Some seriously scary shit went down last night.

I experienced a period of vertigo far worse than any I have experienced before, and that’s saying something because my sinus issues have caused me plenty.

Nothing like this, though, Never like this.

And not just in severity but in kind. This was not the usual wobbly and woozy “ship on rough seas” sort of dizziness I am used to.

No, this was…. different.

Basically, when I stood up, after a few seconds I would start to bob up and down with increasing intensity until I bobbed so hard it threw me to the ground.

It occurs to me that dizziness is not the right word for such a bizarre phenomenon. But it will have to do for now.

It felt like the floor was rippling under my feet. Or like some invisible force was smashing me down over and over until I was flat on the floor.

This phenomenon has me stumped.

I have no idea what the hell can cause that kind of thing. All I have is a vague notion about something to do with neuromuscular control in the vestibular nervous system going wacky do to an infection?

But that’s mere half-baked guessing. The rest of the file is blank.

It’s the whole bouncing thing that really puzzles me. Where the fuck does THAT come from? It’s like I became one of those ridiculous bounce cars people used to build.

Oh, and the fun wasn’t over when I hit the floor. Once down there I felt like I was being pinned to the ground by high gravity.

Which is also pretty WTF.

And for a while there, I was rather concerned. Because that shit was debilitating. Life would have had to change a lot if it had been permanent. Starting with my calling 911 because there was no way I was going to get from the apartment to the car down on the second floor in the state I was in.

I was close to calling 911, in fact, but decided to wait and try to sleep and see if it went away on its own.

Well what do you know. It went away on its own.

In fact, if anything, I feel a little better than I did before. Go fig.

So it was yet another phantom medical anomaly. Oh well. At least I didn’t actually go to the ER this time and thus end up wasting a lot of time there only to be told they have no idea what the fuck is wrong with me.

A small part of me is actually sad I didn’t end up in the ER, though.

Because it would have been exciting to be investigating something that might actually be a thing and not just some medical phantom.

Then said thing might have even been fixable. Imagine that.

Oh well. If I keep deteriorating, I am bound to get there eventually.

So I have that to look forward to.

More after the break.

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Everything fucking hurts

My trip to the kitchen to get my supper was a trial.

When I first stood up from the computer, I discovered that my previously dormant knee issue had woken up and now every step I took on that side resulted in a hot, stabbing pain underneath my right kneecap.

Great, I thought. Another way to lose the ability to walk.

Luckily it seems to have worked itself out okay for now. The pain is suvivable.

Of course, my muscles are still stiff as hell, my back aches, my breath is short for an increasing percentage of time, my wrist and ankles hurt, and I kind of feel like I am dying, but… ya know.

At least the knee thing got a little better.

Yay Team Us.

All I can do is make it through each day, and do what I am told to do to the best of my ability while making smart proactive moves when I can.

Which is not often, sadly.

So I feel pretty helpless. It really feels like there is nothing I can do to take control of my destiny and try to get to a better place. All I can do is drift, take damage, and die.

That’s not the person I want to be. It’s not even the person I consider the “real” me.

Who the fuck knows anything about THAT guy? As far as I know, we’ve never met. I have only ever met his agents and representatives. Same as anyone else.

I wish I had a scalpel of the mind I could use to firmly but carefully cut all the dead and diseased flesh away once and for all. Then flush all this toxic bullshit out of my system, flushing over and over until the water turns clear.

Maybe then I would know what it feels like to be clean.

I haven’t been clean in a very long time.

I guess all I can really do is deal with things as they come up. And hope that my problems progress slowly enough so that they will become real, medical, fixable issues that have clear, unambiguous symptoms with plenty of time to fix them, as opposed to knowing nothing till I just keel over dead.

That would be very bad indeed.

I know the proper emotions to lead to a normal, self-interested response to save my ass no matter what are in my somewhere. But my depression keeps them from leading to any kind of action.

And I can’t just turn that off or wish it away.

But I also can’t let that oncoming train run me over.

This situation is impossible. I can’t win. There is no way to resolve it. All I can do is what I do best : ignore reality and play video games.

And that will have to do until I can free myself from this cage I built so cunningly.

And that will only come when I am ready to give up that little part of myself. To let part of me die no matter how much it hurts and how much the old part of my brain insists that if it dies, I die.

So be it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Check out all that lovely sunshine. Maybe today won’t be so bad after all.

Back pain was a monster sized bitch this morning. Such torment. Felt like a giant was trying to make me shorter via compression.

Pain got to be so bad it made me ingenious. I wanted Aleve and I wanted it bad. So I thought to see if there was anywhere on Skip The Dishes where I could buy it.

Score! 7-11 had it. Got myself some. Took it and…. it didn’t help much.

Because the real problem was that I was constipated. Ain’t no pill gonna make compacted poop vanish out of your colon like a really gross magic trick.

Luckily, there has been progress on that front. Some of the problem has been eliminated. So bully on that.

I think I need to start drinking more water. Seems I need to step up my game if I am to keep things flowing along, So I am going to have to get back to making sure that river keeps running through me.

None of this is new. My link between constipation and back pain is well known to me and my most patient readers. I figured it out ages ago.

But I forgot for a while. I’m only human. I can only keep so much in my brain at one time. Sometimes things get misfiled.

Oh well. I am back flying on the right beam now. I will do what I can to pay close attention to what is going on in my lower intestines and try to keep from getting all backed up again.

I had even noticed that I had gone three and a half days with nary a poop. But I somehow forgot that this was a “stop what you are doing and deal with this” level emergency. I guess because that would get in the way of bein lazy.

