Had to skip Wound Care this morning. Was feeling very under the weather, including a cough and a runny nose.

And not only do I not want to spread whatever I have to my fellow sick folk at the Community Care Clinic, there would have been little point in going when I would have had to answer yes to the whole “do you have any of these COVID symptoms….?” prompt upon entry.

Not sure what happens then. Presumably they tell you to go die at home.

Of course, in my imagination it would go like this :

So once I was on the phone to the CCC, I agreed to just skip today’s Wound Care and wear the same dressings till my next scheduled Wound Care appointment, which is at 9:30 AM on Monday.

I’ve done this before in similar circumstances. My bandages are pretty bedraggled looking by the end, but otherwise no harm is done.

Otherwise, nothing new to report. Being on my feet continues to be torture. Can’t really tell if it’s getting worse because it’s already so bad.

When you are in a great deal of pain. you don’t really have the mental bandwidth to figure out if you are in 8 percent more agony than yesterday.

All I can say is that it seems about the same. Which is better than it getting worse.

No work from Doc Chao about my x-rays yet. He’s probably forgotten all about me. Sustained interest is not his long suit.

After all, why would he keep working after the patient leaves? Nobody pays him for that!

So I will call tomorrow afternoon. Just a friendly little reminder that I exist and you have my future as an ambulatory primate in your hands, so….. be a doctor?

Not that I’m bitter.

Why should I be bitter just because I have to nag doctors into doing their goddamned jobs? So what if I seem to disappear from their minds the moments I am not physically present, like they have medical degrees but not object permanence? Who cares that this really feeds into my feeling of being worthless and disgusting and not worth the slightest bit of time or effort or oxygen?

And that pisses me off. You people are supposed to me making me feel BETTER!!

Speaking of which. my depression has been stable but bad. I find myself alternating between short bouts of seething rage at the world and long jags of black despair.

So I try to keep busy. Well, distracted, anyhow.

Busy implies productivity.

Days like these, I just want to stick my head out the window and scream at the sky.

Just scream and scream and scream until I can scream no more. No words needed, I just feel the need to express my frustration at how life had treated me in the past and how it is treating me now.

Trust me, there’s a pattern.

How dare life steal my strength just when I could put it to good use?

Is this my depression’s dirty dealings?

If so, how do I get it to stop?

I don’t fucking know. And there is nobody to tell me.

Guess I’ll just die, then.

More after the break.

---

Every single step

And now we’re back to every step being agony.

I was in this state once before, and it left me wondering if I was going to have to call 911 because there was no way I could walk to the car in that state.

And now it’s back. The “cramp” has returned. Son of a bitch.

Well last time it went away on its own after I slept. This time it only showed up after I slept. Hopefully my next nap will toggle the goddamned thing off again.

Won’t be calling 911 just yet, anyhow. Not when there is a chance it can be avoided.

I am, technically, crippled right now. Hobbled. Just making it to the toilet and back hurt like hell because every step results in a brutal stab of pain that goes right to the bone in the center of the bottommost edge of my right kneecap.

Mental note : somehow, describing it precisely like that made me feel a little better. Contemplate future self-therapy of describing all my injuries and ailments in excruciating detail for further relief.

Don’t worry, dear readers, I won’t expect you to read it.

Anyhow, yeah, crippled. As in, just getting to the toilet and back was torture. And it’s only like nine feet away.

Getting to the kitchen and back to get myself some supper is out of the question. Luckily, I have a little bit of popcorn and almonds left over from lunch, so I at least have enough food and water to take my evening meds.

Ooh, and i have a cookie too. Score. Thank goodness for my inability to finish meals.

If it hadn’t been for the leftovers, I would have been in dire straits. I would have had no choice but to call Julian on his cell and hope he picks up.

Might seem weird to call someone who is probably in the same apartment as me, but it’s a damn sight more civilized than hollering for him.

Now if he hadn’t picked up, I’d have to holler.

Or just call 911, I suppose. Explain that they are going to have to come all the way to me because I can’t meet them part way.

Which I did before. When I thought I was having a heart attack.

It is possible that I am too accommodating for my own good sometimes.

What can I say, I’m eager to please.

Of course, my leftovers only get me so far, I have no clue what is going to happen if/when midnight rolls around and I still have this “cramp”.

Can’t see how I can make it out to the living room like this. Not without a LOT of pain. And sooner or later, I will have to ask one of my roomies to bring me food and water.

And maybe a pee bottle. 🙁

Is this a preview of my future as a full time cripple?

God I hope not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Gee, there’s so many topics to choose from. Global politics, how the streaming revolution has changed television, the plight of the indigenous peoples of Indonesia, alienatingly frank facts about my sex life, maybe even a bon mot or two about the latest celebrity scandal or political brouhaha….

Nah. Too corny. Let’s mix it up a bit and talk about how my legs are dying.

I’ve been trying to grapple with the subject rationally, using this big ol’ brain of mine. What could possibly account for these symptoms?

Nothing minor,. I am afraid. Because whatever it is, it’s weakening all my major leg muscles and inflaming all the joints at the same time.

And it’s progressing. So it can’t be any sort of simple injury.

It could definitely still be an infection. In which case it’s been raging out of control for a really long time now and someone should really look into stopping it.

One would think that if it was an infection, it would have been detected on one of my many visits to the ER.

But I dunno. Maybe it’s some weird kind of thing that doesn’t show up on normal tests.

That would explain a lot.

An infection is the only thing I can think of that would account for how non-localized it is. A tumour would obviously have a locus – the tumour. And a degenerative disease would surely have more symptoms than just leg death.

So it must be something more subtle and/or complex.

