So first, there was my last IV antibiotic treat at Ambulatory Services. {{1}

And I managed to get through it without becoming a blubbering mess. Traded a few jokes with the nurses, nodded hi to Doctor McLachlan, saw a few of my fellow travelers who were going through the program at the same time as me and so I saw them when we were booked at the same time.

And at the end, as luck would have it, both on duty nurses were nearby so I was able to sincerely thank them for how pleasant they had made the last three weeks of therapy and how easy my time there had been.

Oh, and of course, don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I don’t see you nice ladies again any time soon.

Ha ha ha.

Then it was time to hang out in the lobby till it was time for the ol stress test. That ended up being around an hour and change spent reading and chilling in the comfy and air conditioned comfort of RGH’s excellent waiting area.

Or rather, that’s how long it SHOULD have been. But they were running way behind, so my 1:30 pm appointment didn’t happen till 2:30 pm.

Grumble, grumble. Honestly it wasn’t that big a deal. I didn’t have anywhere I needed to go so whatever,

Finally I was admitted (if that’s the right word). I had thoughtfully worn my shorts under my pants so I would meet the “athletic wear” requirement.

But it turns out that pants fall down if you have pants underneath even if you have a belt on. So with my best intentions I was set up for lots of bonus humiliation.

Because I am just not allowed to have dignity.

Then came the test. Me, treadmill, pain. I did OK at the lowest difficulty but the moment it went up a gear I had to tap out.

As a result, I failed the rest. I did not last anywhere long enough to get enough data for any kind of meaningful result.

And I feel incredibly guilty about that.

I keep wondering if I could have hung in there long enough to get a result but I wimped out because I am a pathetic coward and wimp.

Oh well. Next step is to do a chemical stress test where instead of putting on me on a treadmill, they give me a chemical that raises my heart rate artificially.

That sounds awful.

I foresee my having a huge panic attack as a result. I can’t imagine all that energy going in any other direction.

And that might well incite a fucking cardiac event. Lovely.

Now. I would really love to go to sleep. But I can’t because I have to wait for a phone appointment with Doctor Chao some time between 4 pm and 5 pm.

I will stick to my urinary issues for this visit. But honestly, I could go on about getting dizzy every time I stand up, the fact that now and then my left hand and the left side of my face go numb for a little while, my out of control blood sugar and pressure. the severe attacks of depression, and the fact that I feel weaker and more confused and more helpless every day.

Just to pick a few.

Why does being sick have to be so much work?

More after the break.

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So many issues

There goes my left hand again, “asleep”. Just a mass of numbness wrapped in pins and needles. Left side of my face, too.

I probably should call 911 about it. After all, that’s what I did the first time it happened and I was justifiably freaked by these stroke-like symptoms.

But you know what? They didn’t find anything wrong with me. Somehow, all my ailments turn invisible once I enter that ER.

Oh crap. Now my tongue is numb. Alert level rising.

Where was I? Oh right. My ailments turning invisible.

Just think, if I moved into the ER permanently, I’d never be sick again!

None of this encourages me to go. Then again, every time I go to the ER, they end off by telling me that if the symptoms come back, I should return.

Well they’re back, baby.

And I have to admit, that was the strongest attack yet. So I really should go to the ER and get the cause of this not found again.

Due diligence, and all that. Got to make sure it’s clearly their fault when I present my evidence at the malpractice trial.

Or would it be a hearing?

So yeah. Going to the ER via the wah-wah wagon would be the smart thing to do.

But I am not a smart man. I’m incredibly intelligent, but I am not smart. I am a foolish man who makes poor decisions. I accept this now.

And I am deciding to not call the ambulance this time because I honestly just can’t face all that bullshit right now. The numbness is slowly retreating on its own, meaning that it would be gone by the time I was admitted anyhow, so why spend another interminable period in medical purgatory only to be told they can’t find the problem again?

But I am on alert now. If it happens again I may well go. I am not so foolish as to imagine these are not potentially very serious symptoms. I know I should go now.

Next time for sure. Especially if it’s as bad or worse than this time. Better to waste an afternoon lounging in the ER than to end up a drooling vegetable or a gibbering gimp just because I couldn’t be bothered making the trip.

Meanwhile I will mentally prepare myself for yet another visit to the ER.

Right now, my left hand is 85 percent back to normal, tongue is totally back to normal, and the left side of my face is recovering, with random patches of numbness.

I am so damned sick of being sick.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1]] Don’t worry. Despite the name, those services didn’t move an inch. [[1]]

Tomorrow will be my last day of IV antibiotics at the Ambulatory Clinic at RGH.

And like previous times I’ve gone through that program, I am kind of going to miss it. It was nice having something purposeful to do every day, and even nicer having the nurses there fuss over me a bit each day.

Sad, I know, But I take my nurturing where I can get it.

Glad to know Doctor McLachlan thinks I am now infection free. We beat those nasty infections! Take that, opportunistic microorganisms!

Now I will get bounced back to Wound Care at the Community Care Clinic so they can change my bandages.

So when it comes to nice (mostly) ladies fussing over me, I won’t have to go cold turkey. I will just be down to like, twice a week,

I will miss the nurses at Ambulatory. I didn’t learn all their names but I learned some.

There’s Yana, one of the Russian ladies. Very sweet, works very hard, is very efficient, but there’s definitely an iron will within that smiling warmth.

There’s Edit^[1], another Russian lady. Not very chatty, but very dedicated. She’s the one who worked with the intensity of a high stakes jeweler to get my IV in once.

There’s Lana, tall and elegant, cool and efficient. Just being around her made me less anxious. Always looked fab too.

