put me on an antibiotic IV – note my total lack of surprise I knew that was in the cards before it even occurred to me to go to the ER.

She also has me on an oral antibiotic. One I havce never taken before, so, fingers crossed. I’ve already taken one pill at the hospital – so far so good.

I also had my “wound” (it fits) dressed and “marked”.

“Marking” the wound involves, as you might imagine, means tracing it with a marker.

What you might not imagine is that this would be by far the most painful thing to happen to me today. Apparently my nurse felt she had to press down REALLY HARD, and that hurt so much that I honestly thought she was slicing the whole thing open.

I am positive that was not necessary. I mean, you’re marking me with a Sharpie, not tattooing me by sheer force of will, for fuck’s sake.

But OK. After the IV antibiotics were in me, then the “sodium chloride solution”^[3] was used to flush it out I was, in theory, free to go.

But then this blonde nurse stops me and gabbles something involving medication at me and tells me to sit in the waiting area.

So then 30 more minutes is added to my sentence just so that blondie can re-confirm what meds I am on. Lovely.

More on this later, when I have gotten some fucking rest.

---

And now things get even worse.

So there I am, recently released from the ER, and only then fully realizing that I actually had not eaten since 9:30 am, and it is now 5:30 pm, and that is Bad.

“Just now realizing” may seem out of place here, but the thing is, I reacted to all the waiting I had to do today mostly by sinking into a sort of dozing half-asleep state, and so getting out was a lot like waking up.

Must be one of the few advantages of having a somewhat passive personality. I was able to just sort of Zen my way through it.

The fact that I spend the majority of my time there in an examination room with a comfy-enough exam table helped a lot.

It’s harder to be Zen when you have no where to lie down.

Anyhow! SO there I was, knowing that I needed two things :

1. Somewhere to get the prescription for the oral anibiotic filled, and
2. FOOD NOW PLEASE.

So after a subjectively long time trying to calculate a solution, I took a cab to the Shopper’s Drug Mart at Richmond Center, dropped off my script there, then walked over to the White Spot in Richmond Center.

I actually would have preferred to go to the food court, but I was not up to the mental task of figuring out how to get there from where I was, let alone deal with the natural chaos of so many people and options.

Too bad. I could have gotten Chinese food there.

Of course, at that time of day on a Friday, White Spot is slammed, and I am told I can sit at the bar or wait 10-15 minutes.

I hate eating at counters. They are always too low for my comfort. So I decide to sit and wait. But oh no, there’s no room left in the waiting area.

So I notice there is a table near the entrance with a chair tucked into a corner, so I sit my sick ass down there.

Standing was NOT an option. The walk from Shoppers damn near killed me.

Eventually, one of the waitresses comes over and says “Do you just want to sit there? We can bring you a menu!”

Fine by me.

So I order my Diet Coke and my BC Chicken Burger and I am reading while inhaling the Diet Coke ( I was so damned thirsty!!), and I happen to notice there was this little bit of bandage sticking out of the leg of my pants, right below the wound.

Uh oh, I thought. I roll up my pant leg and sure enough, the dressing for my wound has slipped down to my freaking ankle and my wound is open to the world and all its germs.

So now I have to puit the thing back on somehow, eventually, and I don’t wanna. I suck at taking care of myself and I suck at things requiring any kind of manual dexterity and this is both of those.

Oh well. I keep eating, even though the fries seem weirdly tasteless. But I figure I am all kind of fucked up right now, so I am probably what has changed.

But then, when I get my third glass of Diet Coke, I am half way into it when I realize that it too seems different somehow. It’s much darker in color, and heavier, and oh yeah I started feeling ill the moment I started drinking it.

And it occurs to me that a) my fries are undercooked, and b) it’s entirely possible that my third Diet Coke is actually regular, sugar-filled Coke.

Sadly, I was in too messed up a mental state to take them to task on this. I just paid my bill and got out of there. By the time I fully awoke to what had happened, I was most of the way back to Shoppers and had no way to prove my claim or anything.

Which is too bad. Because if I am right, that could have fucking killed me.

Oh well. After I pick up my pills, I realize that I have no way to call a cab. No cell phone and pay phones are totally not a thing.

So after all that, I had to walk home. Those were two very long blocks to walk considering how wiped out I was.

So now I am home. And I am supposed to go hang out tonight but I ain’t up to it. Which means I am going to have to prevail on Joe to do some shopping for me.

Oh, and I have to go back tomorrow and Sunday in the afternoon for more IV antibiotics. Then on Monday, I meet with the doctor to talk about where to go next. She will have the lab results back by then.