It could all be fundamentally neurological. Highly likely given my unchecked diabetes and all the feeling I have lost in my feet.

Plus subtle little things like half my face and most of my left hand going numb.

I have a strong suspicion that I might be in very poor neurological condition indeed. There’s also the random serious pains I get out of nowhere.

Those probably means something is dying.

And yet I still can’t motivate myself to get the shit done I should be getting done. Calling the company about my POS continuous glucometer and getting it working. Calling Ray at Coastal Sleep about my CPAP machine making me wake up gasping for air about thirty minutes after I go to sleep.

That’s very bad.

That can probably be fixed by increasing the pressure a bit. Clearly it’s almost working. Air is getting through, just not quite enough. Kind of like having a slow leak.

If I fixed either or both of those things, my life would undoubtedly get much, much better, and I would be a much happier, saner, and stronger individual.

Maybe that’s why I can’t do it. That’s too much change.

Sounds glib but there might be a lot of truth to that. Even positive change can be very scary to a weak and frightened soul like mine.

The caterpillar can’t know for sure that it will become a butterfly. Maybe it will just die instead, and what could be worse than that?

But I don’t want to be the world’s oldest caterpillar any more.

I want to pupate and grow up. I’ve lingered in this form far too long and it’s gone to see. I need to move on to the next stage so that I might be reborn anew.

But first I need to let that little piece of me die.

And I am not ready for that yet.

I’m not ready for that…. yet.

More after the break,

---

Something that just occurred to me : it’s called a vacation because you vacate your usual home to go on it, thus leaving it vacant.

This changes everything.

---

My addiction to lunch meat is out of control… I’m going to have to quit cold turkey.

---

The paradox of genius

I sometimes wonder if my life would have been better if it had been way harder.

In a lot of ways, being born with a sky high IQ is like being born rich or good-looking. A lot of things are going to come to you with very little real effort on your part and as a result you never need to learn to work hard and overcome yourself.

Then sooner or later, the real world happens, and you reach your limits, and there you stay because you have no experience of ever overcoming your own limitations and so as far as you know, this is it. Those limitations are carved in stone. Anything that doesn’t come easily to you is something you just “can’t do” or are “no good at” and that can never and will never ever change. It’s a fixed attribute.

Compare that to someone who struggles academically. They have no choice but to learn to work hard, focus, and overcome their limitations because otherwise they will fail. Their lot in life is initially much harder than mine.

But there’s a reason it’s the dropouts who go on to found and run Fortune 500 companies and end up rolling in enough dough to make a gingerbread man the size of King Kong’s older brother.

It’s because hard work and focus and drive are way more valuable than being clever.

Yup. Turns out your parents were right. Sorry.

So brains are great and all, and I really appreciate mine (more often than not), but it is clear to me that I might well have been better off having to work for things.

---

I can be more than I am.
I can me more like who I am.

I can be upright, and focused, and strong
I can write my own ticket and sing my own song

I can choose who I am, where I go, what I do
I can live my beliefs and see everything through

I can run with the dogs, I can play with the rest
Because I AM good enough. Matter of fact, I am blessed

So farewell to the shame from just being alive
You’ve kept me from living. From now on, I will THRIVE.

---

There goes that poetry thing again.

I rather like that one, though.

Maybe I will even submit it to something someday!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So I got my x-rays.

The people at Brooke Radiology were their usual awesome and efficient selves. Whole thing, from walking in to walking out again, took less than 20 minutes.

Trust me, kids, things were not always so.

I was in a lot of pain, though, Kinda confirmed that my legs are, in fact, getting worse.

Every day the pain builds faster. Like I keep saying, eventually I will not be able to walk at all, or for no more than a few agonizing steps.

Talked this over with Joe and Julian last night. Had to make sure Joe was up to speed on the fact that I might lose the ability to walk soon.

I really hope it does not come to that but I have to be prepared for the worst.

During said discussion, I pretty much figured out that it;s going to have to be crutches. Wheelchair’s not possible and I refuse to use a freaking walker in public, so that pretty much leaves those gods-damned crutches.

Luckily, I know where to get them, There’s a place on the first floor of the medical building where a couple of my specialists have their offices called Regent Pharmacy and they have loads of that kind of thing.

Crutches, walkers, wheelchairs, canes, braces, insulin pumps, compression socks, orthopedic shoes, colostomy supplies, and all the other medical gizmos that modern medicine might require of the ill.

I understand it’s quite a profitable product line due to the fact that nobody who buys any of the products has the slightest choice in the matter.

$200? That’s outrageous! I’d rather die of liver failure!

As I recall from a time very long ago when I hurt my leg, Regent will rent me a set of crutches. That would be the right way to go seeing as I hopefully won’t need them forever, knock on wood.

If it did become a permanent thing I would serious consider the massive lifestyle change that getting a wheelchair would entail.

Because I really do hate crutches. When I used them before I hated every minute of it. They are brutally painful on the armpits. extremely cumbersome, present constant little spatial riddles for you to solve, and frankly, I am already quite clumsy with the limbs I was born with, thank you very much.

The last thing I need is to introduce a tool into the equation.

But I do kind of want to continue to be able to move around. My life would suck so much more if I had to rely on others to get around.

If I could even secure said others.

So it’s crutches for me. I suppose I can assuage my reluctance by reminding myself that the crutches will also be saving me from the pain I experience when I am on my feet.

I dunno, though. Somehow it doesn’t seem like enough.

Guess I will just have to learn to levitate.

More after the break.

---

There needs to be a “Should I go to the ER?” line.

I don’t feel qualified to make these kinds of decisions.

---

Do you smell smoke?