It would help if I moved around more, of course. But my health issues have other plans for me, it seems. Movement just keeps getting more painful and draining, and that, to put it very lightly, kind of reinforces my compulsive laziness.

On the other hand, nothing makes me want to move more than being told I can’t (or shouldn’t or whatever) so maybe I can tap into my natural reserve of sheer cussedness to get me through.

Would be nice to be able to get some regular exercise even just for the sake of tension reduction. I know in my bones that I would be a far calmer, happier, saner person if I could just drain away my excess nervous energy via expended effort.

But so far, the old mindless aversion to effort reigns supreme.

If only I could exercise under the direction and supervision of an expert. My main concern with exercise is that I worry that I will hurt myself.

I can handle the strain and pain and sweat-stains, but not the threat of something suddenly going POP and not working any more, with me lying on the ground in agony.

What I really need is physiotherapy. I would happily let a physiotherapist put me through ten flavours of flaming hot hell if I had faith that I would come out stronger in the long run and that they wouldn’t cripple me.

It’s just pain, after all. I’ve been through enough of that lately to know that it sucks and is best avoided when possible, but that it’s not the end of the world, either.

And that some things are worth it.

Some good things can only be birthed in fire.

More after the break.

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Somehow, I have to fly

Chose that song as my launching pad because it touches on the very pragmatism versus idealism issues that I have been pondering lately.

Patient readers know that I am a hardcore pragmatist and have been most of my life. To me, results always come first. I don’t care what school of dogma you prefer. And I don’t give a shit how “beautiful” an idea is. And I especially don’t care whether or not the real answers are too rough for your delicate sensibilities. Fuck YOU.

All I care about is whether it WORKS. When I see the problems of the world, I want to fix them, and that means embracing whatever means necessary to accomplish that goal, regardless of how they make me feel.

To me, that’s what being dedicated to your ideals is truly about. Doing what is right regardless of how YOU feel about it.

That said, as I get older and less peppery, I find my sympathy for the tragic idealists of the world growing, and while I can never (realistically) join their ranks, I am increasingly conscious of the advantages of that point of view.

Because the thing about pragmatism is that it ties your hands. You are bound to the wheel of what is real, with no way to access whatever you need in order to keep your soul and psyche balanced and afloat. If reality does not provide it and it is not within your reach, you have to do without, period.

With potentially lethal results, at least in the case of depression.

Idealists are not so limited. They have a part of themselves walled off from the rough and tumble of the chaotic and unrewarding “real” world and that is where they keep the power supply of their soul safe from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

To a blinkered intellectual like my former self, this makes no sense. How can their be an advantage to blinding yourself to reality? Aren’t you just setting yourself up as easy prey for whatever dangers are out there?

Maybe. But in the process, you might just make yourself far better to withstand them.

You are exchanging awareness for resiliency. The hardcore “realistic” route means you are always betting the entire farm on your ability to correlate and integrate all that information into a cohesive and useful form of consciousness that improves outcomes.

And that’s too much.

No matter how bright you are, nobody can think that hard all the god damned time without their being serious consequences.

Like depression, for instance. Le sigh.

So I am doing my best to expand my mind beyond the cage of my poor reason.

Time to get out of my own way for a change.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today I went to the bank to cash my check…. for the very last time!

Hopefully. Fingers crossed.

See, while we were there, I got them to fill out their part of the form to set up direct deposit for my monthly cheque.

I’ve filled out my part too, so once I add the name and address of my welfare office, all it will need is for Julian to drop it off at said office and the wheels will be in motion.

Dunno how long it will take. You never know with the gubmint. But I am in no particular hurry. As long as it goes through before my next cheque, I’m cool.

We implemented my plan to have Julian wait in line for me. And thank Dog for that! The line was insane. I would never have made it through.

Guess a lot of people do their banking right before closing on a Saturday. LOL.

But ya know how it is. When you have all day to do something, there is no sense of urgency, so it is very easy to procrastinate. You’ll do it…. soon.

And often it is not until the opportunity is about to disappear that the mind’s mode switches from “soon….” to “NOW!” and you get the motivation to go.

In case you’re curious, that’s why some people can’t act until it’s a crisis. Only a crisis (like it’s do in FIVE MINUTES) can give them the adrenaline they need.

It also solves the problem of deciding when to do the thing. That can be the hardest part. It really crushes you between knowing you want to/need too get the thing done and also knowing that the moment you start doing it, things will get way less fun.

That’s where self-discipline comes in handy. It lets you will override the part of you that only cares about immediate consequences and therefore provides the strength you need to act in your own long-term self-interest.

It lets you do things that are not immediately rewarding but way more than worth it in the long run leading to a way happier life.

At least, in theory.

Now um…. where was I?

Oh right. So, got the bank shit done. Standing at the counter while the cashier processed the transaction was hard. Was in a lot of pain by the time we were through.

But I persevered. Yay me!

Feeling better today. The sunshine helps a lot. Seems like, at long last, summer is finally showing up and I am looking forward to enjoying that golden Goldilocks period in between “too cold” and “too hot”.

Maybe I will even get together the wherewithal to go out to get some fresh air and sunshine and exposure to nonlocal reality.

Not real soon though. I am far too fragile. It would not be safe for me to go to the little park next door right now.

That’s so depressing. Le sigh.

I am going to end up being one of those people that just gets wheeled around to various places before long.

More after the break.