It never ends.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] Unless you prefer to keep your cookies untossed, in which case, um, no. [[1]]

[[2]] Cute Asian guy. Rawr. [[2]]

I really should be eating right now.

But i have no appetite. Negative appetite, really – the thought of food and eating is quite repulsive to me at the moment.

I had planned on ordering in as a little treat for myself. I could use a treat to compensate for how sick I feel. But my anti-appetite will not allow that.

Oh well, if the last few days have taught me anything, it is that my appetite can come roaring back at any second, and then I will be really really hungry, so I willl just wait.

But I’ve got to get it done. My body needs all the fuel and vitamins it can get in order to fight off this infection. We are what we eat, after all.

So I will gently and kindly puck-handle my way towards eating.

Might order in, might not. Depends on if I feel like I will stay hungry long enough, as well as if I can stand to wait that long when the hunger strikes.

Maybe a snack to keep me from going insane while I wait for food. Could work.

One bit of good news (grossness alert, skip the next three paragraphs if easily grossed out), at some point, the lesion self-perforated and let out all the pus that was building up under the lesion. Therefore that nasty stuff isn’t building up under there any more, so neither is the pressure inside the wound.

That has radically reduced the moment-to-moment discomfort from the damned thing. So that’s a big plus. It’s still a nasty thing I will get looked at ASAP, but the slowly building hot pain of it is over.

I just have to wipe the thing off now and then. Oh, and the pus is clear, which is a good sign. Means the infection isn’t too severe.

I had originally planned to get Joe to drop me off at the ER today. I have to go to the ER for this because the walk-in clinics are terrible and once more, nobody at my doctor’s office is answering the fucking phone.

I really need a new GP. But finding a new one is so daunting for me. I can get a list of all the local doctors, but where do I go from there?

I need more information before I can reach a conclusion, dammit.

I am beginning to get hungry, thank goodness. When I hit 500 words, I will stop and order myself some sushi.

It’s got to be sushi becaise what my body craves right now is meat and vegetables.

I suppose I could get Chinese, but all the places I know around here have some weird catch. Like they won’t deliver at all unless you order $25/more. Or they don’t have any combo meals for one any more, which means I would have to order full orders of many things to get what I want. Or its “Shanghai style’ and I don’t recognize a single dish, or the online menu has no English on it, or their prices assume you are ordering for your entire huge Chinese family and are therefore super high.

Still, I can at least check to see if SkipTheDishes has any new places.

Today has been rough. The way this current illness works is that I have long periods – I’ve been thinking of them as “burns”, in the spaceglight sense of the word – where I am burning up inside and I feel very nauseous and I get attacks of vertigo and I am pretty god damned miserable.

Dammit. No Chinese food. They still all have a catch.

Anyhow, after a burn, there is an afterburn period, where I actually feel pretty good. Better than average, really.

I’ve experienced this before. Call it the afterglow. When you have been in pain for a long time and then the pain suddenly stops. all you are left with is a bloodstream full of endorphines that your body producted to deal with the pain.

This produces a pleasant and extremely natural period of mild euphoria.

Sadly, your endocrine system immediately gets to work scrubbing those extra endophines from your bloodstream in order to get you back to ‘normal’.

I want mild euphoria to BE my normal, dammit.

All of this reminds me of the carbuncle incident from years back.

For those who do not know, many many years ago, I discovered a grown on the back of my neck. I knew it was probably a bad thing, but it didn’t hurt and I could ignore it most of the time, so I didn’t take it seriously.

I can be such a dumbass.

Luckily, one sunny day, I decided to go to my doctor and have him take a look at it.

More or less on a whim.

He took one look at it and told me to go directly to the ER to have it excised. No side trips.No going back to the apartment. GO NOW AND DO.

Jagoff that I still was, I thought he was overreacting, but I took it to the ER anyhow. While there, I learned that the thing on my neck was called a carbuncle and that it was good that I had come to the ER because “it looked ready to pop”.

Later, I found out that when a carbuncle pops, it can shoot all its collected infectious and toxic good right into your bloodstream and kill you within minutes.

And you don’t exactly go peacefully in your sleep.

So yeah, I am going to get this damned thing looked at. ASAP. In fact, I feel pretty stuid for delaying it a day just because I didn’t have clean clothes.

But the thing is, I simply cannot put on dirty clothes. It’s too damned close. The only time I ever do it is when I can’t afford to use up my last clean pair of pants and all I am doing is answering the door.

Even then, I feel super gross and scuzzy after.

Well the problem is solved. I have clean laundry now and tomorrow I shall throw myself into the jaws of the local emergency room.

May God have mercy on my soul.

I iwll talk to you nice people again tomorrow.