So I am lying in bed making a futile attempt at sleep when I notice something peculiar.

My legs were on fire.

Or at least that’s how it felt. I has a distinct burning sensation all through the muscles and joints of my legs.

It was not hot enough to be painful, but definitely hot enough to be uncomfortable.

Felt like I had a sauna in my pants.

After pondering this for longer than I would care to admit, I realized it was inflammation of some sort and I had the cure.

So I took a couple of Aleve, and that damped down the flames. I can still feel the heat but I can ignore it quite easily.

Of course, now I feel feverish. Did the heat just move?

I feel like I might be coming down with something. I say this knowing that most of the time when I say it, whatever it is goes away on its own.

So consider this my pro forma medical reportage of my suspicions.

Hell, maybe the act of writing it down kickstarts the healing somehow. Like my ailments go, “Shit,. he’s on to us!” and skedaddle.

It would explain all those futile trips to the ER.

I feel quite feverish, plus I have a runny nose and a somewhat suppressed appetite and that good ol’ feeling of general malaise.

I hate that guy. I should bust him down to Captain Malaise.

I hope Doctor Chao gets back to me about those x-rays soon. I am eager to move my case forward whatever that takes. Plus I want to tell him about all the latest developments and maybe suggest that he get this fixed while I can still walk.

The idea of just blithely going to the ER and pretending like all my symptoms are brand new and acute keeps crossing my mind.

Just to get my answers and attention much faster. Like I said before, if I had gone to the ER instead of my GP, we would be WAY further ahead on my case.

Unless they still didn’t find anything. In which case I would lose my shit.

Because my symptoms are not ambiguous. I am in brutal pain every time I stand up. My muscles tremble and my joints ache like the dickens. Sometimes my body does this fun thing where I spasm to the floor.

So I would most definitely not take “we found nothing, go home, kthnxbai!” as an answer this time.

At least if the x-rays show nothing, I can tell Doctor Chao to check for cartilage damage instead. That’s the most likely culprit in my opinion.

I suppose I could say that at the hospital too.

But I would be saying it a lot louder.

Now I have gone and made myself all angry over a theoretical.

It’s so complicated being me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did the Wound Care thing today.

And yup, was just a bit harder than last time (on Friday) to get to and from the car. The pain built up just a little bit faster and I felt just a little bit crazier and I was just that little bit more of a wreck when I got home.

And I don’t know how much more of this I can take. At some point, possibly within the following week, I will simply not be able to make it.

And then what?

I’ll still have places. I got to go. Medical places. Important places. Non-optional places.

So I will have to get there somehow.

Stopping in the middle to rest is possible if somewhat absurd and humiliating. Not sure where I would rest and it would most likely involve sitting on the floor in a hallway. hence the humiliation part.

I could bring a chair. Nah, they don’t make chairs that are both portable and sturdy enough to hold my bulk which are light enough for me to carry.

No matter how I slice it, I am going to need some sort of support device soon. I don’t see any way around it.

And when that happens, I will have to go see Doctor Chao to both update him on the state of my decrepitude and to see if he knows how I get the process started to get the province to pay for whatever it is that will help me to walk.

I am thinking a lot about braces of some sort lately. Don’t know why, it’s not like having big bulky metal braces on my legs is any less cumbersome than crutches or a wheelchair plus they tend to be quite loud and hence attention attracting.

Not good for the ol’ social anxiety at all. But I suppose the only way to get around that issue entirely would be if they made me bionic.

Not an option, as far as I know.

Unsurprisingly, did not get those X-rays yet. Didn’t even bother bringing the lab req with me to Wound Care today because I knew there was little chance I would be up for doing the x-rays afterward.

Tomorrow for sure, though. Can’t let this drop. Got to get X-rays if I am to stand a chance of saving these legs of mine from obsolescence and save myself from a pretty serious lifestyle adjustment.

No matter what mode of locomotive support I end up using, I am going to need more room. Not sure how the fuck that is going to work,

Maybe I will finally get rid of this king sized bed in favour of something queen-sized and maybe even somewhat new-ish.

There’s all these companies touting their less-than-extortionately priced buy-online mattresses these days. All supposedly also the most comfortable sleep ever.

I might need financing help but if they really are that good, I can totally see sinking serious cash into something like that,

Better sleep makes everything better all across the spectrum.

There’s a bit of wisdom floating around that says that if it gets between you and the ground, it’s worth getting the best you can.

So shoes, beds, tires, and so on.

I totally agree.

More after the break.

---

One of us…. one of us…

Instant furry classic right there.

You’re right, folks. We’re taking over the world. Once enough of us were working in the animation field to steer projects, y’all were DOOMED.

Buy a tail and learn to bark, bitch!

This will be our planet soon.

Bow before your cute fuzzy overlords!

MUA HA HA HA, etc.!

---

Deep into the night

It’s almost 9:30 and I still haven’t had supper yet.

This is after having “lunch” just before five.

Why? Because in both cases, getting my food involved getting up and going to the kitchen and back, and it took me a long time to work up the nerve to do so because I knew the experience would be painful and traumatic and would lead to my returning to my computer in a far unhappier state that would not go away right away.

Getting “lunch” was bad enough. I was sweating bullets from the pain by the time I got back here, and that’s WITH taking several breaks along the way.

By all rights, I should probably be in some kind of assisted living situation by now. It will not be long before I can’t do a lot of things for myself.

And I have no idea how to handle that. I feel helpless to deal with being helpless. I know that it means I should look for help but my social anxiety makes help-seeking very hard for me. So I am, for the moment, balking at the prospect.

Clock is ticking, though, and obviously it would be better to at least start dealing with problem BEFORE it becomes a crisis and I am desperate.