And finally there’s Lauren, my all time fave, because she is so my kind of person. Funny, informal, and cool. I loved joking around with her. Having someone around I could do that with meant the world to me.

There ya go, ladies. If I am too slow or shy to thank you tomorrow, I have at least immortalized you in my blog.

Speaking of tomorrow, hoo boy is it going to be busy.

First I got that last IV antibiotics treatment at 11:30 am. The trick there will be trying not to get too emotional. That might make things awkward.

Then I have to hang around the hospital until my stress test appointment at 1:15 pm. No big deal. I’ll just read, or veg out on one of the comfy chairs in the lobby.

Then there’s the stress test. It’s something I have been dodging for years now but this latest trip in the ambulance with heart-type symptoms has convinced me to stop dicking around and get the damned thing done.

Vital to that mission is the information I got from the lady on the phone today pertaining to danger. She said the idea of the test was to get my heart rate up to a certain level while I am hooked up to lots of sensors and see what is going on in my ribcage.

I warned her that these days I get out of breath just from standing up so the test might end up being VERY short. She laughed and said that was fine.

So while I am not looking forward to it, I am now confident that these people know exactly what they are doing and are not going to try to kill me in some sort of Kafka-esqe mechanical death march.

After that, it will be back home to wait for my phone appointment with Doctor Chao to talk about a medical issue I haven’t even brought up to anyone yet.

It’s going to be a busy, busy day!

More after the break.

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Oh. And it’s my birthday today. I just turned 49.

Big fucking deal.

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Countdown to 50

So I got a year left before I turn fifty without having done anything with my time on Earth and made absolutely nothing of myself but a fat, bloated mass of misbegotten blubber teetering on the edge of as hideous and pathetic a death as befits my waste of a life.

Happy fucking birthday indeed.

I don’t know what is going to happen if I turn 50 without having done anything to advance my life and get the fuck out of this deathpit existence.

But it’s probably not good. For years now I have been telling myself that if I wasd still living the same stupid slovenly life when I turned 50 I would end it all.

At the time, that was just a way to soothe myself with the idea that this hell can’t last forever and that one way or another, I would escape it.

That seemed a lot better than imagining myself living another 25 years of steady decline with each birthday finding me making the same goddamned excuses to justify not facing life yet as I get sicker and sicker and becoming even more of a massive loser as the time when I should have started living gets further and further away.

Face it. Describe my life to most people and they would agree it sounded pretty pathetic. This guy with all these gifts just sits around and plays video games all day even though he’s pushing 50? And he’s never ever supported himself? He’s never had a full time job or even a short term boyfriend? And he may soon die of medical conditions he totally could have under control but doesn’t?

God, what a loser!

And all because I am too fucked in the head to even be able to run my extremely undemanding life properly.

I am one very broken unit, and it’s only going to get worse unless I somehow find it within myself to break out of this jail cell and start having a life.

But I don’t know where I would find the strength. I cast about looking for sources of positive reinforcement within myself but there’s nothing there.

And I don’t know how to find it in the world, either. Because I had such an emotionally starved childhood, I never learned how to feed my spirit.

All I know how to do is how to entertain myself. Typical “Lonely Child Syndrome.” Said entertainment keeps me amused and distracted but it doesn’t nourish my soul at all.

It just makes it easier to ignore the hunger pangs.

I’m in the bottom of a deep dark pit I can’t climb out of because I broke every bone in my body when I fell down here in the first place.

Guess all I can do is wait to die.

Or maybe do it myself if it takes too long.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

P.S. Sorry to be such a wretched bummer on my birthday. But I had to vent my spleen after feeling fine lying in bed then suddenly feeling absolutely horrible after standing up. I think my blood sugar was crashing hard. I dragged myself back from the brink by eating a mandarin orange and I am currently struggling to make myself eat more and, ya know, not die. And the very awful mood above reflects that.

I will feel better later. I am sure of that.

But god damn have things gotten scary for me.

Well that was another waste of a fucking day in the ever-loving ER

So this morning, somewhere around 7 am, i noticed I was feeling a might poorly. I couldn’t seem to catch my breath, I was sweating .50 caliber bullets, and I had heartburn type pains in my chest.

That added up to calling 911 to me.

So after a ridiculous series of fumbles and errors on my part, I managed to let the frigging EMTs in. They checked me out then we were off to RGH.

Cue the longest the trip from here to RGH has ever felt, just like my last trip in the Ambulance. When you combine the need to go slow so you don’t jostle the passenger with all the bumps (that actually DO jostle us quite a bit) these apparently suspension- less meat wagons are prone to, time really does stretch.

Got there and was ingested into the lengthy and complex digestive system of the medical machine. This included two and a half hours of just being parked in a wheelchair in the waiting room because…. SURPRISE! All the beds in the ER were full.

Ain’t I the lucky one.

So there I am with my chest pains and shortness of breath and sweat buckets as the morning drags on and on,

Eventually I am finally admitted and get my nice soft hospital bed. This will be my life raft for the next six to eight hours.

After that, it was the usual stuff. Drawing blood, X-rays, blood pressure and blood oxygen monitoring, visits with the doctor, and of course, ennui.

Oh, the ennui.

And of course, in the end, he just tells me he can’t find anything wrong with me. Ergo there is nothing wrong with me, right? They tried a bunch of tests and they all came back negative so clearly you’re a dirty stinking liar and/or delusional. Bye!

And I forgot to get mad and argue this time. Oh well, there’s always a next time.

Well, until something they missed kills me, at least.

Instead, I was my usual pleasant agreeable stupid self, Oh gosh gee golly, I get to go home now? Yay!

Wait…. why did I come here in the first place, then? Hmmm.

