Well I seem to be back to normal. Knock on wood.
I mean, I dunno, I’ve thought I was OK many time before in this recent period and instead things just picked a new way to fuck up, but I have eaten many times without ill effect today and I don’t feel dizzy or ill, so I am taking the W.
Still dunno WTF made me so miserable for four plus days. Which means I still should go see a doctor or two about it all. That would be the smart, grownup thing to do.
But I know I won’t. Like a little kid, once it stops hurting I forget all about it and any resolve I had to subject myself to the lengthy and boring Purgatory that is going to the ER or Urgent Care is long long gone.
I could book an appointment with my questionable GP, Doctor Chao, but it’d be a week before I could even get him on the phone, so meh.
My best guess as to a diagnosis is that it started with the same bug Joe got (he’s fine now by the way) and that emptied me out (and how) and that, in turn, set me up for a serious level of dehydration.
Which is plausible as far as it goes but it doesn’t go all the way. I did manage to get water into me throughout the ordeal, though maybe not enough. There has to have been another factor at play.
Which brings me back to the idea of an inflammatory response of some sort. The fact that Naproxen (generic Aleve) helped me feel better during the crisis is telling but far from conclusive in and of itself.
It could easily have been the placebo effect.
Assuming it wasn’t, then it could have been histamine related. It’s possible that aging has cause my allergies to get worse, just like it made my mother’s eczema worse.
I did have a number of sneezing fits recently. Not super severe ones but more than just a sniffle or two.
So that could be what triggered all this nonsense. I am planning on acquiring some antihistamines in order to test this theory.
It could be that by treating the inflammation and not the allergy, I was addressing the symptom and not the root cause.
Whatever. It’s absurd that I am trying to diagnose myself in the first place. Logic and sense would dictate that I stop being such a child and go to the ER or UC already.
That’s what Joe did, and they fixed him right up.
But he’s sensible, and I am not. And I need to learn to accept that. I’m terribly smart and incredibly bright and I can even be extremely wise when giving advice to others but I am not a practical, sensible, grown up type person like he is.
I’m a strange alien child-thing who is ill suited for life on Earth and who is definitely going to continue to do foolish things for emotional reasons out of a lack of self-discipline and an inability to focus.
And the sooner and better I accept this about myself, the sooner and better I can stop trying to force myself to be someone I am not and start adapting to who I really am and seeing what I can do with what I’ve actually got.
And that means shedding a lot of my bitterness and cynicism, I think. I think that one of my assets is a capacity for enthusiasm and belief and if I am to unlock that potential that means I have to jettison a lot of the negative thinking that I habitually employ and prepare myself for the possibility of disappointment and disillusionment.
Maybe it’s not always better to never have hope in the first place.
More after the break.
The evening after
So far so good.
I still feel kind of off, but that’s to be expected. Heck, I rarely feel 100 percent well even on my good days, so if I did feel that way now I’d suspect delirium.
In other words, I have returned to my standard level of pain and misery.
My appetite is still strong, which is good. I have some catching up to do. After all, I ate very little for four days.
I think I was victim of impaired thinking for a lot of that unpleasant time. The pain, the stress, the fear, and the uncertainty combined kept me in an adrenalized fog and prevented me from thinking clearly about my situation.
But maybe that’s just my current, calm, rational-ish mind judging my fogged up mental state by its own standards quite unfairly.
Maybe I did the best that I could. Imagine that.
Somehow, I gotta let myself off the leash. I know that there’s a part of me that wants to run free and wild and let life just wash over me as I run around experiencing everything that I can without feeling the constipated left brain need to know what will happen before I even make a fucking move.
How the hell am I supposed to learn and grow like that?
I need to follow my heart. But I don’t trust it. I can’t verify its intentions. I can’t make sure what it wants is safe before I take its direction. I have no idea where it will take me.
And I know that’s okay. That’s life. That’s how just this whole wacky game works.
But I am so scared.
Scared deep inside, where it’s hard to reach. That poor little boy that got brutally violated by that horrible man is still in there denying the reality he is in in an attempt to negate the horror he’s experienced.
That’s far too high a price to pay, but he doesn’t know that. What’s happened to him is bigger than his entire world and worse than he can even comprehend, so what can he do except wish it all away?
He learned that monsters are real when he was still afraid of the dark.
And that’s too young.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.