Getting my x-rays tomorrow will be a good start but I will need to do a lot more before I can be sure I will retain bipedal locomotion even if my legs degrade to the point where I just plain can’t stand up any more.

I really hope it doesn’t come to that. But it just might. So I gotta prepare.

I wonder if there’s a pamphlet out there from Pueblo, Colorado called “So you have just lost the use of your legs….. ” that might point me in the right direction.

But, ya know, Canadian. From Igloo, Saskatchewan.

I want to believe that I will get the full use of my legs back. But before then there will be a period where they ain’t not good to me, and I have to survive that somehow.

Please at least leave me the ability to go to the toilet by myself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, And I still haven’t eaten. Guess I am skipping another meal tonight.

God fucking damn it.

Took on too much when getting my lunch together just now.

Won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that I got so much going that I was in frigging agony way before it was done, and so my life once more became an impromptu urban melodrama as I fought to get my food ready and get back to the computer with it before I completely collapsed.

I made it, knock on metaphorical wood. But this is the kind of shit that makes you miss being bored, ya know what I mean?

---

In other news, the new chair is assembled and installed thanks to Joe and Julian. Love you so much, you two! You do so much for me.

And so far it is quite sturdy and comfy. The all-important lumbar support is taking a little getting used to – sort of feels like someone always has their hand on my back.

But in the best possible way, giving me support exactly where I need it. Woo-hoo!

Overall, I think there will be a transition period as my body gets used to the new chair. I’ve already had a few odd pains and cramps from it.

Makes sense. After all, the previous one lasted twenty years. That’s a lot of time for me to get used to it and vice versa.

And while it was more of a torture device than anything else at the end and I am royally glad to see it go, I do appreciate all the years the previous chair supported me.

It’s like the end of a relationship. Sure, things were bad there at the end, but let’s not forget there were far more good years than bad.

Goodbye, old chair. We went through a lot together.

But now it’s time to move on!

---

Had a bad spell earlier today. Felt very agitated and tense and irritable. That old “ready to jump out of my own skin” feeling I get from time to time. Most unpleasant.

Ironically, I learned that the cure for that is exercise just in time for me to be too sick to exercise. Ha ha ha.

But I managed to do a little bit of low-impact stuff and that was enough to let me get a few hours of sleep at least.

My life is so exciting.

Tomorrow, I will have Wound Care at 8:45 am, and then I can get my X-rays after that.

Assuming I am not too tired by the Wound Care thing to do it. I might well be, in which case Julian and I will just have to make a separate trip.

But it has to be done ASAP. No letting it fall by the wayside like I have with that pee test I still have not done.

I am trying to save my freaking legs here. I do not want to end up in a wheelchair, or using one of those scooters.

Lord save me from being yet another fat dude on a scooter.

Because everybody knows why you’re on that thing.

Because you got too fat to walk.

More after the break.

---

A pleasant night out…..?

I love our weekly trip to Denny’s.

As I keep saying, it’s the highlight of my week. Especially now that I do my grocery shipping online every Sunday.

That makes the Denny’s On Sunday ritual the only non-medical trip I take each week.

Which is kind of sad.

But what is truly, tragically sad is that my health issues are encroaching on it, too.

The day of my officially becoming physically handicapped draws ever closer. Now, even just the tiny amount of standing I have to do to get to between the apartment and the car or the car and Denny’s or the car and Wound Care damn near kills me.

I am sitting here sweaty and panting and in pain in many places like I was just on a death march and all I did was go from the car to my computer here.

As recently as a couple of months ago, I would have considered that a negligible amount of effort and pain, but now I can barely make it.

How long before that’s no longer true? Till I can’t even make it that far? Could be tomorrow. Could be a month from now. But it’s going to be soon.

If these shadows remain unchanged, I do not see myself walking on Labour Day.

I really, really do not want to go there. I don’t want to be a cripple. I don’t want to be a huge hassle for myself and everyone near me. I don’t want to have to deal with all the complications inherent in the use of whatever mobility device I end up using. I don’t want to have my life options severely curtailed by a serious disability.

And I especially do not want to feel trapped in a chair or chained to a walker or otherwise unable to do much without some artificial exoskeleton propping me up.

So I really hope those X-rays reveal something the doctors can use to make me well again. I really don’t want things to get worse. My life is depressing enough without being an invalid who can’t even get to the kitchen and back any more.

I have done things myself for my entire life. Out of necessity, of course, because there was nobody else to do them for me. But still.

Having to rely on others to do simple things for myself would drive me buggy. I have extremely little experience in relying on others for anything and the prospect does not exactly appeal to me.

I need autonomy, dammit. Freedom. Space to breathe. I need to be free to do as I please and to a certain extent make things up as I go.

What is inside of me is constantly changing and I have to be free to change with it.

That’s the only form of stability I know.

And if I am forced to rely on others, it is guaranteed to bring out my bossy, demanding, cranky side and nobody wants THAT.

So for the sake of everyone, please let me save my autonomy.

I promise I’ll be good!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And my doom continues to dos-y-do.

The “cramp” still hasn’t gone away, but I am getting good at managing it.

Largely via the radical innovation known as “limping”,

By favoring the other leg, I can use the bad one just to pivot without putting my full weight on it and thus manage to get around.

Which is a big relief, because without being able to even get around the apartment, I would have had no choice but to call 911.

After all, if I was genuinely crippled, I wouldn’t have even been able to make it down to the car to be driven to the hospital.

So phew on that. That…. would have sucked.