Oh right! It was because I had serious symptoms that they still have neither treated nor explained. Ones that came right back the minute I got out of bed.

I was tempted to just admit myself right back into Emegency. Or just not leave in the first place. Tell the nurse I ain’t leaving until someone tells me what the fuck is wrong with me and does something to fix it.

But I hadn’t the energy for that. So I just came home.

This shit is getting really old. I am tired of having serious symptoms apparently caused by absolutely nothing.

I guess I have no choice but to just wait and see if I still feel this bad tomorrow. If I do, I will go right back to Emergency and this time, I am going to get answers.

Oh well. At least I got to watch little black bunnies hop about while I waited for my cab.

Here’s hoping I survive the night!

More after the break.

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This shit’s getting old too

1. I develop an appetite. Maybe big, maybe small. But I can eat. Therefore…
2. I get up to go get food.
3. But then things happen. My joints pop with that sickening click of bone on bone. I accidentally jostle my to the touch testicles. I get an attack of dizziness. Or nausea wells up out of nowhere. Ergo….
4. By the time I sit down to eat, my appetite is beyond dead once again

Even eating is hard for me now.

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How sweet to be….

I imagine that a lot of people find this song bizarre, puzzling, or even offensive.

But I get it.

I too have wanted to be utterly harmless. Innes, the singer of the song, seems to have had the same intuition as I did : people are far less likely to be a threat to you if you pose no threat to them.

That’s what the aggressive types can’t ever understand. Sure, maybe that person won’t attack you because they are scared of you.

But then again, maybe they will attack you BECAUSE they are scared of you.

Better to be no threat to anyone at all. At least until you absolutely have to be.

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I am warming up to the recognition of my own foolish nature.

It’s really quite liberating. I feel like a great weight has been lifted off my shoulders. One I had no conscious notion was even there for a very long time.

But it seems I was trying to prove to the world that I was a smart person who made smarter, better choices that everyone else, and that is patently untrue.

Truth is, I’m a dumbass. I am a silly person who makes bad choices despite my extraordinary intellect and that is that.

I’m very very clever. I’m a trickster, a genius, a magician, and a clown. I can do amazing things with this magnificent mind of mine. It is a truly powerful tool.

But I am not smart. Smart is as smart does and I does dumb. I almost never make the decision i will wish I had made and it is virtually guaranteed that despite all my mental muscle, I will be so paralyzed by indecision when it comes time to choose that I end up up making the decision as impulsively and thoughtlessly as any other moron.

To overcome this limitation, I would have to develop a lot more “character”. One might might also call it toughness, grit, self-control, or even manliness.

It is that which allows one to remain in control and make good, smart decisions even when you are scared, angry, or otherwise in the throes of the kind of intense emotion that floods the mind with adrenaline and makes rational analysis impossible.

Developing more of that would mean I have to finally stop avoiding becoming a harder, tougher, stronger kind of man out of a desire to stay a child.

It would mean sacrificing a portion of my poofy soft nature in return for being more in control of myself and my life and less helpless to steer my own fate.

I am tired of being at the mercy of the waves and the tides.

Real sailors work with the wind but they bend it to their own ends.

They get where they want to go. They get want they want from the world. They see to themselves that their needs are met.

And if I was more like that, I would be a much happier man.

Think about it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My back has become a real brat in the last 24 hours.

Last night was godawful. Hours spent trying to twist, stretch, bend, splay, or otherwise contort the knot upon not of tension out of my traitorous spine.

So of course I didn’t get much sleep. Motherfucker.

This is definitely my OG back pain, the kind that comes when my digestion is messed up by trapped gas.

So clearly I need to eat and drink my carbonated beverages more slowly.

Anyhow, eventually I had my little “hulk smash puny back pain!” moment and pressed super hard on my spine with my fist and managed to flatten things out enough for me to finally get some goddamned sleep.

Resulting in me oversleeping for the day’s IV antibiotics dose. Eep!

Much was the rushing and dressing and cursing.

Sorry for putting you through that, Julian!

As luck would have it, we were only around 8 minutes late. No harm done.

But it took way, way too long for me to catch my breath after. Like half an hour until I was actually back to baseline.

That is…. quite worrying.

Today was a big day in my grubby little world because it was visit with the doctor day and that means opening all the dressings so he can take a look, then of course changing them once he is done.

No big surprises. For me, anyhow. I finally got around to telling the nurses about the wound on my right foot that I used to go to the Community Care Clinic for.

I was supposed to tell them almost two weeks ago, but shyness happened. I just couldn’t seem to make myself bring it up.

I guess on a child-like level I worried they would get mad at me for bringing them more work they had to do.

I really am just a foolish little boy with way more brain that he knows what to do with, aren’t I? Le sigh.

Medical scuttlebutt is that the wound on my left foot has healed remarkably well, so it is no longer under medical supervision.

And the one on my right foot that has been around forever is fine. The infection is long long gone, so, no biggie.

Oh, and I got a thorough debridement from the wound care nurse. That’s always nice, but especially nice when you have four wound sites.

And I am always a little amazed at just how much dried dead skin comes off of me. It gives me a childlike sense of wonder.

Like… gee, did all that come from ME?

The back pain keeps coming back. It’s getting very frustrating. I may well have to invest in some kind of anti-gas medication.

Or a nice strong-ish muscle relaxant to pop these goddamned knots. I would even settle for a general as opposed to topical one.

So I end up sleeping a bunch.

What else do I have to do with my time?

More after the break.

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Catching Covid is so trendy right now. All the big celebrities are doing it.

It’s totally gone viral.

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The blackest of nights

You know…. the kind you don’t come back from.

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I have been really, really depressed lately.