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Further down the spiral

Two very depressing recent events :

1. I was walking back to my computer chair when I stepped on a wrapper on the floor. This was enough of a discontinuity of surface to cause my worse knee (the right one) to start to seriously wobble, and said wobbling led to my falling forward. Luckily, my bed was right in front of me, more or less, and so I only got a jostle and a bounce. but having my leg just give out on me like that was very scary.
2. Last time I got up from the computer, my worse leg was so stiff that I almost fell just from the shock and the pain of it, let alone the way having one leg refuse to flex throws off your balance. I could have got splat forward onto my face, no bed to save me that time.

In other words, shit’s getting real.

I feel like disaster is stalking me, waiting for the perfect opportunity to truly fuck me over like I am the protagonist in a Final Destination movie. And no matter how careful and cautious I try to be, my basic absentminded nature will win out, I will make some incredibly dumb move because I’m not really paying attention, and then blam, I break some part of me that can’t be fix and it’s wheelchairs and catheters for me,

Hell, that’s probably where I am headed anyhow, via slow decline.

Or maybe not so slow.

I have to get this shit looked at. I will have to brace myself for the fact that whoever I dump this all on will probably be quite overwhelmed.

But it can’t be helped. A lot of shit is going wrong all at once.

At least my worse knee is not acting up as much lately so I can afford the time to go see

At least my worse knee is not acting up as much lately so I can afford to wait to see Doctor Chao instead of doing Urgent Care.

Urgent Care is still an open option, though. I am just trying to manage my anxiety. A nice familiar doctor’soffice is less scary than some place I have never been.

And surely someone can actually figure out what is wrong with me rather than just tell me what problems I DON’T’ have.

Hopefully somewhere out there is a solution that will at least halt the decay. I don’t want to lose the ability to walk. I don’t want to become all spastic and fucked up. And I definitely don’t want to be bedbound and full of tubes.

And that means I have to stop just floating along and start pushing to get my problems solved and not stop pushing until they are.

Yes – it’s the dreaded Long Term Commitment Of Effort! Every depressive’s nightmare.

Oh well. It’s not like I have anything better to do!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So this morning, around 10 am, I woke up feeling absolutely terrible.

Np big whup. This happens to me at least once a day. “Bad” sleep kicks my ass and I I wake up with that lovely “just ran a marathon underwater feeling, along with confusion, disorientation, a diffuse tingling all over my body. a feeling like i have been rolled flat then reinflated like a cartoon character, bleary eyes, overheated, sweaty, and last but not least, that special fatigue that I assume also overtakes religious visionaries feel after they have a spell.

So far so what?

But today it was different. For one thing, the effect was far stronger than usual. I was super extra crispy toasty. Utterly incoherent. Could barely string two thoughts together.

And for anothing thing, it wasn’t going away.

Usually it only takes around ten minutes to roughly 90 percent shake it off, but this time it just keept going and going.

I waied over 40 minutes for coherence to show up to play before giving up on and getting dressed so Julian could drop me off at the ER.

Yup. Oh lord, stuck in the ER again.

We all know what happened next. Tons of waiting only for them to never find a definitive answer. Le sigh.

Oh well. Not like I had hot plans anyhow.

Knee still hurts. Was totally going to take it into Urgent Care today but then I woke up feeling like death’s dirty underwear and had to go to the ER instead.

And now the knee’s acting up, so I have to go lay down some more.

Because it would spoil me if I was still able to just sit here quietly using my computer without brutal fucking agony.

Hell, I haven’t eaten in over eight hours. Boy. I am really firing on all cylinders today.

Be back in a bit.

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Hopefully, I will make it to Urgent Care after I do Wound Care at the Community Care clinic tomorrow morning at 8:45 am.

I’m lucky to have so much Care in my life!

Still pondering the problem of how to cash my frigging check. Julian was wonderful and thoughtful enough to get me the form for switching my monthly check to direct deposit. So that will take care of that from now on.

But I have still got that one last check to contend with.

Plus I have to take the form to the bank and get them to fill it out. But I know how I will crack that problem : bring Julian into the bank with me and ask HIM to wait in line.

I figure that should do the trick

There will also be the minor hassle of figuring out how to pay Joe my rent every month. Right now I cash my check then pay him in cash, but in Direct Deposit Land, I will have to sign up with Venmo or Pismo or Pepto-Bysmal or whatever.

Not a major hassle.

Heck. maybe I will find a way to spend money online directly from my bank account and skip having to buy these silly credit cards!

More after the break.

The miracle of food

You know what I hear is good for uour health? Eating regularly.

Well I guess that’s et another healthy habit I have failed to acquire. Because here it is, 8 pm or so, and I am only finally getting around to eating my second meal of the day now.

And I know things were not always so. I am positive my habits used to be somewhat regular. But even my routine has degenerated lately.

The center cannot hold. Entropy always wins. Sooner or later, we’re all worm shit.

Fine, and you?

Hopefully I can get my knee fixed soon. Of my various issues, it’s the one that is causing the most ongoing problems.

My sporadic back pain is worse when it flares up. but at least I can lay down to relieve it most of the time.

But it’s tricky to find a position where nothing is putting pressure on that kneecap.

One positive note : I am proud of myself that just when the ER doc was about to give me the “remember, you can always come back to us if things get worse” brush-off when I said “So we don’t really know what happened, then. ”

And that forced him to hem and haw a bit then say that he thought it was probably an infection, given what he saw in my bloodwork and X-rays.

