I’ve been having muscle spasms.

No more denial. No more “oops, I guess I’m just extra clumsy lately, ha ha”. No more ifs, ands, or maybes. No more self-distracting bullshit.

“Gee, it kinda seems like my leg is on fire…. oh look, a pony!”.

The denial ended when I clearly caught myself doing it. I was standing in the living room talking to Joe with a cold drink in my hand when my wrist twitched and I had to catch the drink midair or it would have splashed onto the floor.

Subjectively, it felt like the thing jumped out of my hand. But not being someone who believes in poltergeists, I was forced to face the truth.

And lots of other things like that have been happening. That was just the clearest example. I’ve been dropping things, knocking things off flat surfaces, nearly falling when my knee or ankle buckles, and so on.

This is bad.

And it definitely now tops my list of things I really should be telling people about.

You know. Medical people. The sorts of people who know about medical things and what they can do about them with their medicine.

Luckily, I have an appointment with Doctor Caswell in a couple of days on Friday, and I can tell her all about it.

Technically, she’s not a neurologist, but she’s an expert in diabetes and these neurological symptoms are almost guaranteed to be diabetic in origin, and that makes her a good place to start.

Glad I already had this appointment set up, to be honest. That bypasses the whole issue with my having to decide to do something about it, which patient readers know is a very big problem for me.

This way I can just talk to her about it without having to make any decisions.

I will also take my new glucometer with me so she can get my blood sugar reading the old fashioned way (the pokey ouchy way :() and we can calibrate the motherfucking thing and finally get me back to active monitoring again.

Nothing is ever simple. |
Nothing is ever easy.
And nothing ever just fucking works.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Also probably neurological in origin is this pain I got in my upper right leg yesterday. Came out of nowhere and hung around for hours, In fact it’s still there, but way way less intense than before.

It feels like a cramp, but one deep in the muscle. Occupies a roughly rod shaped area, and for a while hurt enough to make me wince and cry out in pain whenever it pulsed.

It also burns a tiny bit. Makes me worry it’s lactic acid buildup again.

So to sum up, still dying. Everything is breaking down and it won’t be long before I am in hospital hell, strapped to the bed to keep me from pulling out all my tubes and living my worst nightmare every second of the day till the day I finally, blissfully die.

So what else is new?

More after the break,

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Hiding in the hustle

I’ve been dodging the blues all day.

I do this all the time. It comes naturally to me. I’ve never given it a second thought.

Until tonight. Tonight, I am asking myself why and how I do it, and if I should stop.

At first, the why is obvious : because who wants to be sad? Sadness is a negative emotion. It feels bad. It’s the sort of emotion we o our best to avoid.

And of course, being a depressive…. er, being a person with depression, that is (I am no my illness) , my “blues” include a lot more than mere melancholy.

There’s depression, and despair, and self-loathing, and malaise, and of course good old suicidal ideation, and many more horrors of the chemically depleted mind.

So who wants to deal with all that? Why not put it off as long as you can?

Well nobody likes paying their bills either, but they do it because they know things only get worse when you refuse to deal with them.

Similarly, as unpleasant as depression’s emotions can be, they do serve a function. They are the mind’s attempts to work through emotional conflicts and thus heal itself, and you are better off letting it.

Instead, we plunge headlong from one distracting activity to the next in order to stay too busy for our minds to get around to dealing with its emotions.

That’s how it is for me. The depression really only hits when I am between tasks. I will finish a session of Fallout 76 or blogging and have a few seconds to myself and that’s when that ol’ black cloud engulfs me, so I plunge into the next thing like a rabbit bolting for its hole when it hears a predator.

This is, by the way, why so many people find their depression is worst at night, when they are trying to sleep.

That’s the only time in their whole day when their bodies and minds are free enough to start working on those dark emotions. That’s when their black clouds engulf them.

But you can’t keep running forever. At some point, you have to stop and deal with the barking baying black hounds of your depression, and if you don’t do it voluntarily, eventually it will happen whether you want it to or not.

And that will be far, far worse than dealing with it now.

So I am going to do my best to let my blackness catch up to me. It can eat me alive if that’s what it will take to end the chase.

Take me. Take me now. Take me apart. Take me wherever you need me to go and tell me all the things you have wanted me to hear for so long.

I am yours, demon. Do with me what thou wilt.

But this shit ends NOW.

I will talk to your nice people again tomorrow.