Having all these health problems piling onto me, with all the pain and suffering and fear they bring with them, have really blackened my perspective and my mood.

It really seems like life is just going to get worse and worse for me from now on. My body will self-destruct and I will lose faculties and abilities one by one until I am (un) lucky enough to live my “paralyzed and full of tubes: nightmare.

I’d love to see hope instead. But I just don’t.

And this has taken me to the Bad Place. The one where there only seems to be one way out. The one where I feel trapped and panicky and hopeless and the urge to have it all be “over” grows strong.

I should probably check myself into somewhere safe, to be honest. Somewhere where I can’t hurt myself.

But I can’t afford a place like that and in order for the province to pay for it I would have to somehow get them to take me seriously and why should they be any different than all the doctors I have seen?

I don’t want to be in the Bad Place. I honestly thought I would never be here again. I thought I was past all that.

But here we are again, worse than ever before.

So I am going to need to ask Joe for a very special favour.

You see, I recently had a thought. A very, very bad thought that I wish I could unthink and never think again forever.

It goes like this : Here I am, suicidally depressed, and what do you know, right here sitting on my computer case is a whole lot of different kinds of sleeping pills…….

But I can’t do that. I won’t do that. I could never do that to my friends.

And yet…. I might.

I don’t want to. But I might. The thought has crossed my mind,

So I am going to gather up all these rejected (because they made my sleep apnea worse) sleeping pills and give them to Joe so he can hide them,

That way I don’t know where they are and can’t use them by myself. In the highly unlikely event that I ever need one of them, I will have to ask Joe, and he will give me exactly one dose of them, no more.

I wish I was strong enough to just throw them away. Dump them down the drain. Throw them out the fucking window even.

But that would be “wasting” them so my compulsions say no.

I wish I could just sell them. There has to be a market for these kinds of meds. I could probably get enough for a fancy new computer chair AND a new PC.

But either way, they need to go away.

And come to think of it, so do I.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So today, it’s my frigging knees that are hurting.

Dunno why. I can only assume that somehow, the fall that introduced my poor fragile knees to the cord card concrete is finally catching up to me.

But why would it wait 5 days to do so? Maybe that’s just the stage of the healing I’m in?

Whatever. Like any part of me needs a reason to hurt. I could blame it on the influence of silver prices on leprechaun farts and it would make as much sense.

I am feeling increasingly overwhelmed by all my health issues. There are so many of them now. Diabetes and blood pressure out of control. Three different infections eating away at me. Joints and bones still aching (thank god for Naproxen). Weird fevers and other medical oddities striking without warning.

And that’s just the new stuff.

I feel like I am drowning. I just can’t handle all this depressing complexity. I get overwhelmed by daily life all the time even when I am well.

I would love to be able to just relax and let the medical professional take care of it. But I know I can’t trust these fools. Not with the big picture. They never know what is really going on because all they see is what is in front of them right now.

So thanks for making it so that I have to be EXTRA paranoid and vigilant when I am sick. I am sure that stress really aids in my recovery.

It always kind of sucks for there to be nobody smarter than you in the world but it extra special super soaker sucks when you’re even smarter than your goddamned doctors.

Do you have any idea how lonely that makes me feel? I am all alone out here. I have no true higher authority I can trust to take care of my best interests.

Not even the doctors and nurses currently not quite knowing WTF is wrong with me.

It’s all so frustrating and depressing. I want to be able to relax and trust people. I want to be able, in fact, to have the sort of general faith in the system ordinary people have.

But I see too much. I know too much. I see where they are making mistakes. I know when they could be doing better. I grasps more of the big picture than they do.

And that makes it impossible to relax and trust these people. Or anyone else. It’s like trying to relax on the bus when you know it’s being driven by a toddler.

I mean, what am I supposed to think when I keep going to the ER with legitimate severe symptoms only to be told they have no idea what’s wrong?

If I was rich, I would search the world over for people who actually seem to know the fuck they are talking about.

And then hoard them,

More after the break,.

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Well boss, I have broken down our employee retention issue to these factors

1. People have a choice whether or not to work for us.
2. Working here is extremely unpleasant
3. Therefore people choose not to work for us

Obviously there is nothing we can do about factor 2. We clearly can’t make it more pleasant to work here. That would mean the lowly employees had the power to make us do something we don’t feel like doing, and that’s patently absurd.

So we are working on a plan to circumvent factor 1. This whole employees having a choice thing. That sounds wrong on the face of it and I am going to give a stern lecture to whoever slipped up and allowed this to happen.

Isn’t it bad enough that they make us pay them?

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Master of illusion

I bitch all the time about being ignored, neglected, and forgotten, but the truth is that from the beginning it’s been as much my fault as anyone else’s.

Because I hide. I cloak. I blend into the woodwork and merge with the wallpaper.

And it’s entirely automatic, to the point where it is my default mode.

And it could be argued, successfully I think, that it is this tendency to cloak that is the whole reason I am so starved for affection and attention in the first place.

Ergo, if I want to get the positive emotional feedback I crave, I am going to have to learn to turn off that damned cloaking field.

And that will be very, very hard to do.

Because on the deepest level, I believe that this cloaking effect is what keeps me safe. That without it I would be utterly exposed and open to all the predators of the world and of my mind to brutalize and destroy me.

Not literally true, of course.

But very much subjectively true.

And that’s the reality I have to struggle with. The truth is that I am the only one who can turn the cloaking field off. If anyone else tried, I would fight them tooth and nail for the right to go right back to the same dank cave I was just fighting to escape.

That’s how deep that shit runs. Right down to my animal-level instincts. That’s what happens when you are violated in the worst possible way when you are too young to cross the street by yourself.