Then again, I would have gotten prompt attention. And they would have had a hard time missing my problems entirely and shooing me home when I couldn’t fucking walk,

No see, THIS time, I can’t leave until you actually fix me.

Your move, assholes.

But whatever. Now I am back on the slow track, so to speak.

And it’s even slower than I thought. I had planned to ask Joe and/or Julian to drive me to our local Brooke Radiology so I could get the X-rays of my knees today

So I decided to Google them to see what their weekend hours were, and it’s a good thing I did, because it turns out they are nonexistent.

Can you believe it? Those pricks are not open on the weekends at all! This flabbergasts me. How can they be closed when they are the only medical imaging service for the whole freaking government?

As far as I know, anyhow.

So I am quite miffed at that. Gee, thank goodness nobody ever breaks anything or has cancer that needs detecting or needs a fetal ultrasound on the weekend.

The kicker? If I had gone to the ER instead, I would have been X-rayed, ultrasounded, and quite possibly had tea leaves read over me by now.

And I was looking forward to getting something as concrete as X-rays done. That seems like an exciting advancement of the plot of my bleeding demise to me. I was looking forward to maybe finally getting somewhere with all this.

Oh well. They will be open on Monday. I will just have to wait,

---

Oh, and my new office chair arrived yesterday. Joe and Julian are down in our building’s gym assembling it as I type these words.

They had to take it down there because there’s no room to do it up here. I am quite excited to finally be getting a chair that works.

It’s pretty cheap. I chickened out on my plan to spend at least $200 on it so I would get something of good quality and got this one for a bit under $100.

Spending more money than absolutely necessary can be hard for me.

But it has the all-important lumbar support and that could save me a hell of a lot of back pain. My lumbar region is Ground Zero for my back pain and I have fantasized about having some support there many times.

Right now, I am just worried that it will be a cheap piece of crap that can’t hold my weight. Of course I am only thinking of that consideration now.…

Oh well. If it shatters beneath my bulk, I will pursue a refund, and next time, I will spend a wee bit more.

More after the break.

---

And so I fall

Well, I did my weird fall again. That makes four times at least.

You know, the one where it feels like an invisible giant is bashing me to the ground? That one. I was retrieving my Denny’s order from outside our apartment door and somehow the bag containing it got stuck in the door and I tugged a couple of times and that was enough to set off the avalanche.

I had just enough time to shout, “Oh fuck, OH FUCK!” and then I was flop-bott down on my floppy butt again.

Once more, no real harm done. If I have to fall somewhere, that’s pretty much the best place. Nature provides us with a natural cushion at that exact spot so that we can survive learning to walk and it occasionally serves the same function as an adult.

After I fell, I found myself afraid to try to get back up. That probably came from some long dormant memory from the days when I was new to bipedal locomotion too, because it was a very primal kind of fear.

But as in days of yore, my urge to actually get places overcame my fear. After all, I sure as fuck didn’t want to live the rest of my life on the floor!

So I eventually got up the nerve to try to get up. And it took a few tries, but I did it, hence my being here to type this.

The first few times I was foolishly trying to get up like a normal person would. From being on hands and knee up to on my knees then standing up fully.

Not gonna happen. My muscles lack the strength.

Instead, I ended up finding some place I could put my hands (inside a full laundry basket, weirdly enough) so I could use my much more reliable arms to boost myself up to where my wimpy legs could take over.

Lack of serious harm aside, though, this makes me realize that I have to give considerable thought to whether it is safe for me to be home alone.

I’m thinking no. Which is a rather big problem.

Because I would never dream of asking Joe and Julian to take up babysitting duties. That would basically make it so that Julian would be stuck at home while Joe is at work.

UNACCEPTABLE. Not even a consideration.

But I can’t assume that I will always be able to get out of whatever mess I get myself into. I could end up in real trouble one day.

Maybe I need to live in an assisted living facility of some sort. Either that or the Province is going to have to pay for a full time caretaker for me.

Neither of those sound either pleasant or probable.

I will have to think on it some more. In the meanwhile…

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, managed to get to the gosh darn GP today.

Nothing spectacular came of it. We talked about my dizziness on rising. He looked at my latest lab results from the ER and noted that I am – get this – sodium deficient.

Well bowl me over with a chicken.

Now he certainly didn’t want to tell a very sickly fat dude who is pushing 50 to eat more salt, so instead he told me to drink less water.

Um, no. I refuse to see my 3-4L/day water habit as unhealthy. It’s falling behind on my hydration that makes me ill, not overdoing it.

So I will add the salt back into my diet.

Now I just need proof that I also have a caffeine deficiency and things can go back to normal. Ha ha ha.

---

Anyhow, that’s the dizziness on rising. But that’s honestly no big deal. I can cope with it. Just means I have to take things slow when I first get up, with an option of sitting back down till the room stops spinning,

My real problem is my legs, or rather as I realized, my knees.

All my leg pain is centered around my fragile knees. No big surprise in retrospect, they have been fucked up ever since that incident way back at Nerdvana where I fucked them up by crawling on all fours to pick up a remote.

I was told at the time that I had cartilage damage on both knees. And then they told me that cartilage damage just plain can’t be fixed.

Ya don’t say. It’s a major part of dozens of parts of the human body yet modern medicine, which can replace entire hearts, grow new organs in a test tube, reprogram your immune system, oh and create entirely new organisms via CRISPR, can’t fix a little strip of busted cartilage on a fat guy’s knee?

Anyhow, it’s not a big surprise that as I age those knees are getting worse. Right now, the next step is to go get X-rays of said knees and see what they show.

My guess is nothing, if it” a cartilage issue, but I did take a fall onto them around a month ago, so it is a good idea to look anyhow.