I am getting way too familiar with getting chest X-rays,

It pleased me greatly to at least set one of these breeze ER docs back on theirs heels for a moment by reminded them that they had not, actually, solved the problem.

But we had, at least, ruled out all the big stuff.. Not a heart attack, not a stroke, not pulmonary thrombosis, not COVID.

Yup. They did the Rapid Antigen Test on me. They wanted to give me the “real” COVID test, but I had that once before and when they jabbed that freaking killer Q-tip so far up my nostril that I lost most of the third grade, it hurt so bad that I saw stars.

And I couldn’t help but give the young nurses a look of innocence betrayed.

Poor dear. Not her fault. But motherfucker, did that hurt.

So yeah, I probably “should” have taken the “real” test just to be absolutely sure I don’t have the’Vid. But I need to be way calmer and better rested to be able to be that much of an adult on short notice.

Glad I don’t seem to have it, though. It might be just last a nasty case of the flu to healthy triple-innoculated folks but to walking petrie dishes like me it could still fuck us up real, real bad.

Like, early days of the pandemic bad. *shudder*

So ends another day in the hell of deteriorating health.

Tune in tomorrow, when my head will burst into flame.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I think I’ll miss walking.

Well okay. I’ll miss being ABLE to walk, at least. The actual walking itself, not so much.

I’ve never been a fan.

But the writing is on the wall. Every day, the time I can spend standing shrinks and the pain I feel when I do grows. You don’t need an advanced degree in n-space mathematics to see where that trend goes.

Before too long, I won’t be able to stand at all and the pain will be constant. I will finally well and truly be a cripple.

The death knell for my locomotion was sounded today when just the trip from the parking lot to the office at Wound Care @ the Community Care Clinic in the elevator damn near killed me.

Turns out that god damned wheelchair is catching up with me a lot faster than I thought it would. My ambulatory days are numbered.

The final world will come when I finally manage to get my busted ass into Urgent Care to get this damned knee looked at. If I am SUPER lucky, these doctors might actually be able to do their jobs and figured out what the problem is.

Maybe even fix it. But one crisis at a time.

It’s a harder question than it seems because a lot of the most likely answers have been checked over and over again at the ER in the last month.

Especially my heart. By now, RGH has enough chest X-rays of me to mount an exhibition. I’m thinking…. fall 2023?

Assuming I am still alive by then, of course.

So what next? Crutches, wheelchair, or cane, just like before. All these options suck in their own very special way.

I want Professor X’s floating wheelchair, damn it. Unless it is powered by his amazing mental powers. In which case it would kind of suck as a wheelchair.

Let Jubilee keep it. Or give it to a Morlock.

Morever, specific mobility issues aside, I will not handle being helpless very well. I have far too high a need for autonomy for that. I will stubbornly insists upon doing things myself until I can’t even rise from the bed any more.

And even then it will drive me nuts. To say am used to doing things by myself would be an understatement. It would be easier to say I am not used to doing almost anything with anybody else.

That could make a transition to a legless life rather tricky.

Although to be honest, and this is staggeringly sad, maybe not as tricky as you might think. Truth is, I don’t use my legs a lot anyhow.

It would mostly complicate my feeding and elimination. Tragic.

Shit. Something just occurred to me. Some of my symptoms match those of low blood pressure. I could have the opposite problem I think I have.

Well, one of them, anyhow.

But over the last month my blood pressure has been tested dozens and dozens of times and it came out as high every single time.

So IDKWTFBBQ. I am going to need to have a deep think about this. It certainly feels a lot more like insufficient bloodflow than excessive, what with bits of me going numb, falling asleep, and tingling.

I will think it over.

More after the break.

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And we’re back

Still no idea what could make someone have high AND low blood pressure.

I mean, not at the same time, obviously. That would be too much.

But it gives you the flavour of what I am up against. All my blood pressure readings at the hospital were high. So I must be wrong about having low blood sugar.

Man I wish I had a way to test my blood pressure right now. Break the tie.

Oh well, whatever. I will continue staggering around as I am dragged backwards through the orifices of life, protesting feebly.

There is no rising without pain now. When I am lucky I can skip the dizziness, or at least the worst of it, but there’s is no escaping that bond-grinding pain.

Well, at least, not until I buy more Alleve, anyhow. That seemed to get things under control for a while.

Makes me wonder if the real problem is arthritis. Or some other inflammatory condition.

Today has been reasonably okay, at least after I got home after Wound Care.

Was funny seeing the old familiar Wound Care room after my three week antibiotic treatment vacation at Richmond General.

First thing I noticed was how quiet and peaceful it was. At RGH, even in Ambulatory Services, which has a big steel blast door type thing between it and the rest of the hospital, there’s always a hubbub.

More importantly, hospitals are always full of bad vibes just waiting to pounce on vibe sensitive types like me.

We suck that shit up like a Shop-Vac.

Like I say, I am the world’s only rationalist materialist mystic poet. To an outside observer, my combination of things like science and New Age speak. evolutionary psychology and modern anthropology, and astronomy and astrology might seem contradictory, but it’s all just knowledge to me.

As an intellectual elitist snob. I eschew all those sloppy pseudo-logical shortcuts favoured by the weak-witted masses.

But rest assured, groundlings, it’s not that I think I am BETTER than you.

Perish the thought.

It’s that I know I am SMARTER than you.

And that’s completely different!

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My are the words coming hard at the moment. I feel like I have been writing the last 100 words of this thing for the last hour.

Just 65 more words and I can lay back down and rest this benighted knee of mine.