Those bad tapes have been playing in my head for a very long time. Between the rape and the bullying and the emotional poverty of my childhood, it is quite honestly a wonder that I emerged with any sanity whatsoever.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not crazy. I am so crazy it’s killing me. It’s a disease of the hardest to treat mental illnesses to treat, right up there with Borderline and Narcissistic, because like the name says, Avoidant people like me avoid everything, more or less.

Even – or especially – the things that will help us.

We just can’t make ourselves uncloak. Not even to save our own lives.

And pretty soon, it’s going to kill me too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow..

So my health continues to fuck up in new and exciting ways.

Last night, at around 11:40 pm, I felt this wave of weakness and malaise was over me. It was a truly horrible sensation. Like someone cast a curse on me, or like I had just lost years of my life to the touch of a ghost.

Well this is bad, I thought. So I decided to get off the computer and lay down in bed and monitored my condition.

Well it got a lot worse. I went from mere malaise to feeling absolutely awful. I felt incredibly hot and I was sweating buckets. My head was a mess of turgid fog and I was very dizzy and kept nearly passing out.

In retrospect, I wonder why I didn’t just let myself pass out. Might have saved me a lot of pain and suffering and fear.

But at first at least, I had to sit up because lying down was making me nauseous. So I guess that stuck in my head despite my condition and in times like these, I revert to my most primal of behaviours which is stubbornness.

What followed was several hours of sitting on the edge of my bed suffering like the sick animal I was. It felt like an attack of some kind of tropical disease. Like malaria.

Seems unlikely, though.

Eventually the fever broke and I was able to lie down and zonk out.

Then, on the way today’s IV antibiotics appointment, I realized that once more, the left half of my face and three of the fingers on my left hand had “gone to sleep”.

In other words, they were numb.

It quickly cleared, though. All that is left is a tiny bit of tingling in my lip and one fingertip.

Now either of these incidents would be enough to send me back to the ever-loving ER. It would have been easy to once more go after my antibiotics. That would definitely have been the adult, rational, reasonable thing to do.

But I have come to the conclusion that I am not a wise man. I am a foolish creature that makes poor decisions despite his best efforts to be smart and make wise choices, and lack the basic emotional stability for grown up type smarts.

Ergo, I did not go to the ER, because I just could not stand the thought of going back there so soon. I need more time to recover my nerves and my patience.

Plus, there lurks in my mind the feeling that no matter what symptoms I present with, they are going to find there to be nothing wrong with me.

I mean, last time, I felt absolutely horrible. Cold, dizzy, confused, ill.

And yet I got a clean bill of health anyhow. What. The. Fuck.

At this point, I feel like I could be on fire and they would still just patiently and unhurriedly test me then tell me they found nothing wrong with me and can’t explain this mysterious burning sensation I claim to be feeling.

There has to be something physical going on. Something the usual tests don’t show.

And I suppose it’s up to me to make sure they frigging find it.

Preferably before it kills me.

More after the break.

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In other news

Then there’s the matter of atenolol.

Every time I get my IV treatment, they take my blood pressure, and I get a stark reminder of just how bad mine in.

So for now, I have foresworn both salt and caffeine. If my blood pressure enters the normal range and stays there a while, they will come back.

But for now, I have to do whatever I can to lower that shit before I have a stroke, an aneurism, a heart attack, or an attack from the salt vampire from Star Trek.

Oh, she’s out there. Count on it.

In addition to those measures, I went back on atenolol.

It’s one of my blood pressure meds. I forget what the other one is called, which tells you a lot about my compliance level.

See, being the stumbling fool I am, when I was told to go off one of my blood pressure meds in order to combat my serious dizzy-upon-rising issue, I forget which one I was told to stop so I stopped both.

Good god, that was stupid. You are never supposed to go off a blood pressure medication suddenly, let alone two of them.

So I figured I better go back on the one I could find and that was atenolol.

Well, guess what. I am getting super dizzy when I stand up again.

So now I have to stop the atenolol again because that shit is very harsh to deal with. Getting sick and dizzy every time I stand up is very depressing.

Basically, you know how sometimes you get dizzy from standing up too fast?

Imagine that happening every single time you stand up.

But I still need to lower the frick out of my blood pressure, so I will have to ask Doctor Kwok the Mighty to find me a new one.

This is honestly the first time I can remember having to discontinue a med because of the side effects. Makes me realize how lucky I have been until now.

Most of the time, I either experience no side effects or weak ones.

Guess my luck finally wore out. Oh well.

The good news is that I finally made it out to Denny’s tonight.

Which means not only did I get precious facetime with my friends, I also ate a nice big turkey dinner full of all four food groups and by doing so onboarded some serious nutrition to see me through the next low appetite/missed meal period.

I have missed at least one meal due to lack of appetite for like eight days in a row.

That’s not good.

Sure is saving me a ton of money, though!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Getting pretty worried about my legs.

I think they are just getting weaker and weaker.

That ol’ wheelchair is getting closer every day.

Take right now. All I did today was my IV antibiotics treatment. All that entails is me making it to the car and back plus a little bit of walking in the hospital itself.

Normally, it’s no big deal. But for some reason, today it has left me feeling like I walked a long distance. I took a nap when we got back and when I woke up, my legs were sore and stiff and felt kind of… bruised?

Now granted, I took that fall onto my knees recently. That might explain a lot. Except that you would think they would hurt like that all the time in that case.

As for that fall, and the previous one : they both happened because my legs don’t act like legs any more. They are more like stilts made of bone.

That’s because my knees just do not flex properly any more. They haven’t in quite a while. And that seriously limits my locomotion because it means I can’t react or adapt to the unexpected or the uneven on the fly at all.

