(WARNING : Medical horror ahead. )

Don’t wanna talk about this. But I gotta. So here goes :

I think I might be getting weaker.

Seems like moving around takes more and more effort lately, and causes me more and more pain than ever before.

And that is with the walker.

In fact, the last time I did Wound Care, it took way more out of me than usual, and I was in a fair bit more pain as well.

Ditto with the previous trip to see Doctor Caswell.

What’s worse is that it’s not just the intensity but the nature of the pain that has changed. Lately it feels like I am not so much moving my body around like a normal human being as piloting a set of stilts made of bone and padded with flesh.

When I am on my feet, it feels like my muscle and flesh are just hanging off my bones by the tendons and that all the work is being done by an increasingly small group of muscles that still can generate barely enough force to move me around.

Time to go back to Doctor Chao and remind him that my legs still don’t work and that there is a good chance they are getting worse.

It also means I must once more face the prospect of a time not long from now when the walker won’t cut it any more and I will be looking at either a wheelchair or crutches.

And I hate crutches.

Unless they were the cool kind they call forearm crutches. You know, the kind Jimmy from South Park uses.

You know, this guy!

Those I might be able to live with. They seem far more light and agile and a lot less cumbersome than traditional under the arm crutches.

There’s also leg supporting crutches, known when I was a kid as leg braces. Those might help do what my leg muscles increasingly cannot, and that’s hold me up.

I don’t want any of this to happen, obviously. Ideally I would get normal leg function back and being able to walk around like everyone else again.

But I am the sort of person who can’t relax about something that is bothering him until he makes plans to deal with it or otherwise handle the situation.

And this stuff has been on my mind for weeks now. Ever since my last attack of flu-like symptoms that made me sleep all weekend, practically.

It was after recovering from that when this feeling of my flesh just hanging off the bones became clear to me, and since then I have known I needed to talk it out in this space but have been putting it off because it’s such a scary and depressing subject.

But no one has ever successfully dealt with a problem by not thinking about it. So now I have written in out, and made it real.

Now it is up to me, and nobody else, to get this dealt with instead of doing what I usually do, which is ignore and/or avoid problems until they force me to deal with them by becoming a crisis and taking the issue out of my hands.

Well that’s not good enough, god damn it. Not good enough.

I am not a coward and I am not a child. I can face my problems head on and deal with them an a sensible, adult fashion.

It’s just a matter of pulling myself together and getting it done.

So Monday morning, I will call Doctor Chao’s office and get this ball rolling again.

More after the break.

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The big sad

Surviving a wave of depression right now.

They come and go. I try not to pay much attention to them. They don’t mean anything and they aren’t even necessarily trying to tell me something.

I should be so lucky.

No, it’s just a fluctuation in the neurochemical balances in my brain. I am free to stay safe on the shore and watch the waves go by.

As long as I don’t wade into the water to try to fight the tide, I won’t get wet. I won’t get caught in the undertow. And the shadowy sharks of my subconscious mind can’t get to me here on dry land.

I could slap an attribution on it if I felt it was needed. Maybe this is a delayed reaction to the stuff I talked about in part 1. Maybe this is just a side effect of my subconscious mind processing a block of deep sadness left over from all the hurt I have experienced in my life and then just ignored instead of dealing with the pain.

Why cope when you can escape? Oh, there are so many reasons.

Or maybe I just need a good long cry. It’s still hard for me to arrange that.

Stupid male emotional constipation.

I think the real problem is not the worry that some imaginary male rival or bully will pop out of the woodwork to mock us.

The problem is being afraid to deal with the emotions involved. Crying brings all that pain and fear and distress to the surface so it can be expressed, and when you have the option of just not doing that. it’s easy to just keep putting it off until you have accrued such an enormous backlog of unexpressed emotion that it looms over you like a tidal wave that threaten to destroy you if you don’t keep running away.

Man, I am all about the water metaphors right now.

So basically it’s emotional procrastination. You keep putting off dealing with things until they pile up and then that becomes your excuse to KEEP putting them off and the problem just gets worse and worse.

The only solution is to stop running away and turn around to face that tidal wave and deal with your issues the best you can.

And I swear I’m going to do that soon.

Just… not right now. I have…. stuff.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.