Hopefully tomorrow Julian and I will make it to the Urgent Care place and I can get the ball rolling on fixing THIS crisis.

And while I am out there, I will get more Alleve.

Taking the bone hurty pain away should do wonders for my mood.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has not gone well.

I had two things to accomplish : get the pee test done, and cash my check.

I decided to cash the check first. Bad call, as it turned out.

I knew this was going to happen : the moment I got into line at the bank, the clock started ticking on how long I could remain standing.

I have never been any good at standing for a long period of time – no fat person is. When we stand, blood pools in our feet, and our feet swell up and become painfully sore and it only gets worse from there.

This tendency has only gotten worse since I have been getting sicker. My “standing time” ticker ticks faster every day.

So it didn’t take long for my legs to start hurting when I joined the line in the bank. There were only two people ahead of me, though. So maybe I could win the race yet.

Nope. Those two people were apparently doing a year’s worth of transactions one by one, because they were taking forever. Meanwhile the pain in my legs is building at wildfire speeds and I feel like I may faint.

Eventually, I have to quit. I had to either sit down or fall down. These people won. I had to go back out to the car to sit down with Julian, mission thwarted.

But I could still get that pesky pee test done, right?

Not with my legs hurting like that. I was honestly not sure I would make it the quarter of a block from the parking lot of the mini-mall to the lab without falling.

Being sick sucks.

So I didn’t achieve either of my goals, dammit. We will try again tomorrow.

Clearly the time has come for me to get some kind of walking assistance. A cane. Crutches. A wheelchair. A walker.

Doc Costin suggested a walker this morning. I told him my vanity prevented me from even contemplating that option.

He thought that was silly. But he’s in his mid-70s. He’s had a lot more experience with being old than I have.

We tried a cane. Joe got me one for my birthday. Small problem : My arms are not strong enough to support me that way. When I tried to use my cane to rise, my arm spazzed out, twitching back and forth like an itchy weathervane.

So that’s no solution, I talked about all the problems with being in a wheelchair yesterday. I would rather be bedbound then use a walker in public.

So that leaves crutches.

I fucking hate crutches.

They are super painful to use if you are my size. I was not built to support my entire weight on my armpits. Nobody was.

So yay, no “good” solutions, at least until I am rich enough to hire some big muscular dude in amazing good shape to carry me around.

A fella can dream, right?

A big beefy dude, with broad shoulders and strong hands and kind eyes…..

More after the break.

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Until I took an arrow to the knee

So the latest “thing” tormenting me is this “thing” under my kneecap.

I got it when I took my last and latest fall,. Went down hard onto my knees in a move that would be amusingly overdramatic – like I should have been shouting “NOOOOOO!!!” at the same time – if it hadn’t been so painful.

And I knew right then that there would be a price to pay for that fall. I can’t expect to have all 300 lbs of me land on my poor fragile knees with there being consequences.

`I am not sure what to call this pain of mine. A sprain? A twist? A subpatellar contusion?

I’m going with that because it sounds cool.

The pain’s been gettng worse over the weeks been growing slowly over the weeks since I took my tumble. That suggests that things keep getting worse unless I get this taken care of ASAP.

Doesn’t seem like an ER-worthy thing though. And I don’t want to wait till next Monday for an appointment with my GP, Doctor Chao.

Guess I will give Urgent Care a try.

I’ve not tried it before because I don’t know how to tell whether my problem is an emergency or merely urgent, and that’s not the kind of value judgment I want to have to make when I am hurting anyhow.

But I think I get it now. I need to forget the whole urgent/emergent nonsense and just think of it being like my home town’s Medical Building.

In other words, a place with a whole bunch of doctors offices, both specialists and GPs, that you go when you are sick but not like, emergency room sick.

Ours was in a mall.

So I will get Julian to take me there tomorrow. Hopefully they can be more useful than the ER that never finds anything and the GP who can’t see me in person half the time.

Great, Doc, let me just email you my knee.

If it gets the results I want without my having to do time in Medical Purgatory, then I am all for it. And maybe, just maybe. they will take the time to find out what the problem actually is and maybe even (gasp!) treat it!

Even AFTER they are bored of it and go looking for something easier to fix so they can get their dopamine fix.

But maybe I’m just another pie-eyed idealist.

What worries me the most is its sub-patellar location. How are they even going to get good images of the issue, let alone get at it to fix it?

Honestly, they might have to remove it.

I hope I am wrong. I am hoping they can do it all laparoscopically, or something like it.

Either way, though, I have to get right on this before it gets worse.

There was times today when the so bad I couldn’t even use the computer. No matter how I sat, some part of me was tugging on the kneecap, and tugging = owies.

So tomorrow, I go to the new Urgent Care center.

Now where the hell is it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, they say that order to be truly free, one must give up a little part of oneself.

Hedwig in hedwig and the angry inch

That is the inevitable conclusion I have come to. There comes a time in everyone’s life when the main thing holding them back is themselves. They are in their own way, and the only way to get out of their own way is to give up things they falsely believe to be a fundamental part of themselves.

But that’s the false self, the one we create based on the things we think we know about ourselves instead of be actually looking at our naked self and seeing who we really are.

Truth is, you can cut that rotten piece of you right out and be better off without it. Just like removing a tumour or pulling a tooth.

I mean, sure, it will hurt like hell. And there will be blood, and worse, no doubt. Your body rarely handles the idea that there is part of you that came from you and that has been there a long time is nevertheless bad now and has to go.

We are not used to having to disconnect part of ourselves emotionally. Things always go the other way when we are kids. We all have lots of experience with getting bigger and accepting that there is more of us now.