If/when they don’t find anything, I imagine the next step will be an ultrasound. Unlike X-rays, they handle soft tissues just fine.

So I have some hope for my continuing ability to walk. Hopefully I won’t just hit another dead end where they more or less tell him I’m not worth fixing.

Hell I still have a big ol hernia I was told they couldn’t fix either.

i guess I should have thought of that before being someone they see as worthless.

Not that I’m bitter.

I will do my best to get the X-ray done tomorrow. The secret is to not try and fold it in with any other tasks.

I basically got one mission’s worth of endurance in these legs and that’s it.

Having to go do Wound Care an hours after Doctor Chao was quite painful.

Why must life hurt me so?

More after the break.

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So over this!

Just for the record, I am so very, VERY over going to the kitchen and back being a fucking bloodsport every single time.

The latest development : remember that “cramp” I mentioned? The one that would show up just under my right kneecap sometimes when I had been sitting down for a long time? The one I knew was a “cramp” because it went away have four steps?

Well it stopped doing that. It was there the entire time I was hobbling about getting my 7-11 order from the door. Every freaking step there was another red-hot stab of bone pain to remind me of exactly how fucked I am.

The answer : very.

Now I am back at the computer, panting like a rented mule and rubbing my various sore areas to make sure I didn’t lose any parts along the way.

So far so good, though a few bits feel like they are considering jumping ship the next time the opportunity comes up.

This shit has got to end. Like I said before. it all recedes into the background of my mind after I sit or lay down for a while and that seems to always coax my mind into thinking it really wasn’t that bad and this time I will be ready.

But it really was that bad. Worse, even. And instead of being ready I am traumatized anew by it.

I find myself longing for braces or splints or the like. Something to immobilize my errant knees and give me some much knee-ded (see what I did there?) stabilization when I walk and thus both protect the poor patellas from further injury and give me some relief from all this god damned pain.

Pretty sure that is what they would do if I went into the ER with fresh injuries resulting in my current crippled condition. Get me in some sort of supportive framework.

But I suppose the medical system figures that if you made it to the doctor’s office, it can’t be all THAT big of a deal.

Remember, the doctor’s only real job is to get you to leave so he can move on to the next fee. Er, patient.

Again, not that I’m bitter. Nope. not at all.

Oh well, Hopefully tomorrow I will get those X-rays done and then next week I will talk with Doctor Chao on the phone about the results and what comes next.

I have to keep forcibly reminding myself that this is not forever. Human beings can be repaired. The road to full recovery might be long, twisted, and painful, but some day I will be able to walk without pain again.

I’ll still choose not to when I can avoid it.

But it will be nice to have the option.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling kind of depressed at the moment, despite the sunshine outside my window.

Been thinking about what I have been calling The Suffering in my mind. It’s all this pain from my mental wounds both past and present that keeps me from moving forward.

It’s like I can’t truly heal myself when I have all this Suffering to do. And as long as that’s true, I never have to face the world and grow up.

This is my Suffering, it is both my burden and my shield.

No, that’s too simplistic. It’s a piece of the puzzle but it’s no solution.

Because why do I need to hide from the world so badly, then? What makes me afraid to grow up? What convinced me that the entire adult world is nothing but another stretch of midnight tundra for me to die on? Why am I so sure I could never survive out there?

I think it must trace back to my sense of total abandonment, I am stuck in the abandoned child’s mindset, where I am forlorn and helpless and my only hope is to attract a caregiver via my charming and piteous helplessness.

You know. Like a real man.

So now I must be my own annoying therapist and ask : what would being able to survive on my own mean to me?

First answer ; I don’t know. The bottom falls out of my brain when I try to think about it. It is such a deep challenge to the fundamental structure of my entire psyche

Logically, it would be a gain, but emotionally it definitely reads as a massive loss.

I think it might be that my sense of abandonment runs so deep that I cannot truly imagine myself as being strong enough to survive on my own.

When I try, I can’t get past the ancient feeling that if I am strong enough on my own, people will TRULY abandon me forever, and then I’d be truly fucked.

Even though by definition I don’t need them any more. I am strong enough on my own.

That’s the foundational assertion of the entire syllogism.

So it’s an emotional paradox. In order to move forward, I have to imagine a world and a life in which I was as perfectly capable of handling modern life as any other citizen.

After all, billions are handling them just fine as I type things.

And some of THEM are idjits. Or at least way dumber than ME.

Which brings me back to the need to become harder. Something in me has to solidify and become tougher and stronger and less sensitive if I am to heal up and be strong.

And I have been dodging that necessity for a very long time. But why? What am I afraid of giving up? Is it just the pain and loss of innocence I fear, or something else?

What would losing that last little part of me mean?

Dunno. But that’s enough skullduggery for now.

More after the break

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I bet immortals procrastinate a lot.

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You don’t see a lot of people who are both funny and stupid. Wit skews smart. Even the comedian with the dumbest, cheapest, easiest jokes has to have something going on.

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Secrets of the Changeling

Obviously, The Changeling is me.

The name refers to the theory that the European myth of the “changeling”, namely a child being replaced by a duplicate from the faerie folk, may have actually referred to autistic children, who can indeed seem like strange and inhuman children.

I had been pondering my own bizarre nature as a child – no interest in toys, or energetic play on the playground, or play really at all in the usual sense.

All I wanted to do was read and play games and watch TV.

And I was a weirdly calm, serious, sensible child from the very beginning. I spoke like an adult and had a dragon sized appetite for information and never ran or screamed or shouted or otherwise acted up.

That made me one strange kid indeed. Positively spooky at times, I would imagine.