I can walk over perfectly flat or carpeted surfaces and that’s about it.

And even then, that is not guaranteed, because sometimes a knee or an ankle will randomly lock up on me.

I have actually been falling a lot lately. I am just lucky that the vast majority of times it has happened, it’s been within a few inches of that giant crash pad I call my king sized bed, so no harm is done.

But I take a tumble of some sort roughly once a day, on average. Therefore it is just a matter of time before I do really hurt myself.

Did I say the wheelchair was getting closer? Well so is me full of tubes lying in a hospital bed, unable to even go to the bathroom on my own any more.

At least I am finally feeling some fear instead of my usual dull apathy. Hopefully I am through with watching my health fall apart with the same sort of detachment with which a cow looks at a passing train.

I am going to grab hold of this fear and hold it close to my heart because only it can free me from this tortuous downward slide. Only the perfectly reasonable fear of the very bad things in store for me if I don’t shape up will motivate me to change.

And even then it’s a battle. Because the diseased part of my mind wants all those bad things to happen to me. It’s overjoyed to keep me tied to the tracks while that steaming locomotive comes barreling towards me, each car a different medical horror waiting to make my life far worse than merely playing video games all the time.

I don’t want it to win. But it has the controls for now. As long as it can freeze my will and punish all attempts to escape my doom, it’s in charge, not me.

So the question is : how far will I go to avoid having to take responsibility for my life?

Will I let the madman within doom me to a nightmarish fate rather than toughen up and actually take control of my fate?

Or will I finally snap out of this deadly dream and escape before it’s too late?

Stay tuned and find out.

More after the break.

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Fuck this life, again

(WARNING : The following contains non-explicit talk of pooping. )

Everything was fine (ish) till I pooped.

Roundabout 7 pm, I felt the urge to move my bowels.

Good, I thought. I haven’t done so lately, largely because of lack of appetite^[1], and I figured I must be quite overdue.

But I had forgotten about how life insists on punishing me constantly but from different angles so I never get used to it.

The operation itself went smoothly. No issues. But when I got up after, I got hit with the unfortunately familiar feeling that everything still in my guts had just turned to wet concrete and was now sludging up my entire lower GI tract.

And with that, my appetite once more vanished. The gut is at least smart enough to know that if things stop moving out, things HAVE to stop coming in.

So here I am sitting with a gut full of mud, unable to enjoy ordering in like I do every Saturday because I sure as fuck ain’t wasting money on food I can’t eat.

As it is, I will struggle just to eat a little snack in order to comply with my “WITH FOOD” labeled meds. Food seems totally gross to me right now.

I can’t even resort to my usual dodge in this situation, which is fruit. Even when nothing else appeals to me, nice lovely fresh fruit manages to at least seem palatable.

And you know why I can’t eat fresh fruit?

Because I can’t bend down low enough to reach the crisper bin where we keep all out fresh fruit, that’s why.

My anti-inflammatory Naproxen has banished the pain but not the stiffness.

So yeah, fuck this stupid life of mine. I want out. I want to vanish from here and appear someplace where I can earn a living and have a home and have a husband and get respect and dignity and feels useful and wanted and loved.

I deserve so much better than this stupid shitshow of an existence. I am charismatic, lovable, brilliant, extremely talented, and capable of doing so much in the world.

But first I have to ditch this fucking depression that keeps me locked away behind invisible doors which aren’t even locked.

They don’t have to lock the doors if you’re afraid of them.

I am prisoner, jailer, and prison all in one.

So how do I get me to let me go?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well today’s been a galloping pile of heavy duty horse crap.

Woke up feeling quite crappy. Trouble breathing, heart beating hard, a terrible chill pervading my every tissue, aches and pains everywhere, and nausea.

There’s always nausea.

Well shit, I thought. But I was going to be going to the hospital for my IV antibiotics shortly, so I decided to wait till I had that done and see how I felt.

I told the nurses at Ambulatory I was having trouble breathing. They were completely unhelpful and unsympathetic. Told me it was not their department and that I would have to go to Emergency if I wanted help.

Jesus, I know it’s not your department, but would it have killed you to at least pretend that you gave a shit whether I lived or died?

I’m still processing that. Major, major loss of respect for those ladies.

So I humped it over to Emerge less than a week after going there for my back. They too seemed to lack all sense of urgency despite the severity of my symptoms.

By this point, I was shivering from the biting cold gnawing at my bones and I was so weak and dizzy I could barely make it down the hall to my bed.

Is there just something about me that says, “Not important, don’t pay attention, feel free to ignore unless actively on fire”?

Because that would fit my background.

Anyhow, the usual sorts of waiting and being probed and such went down. I felt quite miserable as my case slowly made it through the digestive system of RGH,

Of course, in the end, they couldn’t find a single thing wrong with me.

How is that possible? There’s several possibilities.

a) I have something obscure and bizarre wrong with me that does not show up on the usual sorts of tests they do in this kind of situation. This is, thankfully, unlikely, but my latent hypochondria insists I include it. I am not sure what could dodge three rounds of bloodwork, chest X-rays, three ECGs, and various other tests, and I hope I never have to find out.

And yet I still feel like crap. So I have to check the other possibility :

b) Psychosomatic illness strikes again. This is superficially plausible and fits the facts but it doesn’t sit right with me. Maybe my subconscious mind is putting on an elaborate show to keep me from having to deal with…. um, the very illness it’s making up?

So honestly I have no idea. Guess I am just fucked.

Oh, and the kicker? Fell down getting out of the cab AGAIN.

This time I landed on my knees, Thank god they did not go boom. But I am all sore from knees to nipple now.