But cutting things off, whether physically or emotionally? That’s when things get tricky.

Shit’s got to go, though, so it’s gonna go. Luckily, this is where having a cold-blooded and ruthless side comes in handy. I am perfectly capable of doing whatever needs to be done in order to free myself from this goddamned illegal leg-trap of a fucking life.

There is nothing in me that I value more highly than my own sanity and happiness. I will dump the contents of my soul into the fires of Mount Doom if that’s what it takes.

Pain is bullshit anyhow. It happens and then it’s over and then it’s gone and all that’s left is the prize you earned with your pain.

Some things are worth the pain. Remember that.

I don’t think I could define the part of me that needs to go. But I can feel clearly. It’s full of all those toxins and demons and cruel laughter in the dark that I have painstakingly refined and distilled out of the dregs of my soul for all these years.

And that can create the illusion of progress. The poison might not be gone, but it’s not where it used to be and it’s out of sight, so I can forget about it a while.

Nowhere near as good as actually being clean, though. I need to expel the pollutants, not just move them around.

What I really need is some dialysis of the soul. My mind’s kidneys aren’t getting the job done and I need help getting rid of all that rotten old blood so that new, fresh, healthy blood can take its place.

I need renewal, dammit. Let the cycle spin again.

More after the break.

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And yet, somehow, worse

Now I am worried about my pulmonary health.

That’s the lungs, y’all. But you already knew that.

Turns out that time yesterday when I felt like I was going to drown in my own sinus fluid was not a one-off aberration. It’s been coming and going all day, meaning that sometimes I just plain can’t lie down.

Which is intensely frustrating so I am trying not to think about it too much.

And that, of course, has me thinking pneumonia. I can tell the fluid is in my lungs and not just my nose et al. I don’t usually get that from just my usual sinus bullshit. So the pneumonia option is still in play.

Plus I have had a general increase in my overall feeling of crappiness today. All day I have felt even weaker and more drained and more fragile than usual.

Breathing seems harder too. Only by a bit, but still.

So consider me to be on high alert. No way am I going to let it get it get as bad as it did last time I had the ‘monia.

Last time, you will remember (now), when the nurses in the ER took my blood oxygen reading very, very carefully, when the number popped up one of the younger nurses shot one of the older nurses a look of great shock and disbelief with an implied “are you seeing this? What the fuck???” tagged on.

Technically a lapse in professionalism. You’re not supposed to let that kind of thing show lest you freak out the patient and make everything worse.

But I don’t blame her. It must take time to build up your poker face.

I honestly thought it was cute.

Stlll, I know I was super lucky to not have it turn into something far worse before I got around to going go the ER (!!). So this time, I am crouched at the starting line.

All I need is one solid, verifiable symptom and I am off to the frigging ER.

Even sans symptom I might go anyhow. Give it 24 hours and we will see. I know that I am VERY vulnerable and even the smallest of infections might be able to kick my ass right now, so I am going to be very very vigilant.

I hope they don’t take one look at my list of symptoms and say “COVID!” and send me back home again.

There is no way I could keep from feeling rejected.

I can definitely feel some scratchiness building in the back of my throat and it is getting somewhat hard to concentrate.

I will see how I feel tomorrow afternoon, when Julian takes me to the lab for my pee test. Finally getting around to it.

Of course, the urinary issue that prompted it has all but vanished.

Oh well, it will be useful information anyhow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

r>

I swear, it’s like I have a Wheel of Debility that chooses a new way for me to be crippled at random intervals

Right now, it’s my upper right leg. Right down in the core of the largest muscle right behind the right leg. Right now putting weight on it hurts. Feel worse than a cramp but not as bad as an actual sprain.

To be honest, I would think it might actually be a sprain if it wasn’t for the fact that is disappears completely for days at a time.

And I am pretty sure a sprain can’t do that, unless I have some serious misapprehensions as to their fundamental nature.

And of course, this chose to struck right when it was time to receive my grocery delivery for the week without anyone around to help.

Ain’t life grand.

At least I have learned what it takes to get me to get my shiznit together and take some insulin – it’s our old pal the Demon Hunger.

Once I feel that frenzied hunger start to build up, I know I had better get my gear together and inject while I still have enough of my wits left to do so.

So basically, it needs to hurt. No big surprise there. If high blood sugar hurt as much as say a toothache, Type 2 diabetes would be wiped out overnight.

But it doesn’t hurt. Oh, it’s hurting me all right. It’s shredding my every vein, organ, and artery with its blood that’s thick like cold maple syrup as I type these very words.

But I don’t feel a thing. Subjectively speaking, I feel the same as always. Maybe if I managed to get my blood sugar down to normal and keep in there for a week or more, I might get a taste of the unsweetened life and grow to like it.

But probably not.

Other than pesky leg pain, today’s been okay.

Had a bad bit when I lay down to take a siesta and found that my nose and sinuses had filled with sinus fluid and if I laid down I would drown.

Eventually I figured out which end was up and what was going on, but for a little while there I had no idea WTF, and was worried I was going to end up with pneumonia again.

I mean, I’m not sure how I made it the first time. Thank God for Hospital Mode, I guess.

And I don’t even have a tablet this time. Bummer. There is definitely a hard limit as to how much reading I can do.

Oh well. Last time J&J offered to move my entire computer to my hospital room. I turned them down because I had the tablet.

This time, I would totally take them up on it.

As long as I have my precious computer, you can do whatever you want with the rest of me. I’m all yours.