And that got me wondering if I might have been mistaken for a Changeling child too. So I wrote that little conversation between two worried parents as a way to work through some of the idea connected with this notion.

It’s a sensitive subject for me, for obvious reasons. That weird little boy was me, and I still remember what it was like to be him,

I tried so hard to get people to like me. But I just did not have the tools I needed. All I had was the ability to charm adults by being adorably precocious, and even that did not work for very long.

Eventually, the strange chill that lay beneath the charm wore through and they abandoned me in favour of more easily understood (and withstood) children.

Nobody knew how to deal with someone like me. So they just…. didn’t. I was not equipped to fight for what I needed at all. So the path of least resistance was to rebuff me when I came to them for comfort, knowing that I would then just go off and be miserable and therefore stop making them deal with me.

It doesn’t matter if it’s wrong. All that matters is that you’ll get away with it.

Nobody ever suffered any consequences for abusing, neglecting, or rejecting me. Not my bullies, not my teachers, not the school administrators….. and not my family either.

Lesson : learn to inflict consequences on those who wrong you. Give them the unequivocal message that you are not prey and they need to back the fuck off.

So much for civilization. That’s for grownups. For children, it’s jungle savagery all the way so that children get properly brutalized before civilization makes them wimps.

No wonder they make us read Lord of the Flies. As a fuckling warning.

I didn’t ask to be a Changeling child. I wasn’t trying to be weird. I was just being who I was, just like any other kid.

But I suffered for it anyway.

I don’t know how many times an adult suddenly walked away from me while shaking their head as if to clear it after waking up.

Guess I overloaded their brains.

Story of my life, really.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is the conversation that changed my life.

They thought I was asleep.

“But what IS he, Jo? What could he BE?”

“He is OUR SON. Our perfectly normal HUMAN son. You were there when he was born, You’ve been with him ever since. You’ve washed every nappy, made and fed him every bottle. rocked him to sleep. washed every inch of him hundreds of times and seen that every scrap of human is normal and human and male. Forget what those fools in the village think. Half of them still angels bring babies, Tagra. Our boy is a perfectly normal natural little boy just like all other others in this villain, and that’s final!”

“But he can’t be, Jo. He just can’t. You’ve seen how he looks at people,. Eyes a million years old. And like he already knows everything about them. And they shine so bright, Jo. So bright it frightens me, Jo. Bright like a star and twice as cold, those eyes. And so hungry to know things it’s like they could eat you, swallow you up like a trout with a worm, and not even slow down. ”

“Don’t talk such nonsense, woman. Boy can’t help how his eyes are, can he? Launny the Leadsmith has an eye red as blood, and nobody thinks he’s… unnatural.

“Don’t they though? And you know there’s a lot more to it than the eyes. Like how he knows things. Things a boy his age has no way of learning and no business knowing. Did you know that Tina from down the shops was over here yesterday barkin’ at me because our boy Rob told her Tina and Roger that everyone dies eventually and that their parents will die before they do?”

“He said what? Hahaha!”

“Stop laughing, it’s not funny, Jo. Those kids were up all night crying!”

“All right, all right, my dear Tagatha. You’ve made your point. He’s an odd one, our boy. He’s spooky, and knowing, and his eyes could make a saint nervous. But no matter how weirdling strange he is, he’s still out son, Tag, He’s still the boy who sat in my lap and looked up at the stars and asked all those questions. He’s still my best little helper who knows more about running my shop at 5 than old Titch knows at 50 and he was worked for me all my life. And he is still the little boy who won’t go into the Old Barn by himself because he thinks the rats there will eat him.

He’s just a little boy, Tag, no matter how unusual he might be. And there is no way I am going to let the ignorance and cowardice of others come between me and my son. “

“And neither am I. Thanks, Jo. You always make things make sense again. ”

And I always will, my dearest Tag. ”

I didn’t understand a lot of what they said that night.

But I knew two things now :

There was something deeply wrong with me.

And it makes my parents sad.

More after the break.

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A life of adventure

One good thing about being as sick as I am is that it sure makes life exciting.

Why, even the most mundane of tasks becomes a booby-trapped maze full of dangers and hazards that would give Lara Croft a run for her money.

For example, just to retrieve the Dinner of Random Whatever I See First, I had to cross the Bedroom of Pulsating Vertigo, span the Living Room of Light and Sound, navigate the Kitchen of Leg Torture, then barely make it back to Home Base at this here computer before falling to the floor, dinner going everywhere, from the pain.

Then I am back here in my (soon to be replaced!) computer chair and ready to blog and eat for the second time today.

Woops! Psych! I got the left hand/left left numbness again, which makes it harder to both type and eat!

Like I said, my life is one big adventure.

Well I have at least finally taken some positive action : I made an appointment to see my GP Doctor Chao at 9:30 am on Friday.

Well I hope he’s ready for a workout, because I have a lot of stuff to dump on him. My pattern of slow deterioration has continued apace, letting problems sneak up on me, and so I have accumulated quite the backlog.

It doesn’t help at all that I keep going to the ER when I think I should only to be told nothing is wrong with me.

Hence my treating part of my hand and part of my face going numb as a total meh.

I know it will pass quickly. Of course, one of these times it might not, and honestly these incidents are probably a terrible warning sign of something or others, but they keep checking me for signs of stroke, heart attack, and so on, and not finding anything, so I guess that means it’s my problem and my problem alone.

“Sir, we have to ask you to leave. The doctors can’t figure out what’s wrong with you and it’s making them sad. We’re beginning to think you’re doing it on purpose. ”

Not that I’m bitter. I’m beyond that.

By this point, I’m downright acrid.

I am one hell of a satirist, though.