And I have to battle my way through a bunch of neurotic BS about breathing again.

Seriously, fuck my fucking life.

More after the break.

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Oh yeah, my nuts

My balls are still all tender and swollen. Which is no fun.

Wish there was a way to relieve the pressure that didn’t require me to masturbate to conclusion. That’s something that, due to antidepressants and general poor health, I have difficulty doing even without my nutsack being all bloated and sensitive.

Maybe I need one of those electro-ejaculators they use on bulls and stallions. To get a semen sample, they stick an electrode up their butts and deliver an electric zap directly to their prostates to make them cum.

Seems like a dirty rotten trick to me. At least buy them dinner first!

And just in general, I feel ill. Like there is a phantom weight pressing down on me from all angles at once. And my heart does not enjoy that.

I have this subtle tremble going on all the time. It really undermines my sense of security. You’d think I had a profound shock of some sort.

Nope. Just lived another day of my current life.

Oh, and I have zero appetite. Which is particularly ironic because after I got back from the hospital, I had one of my worst run-ins with the Demon Hunger ever.

I am talking intense hunger pangs that forced me to stop whatever I was doing until they passed. I don’t know if that’s what starvation is like but I would not be surprised.

Made getting some insulin into me all the trickier. As patient readers know, that’s the cure. The demonic hunger comes from my level of insulin response falling to critically low levels, causing my cells to start starving.

It’s nearly impossible to cure by eating. I’ve eaten big hearty meals while in that state and had them barely put the smallest of dents in the raging void in my gut.

I guess that’s one way to get me to take my insulin. Harsh, but fair.

Sooner or later, I am going to have to face this whole conundrum of how I keep feeling like day-old shit while apparently having nothing actually wrong with me.

Right now I am leaning towards the “something not caught on standard tests” side of the equation. Which sucks because not only does it mean I am actually well and truly sick, it also means that it’s up to me to figure out how to get the medical establishment to do whatever it has to do to figure out what is actually wrong with me.

I am so fucking sick of doing their job for them. My job as patient is to show up and do what I am told without complaining or being difficult.

I should not have to do the investigative science too.

I mean, the doctor at the ER agreed that I needed to come in today given how I felt and my history of cardio issues and underlying conditions and so on.

And I am getting a grip on my highly maladaptive fear of wasting people’s time and resources on what turns out to be “nothing”. I did what I am supposed to do.

But I still would rather not have put myself through all that.

But what could I do? I felt so bad.

Let’s hope I can make it a week before I land in the ER again this time,.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, nature, fate, and Satan’s second cousin Louie have new ways for me to suffer.

You see, I have been experiencing a lot of back pain. But not the kind that has been plaguing me for the last week. That I have more or less licked with the Naproxen.

This time the culprit is gas.

The intestinal kind. You know, natural gas. I’ve had a wicked case of it for around 24 hours now and it is getting caught in pockets deep in my guts which makes said guts inflate and tighten and that makes the surrounding muscles also tighten around the pockets of gas and voila, back pain. Mostly in the woods.

You know… the lumbar region.

Science is so beautiful.

Last night was especially bad. I got very little sleep due to the back pain. Spent many futile hours rubbing my back, stretching, and using my massager in a vain attempt to get things to relax so I could fucking sleep.

At least I know it’s gas now. So I can concentrate on getting those gas bubbles to pick a lane and get the fudge out.

Dunno why I got so gassy all of a sudden. There’s been no serious change to my diet and as far as I know, I don’t have a cold or flu or whatever.

Oh well. I will have to ask it some questions next time I fart.

The back pain is bad enough, but another, even less dignified form of pain apparently hitched a ride on the very same train :

Christ, do my balls ache.

And that’s particularly noisome because for me at least, testicle pain always comes with nausea or the risk of nausea.

I expect that’s true of a lot of men. Our wedding tackle is quite delicate.

You’d think it would have evolved a tough outer shell by now.

As to why they are aching, it could be a lot of things. Wearing my pants too tight in the crotchal region has caused it in the past.

Of course, they would not be too tight if my balls were not seriously swollen.

And that points us to the real problem : my balls are bluer than a Smurf’s.

This is a condition which, while quite painful, has an easy and obvious cure :

Spank that monkey like it wrecked the car!

But that’s a Catch-22 because you know what makes it really hard to get off?

Super sore balls.

It’s doable, but tricky. You have to settle in such a way that your downstroke will not touch your nuts AT ALL.

Oh, and if you miss, you experience terrible pain and nausea!

It’s like a really filthy game of Operation!

So perhaps I will undertake Operation Spermatic Freedom later tonight.

More after the break.

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A quick note about crazy neighbors

In a comment on this video

I wrote this comment :

Well there was one family in the neighborhood when I was a kid who had like eight cats and all their furniture was scratched to pieces and the parents knew everybody but didn’t have any friends and their youngest was this creepy little fat kid who….

Oh wait. That was us! 🙂 Sorry.

michael bertrand, former weird neighbour

Because I’m funny like that! 🙂

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Captain Omniscience is SUCH a know-it-all

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The problem with shadows

The problem with shadows is that you can’tescape them if you are still hiding in them.

I have always had a sort of cloak of illusion. A sort of aura of ambiguity and enigma that keeps people from knowing exactly who or what I am.

Myself included, sadly.

But it’s not made of lies. I am too honest for that.

Plus, lies are strategically weak. A defense made of lies could disappear in a puff of logic if any of them are exposed as the falsehoods they are, and that makes for a pretty bad hiding place if you ask me.

No, for me it’s all about the ambiguous. The undetermined. The questionable. And especially important for me, the arguable.