More after the break.

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Am I dying ^[1]

Sure feels that way sometimes.

After all, I am so weak, and so many things on me hurt. ^[2] I keep bouncing in an out of the ER, and worrying events like my near-drowning this morning and my attacks of transient facial paralysis seem to be beating some kind of drumbeat of death for me.

The natives are restless tonight. And fidgety.

And I know that both my blood sugar and my blood pressure are so far out of whack that only the oldest amongst them have even heart of whack, and then, only in legend.

So the situation is not good at all. I am in a very sorry state (say, Nevada) and the sooner I find a way out of this quagmire (giggity) of mental and physical ailment, the better off I will be, and by “better off”, I mean “not dead or worse”.

But I am not dead yet. Neither is my fate cast in stone. I can still grab my occasional moments of clarity and motivation and do what I can to advance my cause.

I am eternally searching for a working solution that would let me get to where I want to go via the things I actually have on hand.

Most of the time all I can find is solutions that might well work for other people but are worse than useless because they get in the way of real solutions.

Anyhow, as cathartic as it can be to say I am dying, that is probably putting Descartes before Deshorses. I am not doing good but no need to pull the pin on the D-word yet.

My Dog, are the words coming hard today.

Still, even if I am not, in fact, dying, I could definitely be said to be in somewhat of a “pre death” mode of life.

And that needs to end.

And it’s not like I don’t know exactly what I should be doing. I always know. I am a smart guy. Knowing the right answer comes naturally to me.

But I don’t have what it takes to actually do it. I always fall short of actually ripping of the bandage once and for all.

So I suppose it isn’t the right answer after all. And I don’t know how to build up the strength in my spirit, resolve, or self-discipline.

But I know that at some point I need to become much

Been putting it off far too long. Time to grow the hell up.

Just as soon as I am strong enough.

Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

^[1] Inquiring minds want to know!

---

Stay tuned for my new philosophical cooking show, My Dinner With Entrees.

Had a scary incident this morning.

Was lying in bed when I suddenly realized I was having trouble speaking words.

Tried some test sentences. It was even worse : I wasn’t just having trouble, I was having trouble forming the sentences in the first place.

Couldn’t seem to remember the tunes I know on the synth either.

Cue total panic. Because I need my words, man. Without those I would have no reason to live and a lot of reasons to die. I write therefore I am. I live to express myself. If I had some kind of stroke and end up not even to string together a sentence any more, that would be orders of magnitude worse than killing me.

I could survive it all if I could at least type. It would hurt like hell to lose my power of speech – foxy loves to talk.

But I do the vast majority of my communication via text anyhow, whether as Fruvous on Tapestries MUCK or here on this blog, so I could survive.

Might have to learn to type way faster if I want to keep up with conversation in realtime.

It went away eventually, thank Dog. Knock on would. But this was not a one-off incident. I’ve noticed my verbal error counter going up over the last couple of weeks, especially the dreaded “wrong word entirely” error, and that’s enough to keep me worried.

I’ve had two more incidents of my left hand and the left half of my face going numb since I so confidently said “next time, I’ll go to the ER for sure!”

Ha ha ha.

Well I am going to have to do it some time soon, while I still have my faculty of speech.

Even knowing that they probably won’t find anything. Again. Even then, I need to do it because I need to at least be able to say I did what I could.

If I’m going to end up a gibtard anywhere, I might as well go down swinging.

Plus I think I have recharged my batteries enough to survive another long and quite probably utterly pointless trip through the bowels of the ER at RGH.

But I won’t be happy about it. And that’s good. I need that anger to remind me to be mad when they inevitably fail me by not producing a result, let alone a solution.

These symptoms are not normal, and I am not making them up. Bad, scary shit of the kind to which the phrase “warning signs” so easily applies keeps happening and I keep trying to do the right thing and tell a doctor about them only to get bubkis in return except a lost afternoon in medical purgatory.

Well I am going to raise hell if I get the same runaround again.

For all I know,. I am having mini-strokes all the time and they are shredding my brain.

God damn it, I am going to get me some answers.

More after the break,

A body bruise she got me with

Still drying, still falling apart.

My plan was to go to the lab for a pee test tomorrow. But Julian rightfully pointed out that it might be closed for Labour Day too. Damn it.

This is medical testing, not plastic surgery. Time is definitely a factor. So I really hope they are open on stat holidays.

Because if I can’t go tomorrow, it will have to wait till Wednesday because I am going to be using all my spoons to get to Wound Care and back on Tuesday.

Won’t be long before I am too weak to even do that on my own. And then it will finally be the goddamned wheelchair me at last, and that’s going to be a massive change because there is zero chance I can get a wheelchair through this order’s nest of an apartment. So I would have to move.

Not something I wanted to do even when I was healthy. But now when my health is in rapid decline seems like an especially bad to pull up stakes.

Oh well. It’s not like I can afford one of those fancy moving services that does the whole damned thing for you.

Guess I will have to leave it to the already put-upon Joe and Julian et al. Le sigh.

And I just plain don’t want to move away from my friends. Last time I lived along I want about as crazy I have ever been. The alienation gnawed at me and it felt like the foundations of my mind were as shaky as half-melted Jello. I spent hours frozen to the bed by the fear that if I moved, I would cease to exist.

Like I said…. crazy.

And I can’t go back to that. So I don’t know what I would do.

Get really good at playing “The Floor Is Lava”. I guess.