So whatever, I guess. I will see Doctor Chao and see if I can pull of a miracle and actually get the medical establishment to pay attention to me long enough to fix me.

Remember, I had to badger them for a year to just get them to schedule my heart procedure, and then wait another six months for them to actually do it.

And that had all kinds of very clear medical imaging to establish the absolute necessity of the procedure. Still I had to keep phoning them in order for them to continue to remember that I exist.

I hope it doesn’t come to that this time.

But if it does, I am ready to fight.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Everything is fine. I’m not in much pain, my chest is not complaining, my breathing is normal and even. and my legs are not screaming out as if they are being stretched on the rack by some demented Inquisitor.

Until I stand up. Then everything goes straight to hell.

There’s no grace period any more. The second I stand up, the pain begins, and the clock starts counting down on how long I can stay upright before total collapse.

And the longer I am up, the worst the pain gets. So it’s really a torture test. How long can I endure the pain before it overtakes me?

How very fun.

And it doesn’t stop the moment I sit down again either. It gets a zillion times better, but the malady lingers on. My muscles will continue to ache and my head will continue to pound and it will take me a long time to catch my breath.

You know you’re doing poorly when getting up to take a leak is a cardio workout.

But because I can go back to feeling relatively healthy by simply not getting up for a while, it’s easy to sort of half-forget just how bad off I am.

Until I stand up.

And then it’s kind of like being traumatized all over again. Not totally – I obviously don’t literally forget. But my mind’s attempts to snap back into shape after being deformed by the pain tend to dull the memory of just how much it sucks,

Better than just saying depressed about it, I suppose.

Kind of makes a walking-free lifestyle seem appealing. But only in theory. In practice, whatever the modality, getting around sans standing up would be an enormous hassle and a lot of work and involve a lot of complicated bullshit that would make me wish for legs that work a million times a day.

But as a dreamy little fantasy, it’s quite nice. I picture myself as some kind of spoiled and overindulged member of a heavily inbred royal family who has too many birth defects to be able to live a normal life so he has a whole cadre of servants who are dedicated to keeping him healthy, comfortable, and satisfied.

Such a wet dream for us oral retentive types. Maximum reward, minimum effort.

What I truly need to do is get someone to look at my legs. Because they have been getting weaker and weaker for a long time now.

Dunno if the problem is the legs themselves, or the nerves controlling them, Both are a possibility given all the time I spend with my 300 pounds resting on my big ol butt.

Or it could be cardiovascular.

All I know is that I want it fixed, and that means going against all my avoidant personality disorder instincts and bringing it to someone’s attention.

Doctor Chao’s, presumably. GPs are supposed to be the gatekeepers of medicine, after all. Everything starts with them,

But with me, it’s never just a matter of knowing what I should be doing. That’s the easy part. It’s finding the energy and focus and motivation to do it that’s the tricky bit.

There is something fundamentally broken in me. A vital organ of the soul does not and can not do its job and so where motivation should accumulate, solidify, and lead to positive action it just flows right back out again, leaving me drained and in despair.

I need to patch that shit up somehow.

But there is still that enormous Wound in me, crippling me, keeping me down.

I need to find what is keeping me from being able to heal it. I know i’s a sickness of the soul and that the solution will have to be spiritual.

But I don’t know much about things like that.

Guess I had best get my ass to learnin’.

More after the break.

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Oops! Free food!

Tonight’s adventure with ordering in : getting the wrong order.

I ordered me some KFC tonight. My usual order – 4 piece meal, Mega Individual Fries, Individual Gravy, Individual Coleslaw.

That’s been my usual order ever since I was in UPEI. So when I opened the bag that was first delivered to me, I instantly knew it was wrong.

Instead, I found two chicken sandwiches of some sort. an Individual Macaraoni Salad, an Individual Potato Salad, and 4 Smore’s Brownies.

The only thing they got was my usual half-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi.

So I had to bring up the Skip the Dishes site and look for the “wrong order!” option. Which did not seem to be there, but then it was.

Then I had the option of taking Skip the Dishes credit or let them try delivering it again. I chose the latter rather than start the ordering process over when I was already hungry.

And then it displayed these golden words : Feel free to keep or throw away the wrong order you received.

Score! I got a whack of KFC in the fridge now. Gonna be eating that for a while.

Hope those sandwiches are something normal-ish and not “crazy hot” or something.

Gonna give the Smore’s brownies away…. except for one. Yeah, I know I should not be eating something like that, but I am only human.

And I got lots of insulin.

The latest in suffering

The latest trick my body is pulling is that sometimes when I get up after sitting for a while, I have a kind of hard cramp in that spot under my right kneecap that has been giving me trouble on and off.

This leads to every step being painful enough to make me cry out in pain, and that’s saying something given how shy and avoidant I am.

It goes away after a half-dozen steps though, which is what lead me to conclude it was a cramp. A few steps is enough to pop the knot.

Not fun, but at least it’s fixable and not something permanent.

Life is clearly coming for my ability to walk.

Better get on that toot suite.

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Aaaand I just had another incident of feeling like I am being battered to the ground by an invisible but powerful giant.

It’s such a strange experience. I had gone to the kitchen to put something in the fridge, and when I came back, just as I was about to sit down, I felt the first bob.

Just a twitch, like I was doing an extremely brief courtesy.

And I had just enough time to think. “Uh oh” before the bigger bounces, including the one that took me all the way to the floor, came along.

Luckily, I went straight down this time, and thus landed squarely on the big fluffy safety pad that is my big fat butt.

So it didn’t hurt at all. But c’est tres bizarre.

It’s so weird, in fact, that I don’t even know how to Google it.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.