After all, if you defy definition and instead rely on your sly trickster powers to allow you to adapt to situations on the fly, it’s nearly impossible to pin you down.

That fog you wrap yourself in hides your true position and lets you take whatever form is most advantageous at the moment, all while maintaining your infuriating grin and ability to dodge out of the way of attacks then move back so fast it looks like you never moved at all. And yet, the attack still missed.

Tsk tsk, old boy. Why can’t you hit me? I’m standing right here.

And sure, that sort of thing makes me feel powerful and wicked while I am imagining myself as this devilish creature of illusions and insight.

But nobody likes that guy, and he can hardly slow down and be human.

I mean, all the clever tricks and confounding mirages in the world won’t keep you from being lonely. Magic spells and imps from hell and ghosts from a well and all that other bullcrap are nothing but nothingness at the end of the day.

Smoke and mirrors and parlor tricks.

And the sad truth is that the audience is an illusion too, just voices in your head, and you have been all alone this whole damned time.

The whole damned show is nothing but mental masturbation designed to fool the real audience – namely you – into forgetting your stark and sterile solitude for a while.

But the world outside is real. That’s what you keep telling yourself. You are not all alone with your demons and your dementia yet. There is still a whole big world out there that doesn’t need you to believe in it to keep on existing and that is full of whatever it is you need or want or even just itch for out of sheer perverse whimsy.

And all you would have to do is open up those doors and go out to greet the world.

But that would mean also letting the world in.

And you are just not ready for that yet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I am officially a bit… worried…. about myself.

Because like I said before, dealing with this back pain is very depressing and every time I have to get out of bed it leaves me in a dark black mood no matter how good I felt before I got up.

Well it’s getting worse. And now it brings with it the bad thoughts.

Of the self-harm kind.

It’s worst when I can’t seem to escape the pain at all. When my back hurts no matter what position I am in or whether I am sitting, standing, or lying down. When just sitting in front of this computer feels like someone stuck a dagger in my back that digs in a little deeper with every heartbeat.

That’s when my depression and anxiety kick into “animal gnaws a limb off” levels of panic. The need to escape the situation no matter what it takes is very strong and makes me worried about my own safety.

I don’t think I am in any real danger yet, but I am way closer to the edge than I ever want to be. And I don’t like where this is headed.

At least I have a new weapon against the pain now.

Let me tell you about my day.

Got to Ambulatory Care. First order of business : test my IV. Ouch. It is old and busted. Time to take the old one out, needle and all, and install a new one.

The old one lasted 10 days, so it was way past due for retirement.

And I immediately knew this was going to be a hassle because I have those veins that like to hide and even squirm out of the way when you attempt to pierce them.

But my nurse busted out the kickass alternative light source that makes your veins glow in the dark. It’s so damned cool.

Then she grabbed my arm and spent the next ten minutes establishing a new IV connection with such concentration and care that you would think she was defusing a nuclear weapon and time was running out.

I was, and am, extremely impressed.

I also feel vaguely guilty. I know I didn’t choose to have these weird veins but they fit so neatly into the other ways in which I am shy and elusive that it’s hard not to feel responsible for them at least metaphorically.

Then came meeting with Doc Kwok. And I am brimming with pride because when he asked me how I was doing, I said “Not good!” and told him about my back pain saga and he was going to investigate immediately!

I am so happy that I spoke up for myself and managed to go against all my avoidant instincts to bring my problem to someone’s attention.

But plot twist : when I rolled my shirt up to expose my back for examination, everyone saw the infection I have on my upper left shoulder and back, and that completely threadjacked everything because it turns out it’s WAY worse than I thought.

I thought it was just a small pustule with some crusted on pus. Um, nope.

I have two serious wounds up there. Son of a bitch.

In my defense, I can’t see them and they don’t hurt. Add in my general ignorance of what is happening in so-called “reality” and it was the perfect setup for having something like this sneak up on me.

However, I must apologize to Julian, who has been bugging me to get it looked at and treated and I have been blithely dismissing him,

If only I could have seen what you saw, Julian. Sorry.

So the next little while was all about THAT. Luckily, Nurse Maria the wound care specialist was there and not busy so the wounds got immediate debridement.

That still sounds like a technical term for when a woman gets a divorce to me.

So now I have three wound sites with four infections.

I’m beginning to think I have some kind of a problem.

As for my new weapon, I felt like Doc Kwok was going to not get how bad the problem was and dismiss me too, but then he said the magic word :

Anti-inflammatory. Do I want one? Yes I indeedily do.

It’s called Naproxen and it seems to be indicated for a lot of things.. That makes sense because as we are learning, a lot of things have inflammation as a root cause or major contributing factor and so the fact that Naproxen directly blocks the chemicals involved in inflammation might make it effective on a whole whack of stuff.

I’ve taken one dose and I already feel better. My joints don’t hurt so much when they go click and the constant ache is much lesser.

And the drug info says that you might have to take the drug for two weeks before the full effect kicks in. So I ain’t seen nothing yet.

So there is some hope. I might escape the darkness after all. This week of misery might be nothing but a fading memory very soon.

So what if I am covered in seeping wounds? They are being treated. Medical authorities know about them. For once, I am not hiding my wounds away like the avoidant little animal I am out of fear of drawing attention to myself.

I still need to get my life under control, by which I mean my sleep and blood sugar levels, but at least I am not suffering in scared silence any more.

People have noticed me. And they care!

It’s a dream come true!

A very, very sad and pathetic dream, but still counts as a win in my books.

Never trust the darkness. It lies.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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You couldn’t tell through the lab-coat, but Doctor Victor von Frankenstein was actually really into body building.

He found it to be a great way to make friends.

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Is this too dark?

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