Of course, if this place wasn’t stuff with Joe’s “rescues” and Felicity’s archives, this would be a very roomy apartment. Airy, even.

But it is what it is.

I could definitely get around my bathroom and bedroom with using my legs. It would be rough while I built up my upper chest muscles, but it would be enough to get me from bed to computer and computer to bathroom and back.

And that takes care of the basics.

Maybe try to get my mini-fridge working again (it stopped forming a seal) so I can keep some refrigerate only type foods on hand, along with canned good of course.

Yeah. I could make it work here.

As long as I never wanted to go anywhere. No matter how you slice it, moving me is going to require some kind of cot, gurney, wheelchair, or other contrivance.

I suppose we’d have to keep that to a minimum. Not easy to do when you have all the medical issues I do.

Might be easier to just leave me in the hospital.

I know Munchausen’s Syndrome would get me sooner or later.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Almost landed in the ER again. ;

Was having trouble breathing early in the ER. My throat was sore and my breathing was getting hoarse. I even got all my clothes on in preparation for an ambulance trip.

I’ve learned my lesson. Having to get dressed in a hurry when you might be having a cardiac even sucks. From now on, I dress FIRST, then call 911.

Unless shit’s very harsh, of course. In which case, fuck it, I’ll go naked.

But as it turned out, I ended up falling asleep instead, and when I woke up things were more or less back to normal.

So maybe it was a panic attack in disguise. I dunno.

This was after another tortuous night of back pain. Nonstop spinal torture centered around that always difficult lumbar region.

I spend a lot of time trying to bend, rub, and stretch my way to freedom and I was running out of rope when I stumbled upon the solution :

Water. Good ol’ hydration. Apparently some part of me was all swole up from my being sharply behind on my liquid needs and that was what was exerting the pressure in my abdomen that caused the pain.

Glad I finally figured it out because I was getting pretty desperate. Crazed, even.

Of course, for me, pain is only created, never destroyed, so something else had to start fucking up to fill the void.

This time, it’s my upper leg muscles once again. Get these cramps right in the middle of the meat of the leg. I assume they are a legacy of Taxi Fall 2.

Oh well, this too shall pass and it will be time to spin the Wheel of Pain again.

Otherwise, today has been reasonably OK. It’s sunny and 20° C, so it seems like summer is finally here.

The sunshine got here ages ago but the warmth has been on back-order for ages.

Must be those pesky supply chain issues.

Today’s the first time in three weeks plus that I have not needed to go anywhere. And in theory, it’s a relief to be able to relax all day again.

But we both know that’s bullshit. I don’t want to go back to my previous lumpen existence. I don’t want to face all those empty hours again now that I have had a taste of life with an actual purpose.

The only solution would be to learn to generate my own purpose, and I might not be strong enough to do that yet.

The best I can hope to do is to hitch my wagon to some larger purpose outside myself and let it tow me in the right direction.

`Which sounds an awful lot like going back to school. Call it my “Academic Superstar” plan. Get myself into academia and wow the right people and get scholarships and mentorships and fellowships and all that other good stuff.

Honestly, I just want to be somewhere where my gifts count for something. Where, at long last, being super gifted earns me some actual gifts.

I’m a once in a generation genius, god damn it.

That has to be worth a buck or two!

More after the break.

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Down, down, down

Well, here I am in the cesspit of the void again, drowning in darkness.

Big fucking deal. Whatever. This too shall pass. I am in too pissy a mood to give in to my depression’s weak-ass bullshit.

Maybe that’s where all the angry people come from. They are people who learned to treat their depression by turning it into anger.

I can see the appeal. It turns a feeling of weakness directly into the illusion of strength.

It’s not strength, of course. It’s a lose of self-control and a failure to regulate your own emotions, forcing others to take the burden from you.

Sure feels good at the time, though, I imagine.

No mystery as to where this black mood comes from : it’s compounded frustration. I have felt restless and trapped and pissed off all day and when enough of that feeling gets bottled up it has no choice but to pop the radiator cap on my mood and send the pressure shooting into whatever its default low-level release mode is.

For me it’s depression. For others, it might be anxiety, or rage.

Of course, all the fear and worry from my health issues doesn’t help things one bit. That definitely adds steam pressure to the whole system.

And I would love to be able to just relax and put myself in the hands of the professionals , knowing they know what is best for me, but they fucking don’t.

None of them can see the big picture. Me as a single living organism, instead of me as a name attached to a list of symptoms that apparently they don’t fucking understand.

No that I am bitter.

Oh wait, yes I am. Deeply bitter. Like cyanide, I am bitter.

As I see it right now, it’s my mental health issues that are holding me back. So they should be the focus of my attempts to get better.

If I could get myself sane enough to look after myself properly, the rest will follow.

Small problem : that’s not possible. My mental health issues are not the sort of thing you can conquer by buckling down and working hard.

I already have everything society is prepared to give me : drugs and an hour of therapy a week. If that’s not good enough, tough.

We don’t waste precious mental health dollars on mere depressives. Especially boring ones who haven’t even tried to commit suicide yet.

Get a more exciting illness, loser!

All I know how to do to help myself is write the blog you are reading right now. And it’s like trying to empty a lake with a teaspoon, but it’s all I have.

What I need is a nice long stay in a mental institution where I can get intensive daily therapy in multiple modes until I feel a lot better.

But that sounds suspicious like the old, boring kind of medicine where you stick with a problem until you solve it.

And who has time for that shit?

Screw that. This patient is broken, mommy. I want a new one!

Again. Not that I am (incredibly) bitter.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.