Don’t think I have a lot more time as an ambulatory human left.
Did the Wound Care thing today. Phew, finally. By that point, I’d had the same dressings on my wounds for ten days.
Ew ew ew.
But man, was it rough. From here to the car, from the car to the Community Care Clinic, from the CCC back to the apartment building, then from the car back to this room.
Oh, and while at the CCC, first to reception, then down a long corridor to the waiting area, then from waiting area to the actual CCC for Wound Care, then back down the long ass corridor to leave the clinic as a whole.
This journey seemed longer and harder than ever for me today. There were times I wasn’t sure I was going to make it at all. But I persevered.
But what really tells me my time being upright and bipedal is coming to a close is that while I haven’t had another full collapse like last night, my knees spontaneously buckle for half a second at random moments when I walk.
Right now, all that does is cause me to dip to one side and have to catch myself a bit.
But it won’t be long, I reckon, before I won’t be able to walk without risking a very bad fall at any moment when my knees give out on me.
So I guess it’s time to think about crutches. God damn it.
And Doctor Chao. Because if he had done his fucking job, I would have had that lower spinal CT scan days ago and we might be on our way to a solution already.
Instead, I am stuck in limbo, and it is now up to ME to get things started again.
All because that dipshit Doctor Chao forgot to submit the req for my CT scan.
That mother fucker.
I tried getting in touch with the CT department at RGH to verify that he had not, in fact, told them a damn thing, only to be blocked by nobody answering the phone at Medical Imaging, causing it to dump me to a voice menu.
There, a rather strained sounding robot voice told me that their system can totally take voice-mails, but that the Medical Imaging department did not subscribe to that service.
Well ain’t that fucking lovely.
I should have called back in half an hour or so, but I forgot. Plus I didn’t want to wait through the unskippable five minute Covid information dump that greets you when you call RGH again.
Bu I still should have called back.
I will call again tomorrow, and do my best to resolve the issue. Once I have confirmation that the people at CT have never heard of me, then I can call Doctor Chao’s office and arrange a phone appointment so I can yell at him.
Admit it, he’s got it coming. And from his POV, that’s better than my other recourse, namely complained to the College of Physicians and Surgeons about him.
That’s who certifies doctors in this province and they can be a real bitch to deal with if they think you are not doing your job well.
Doctors get real judgey about that kind of shit.
So we will see how that little talk goes. His saving grace is that I am still far more worried about results than revenge, so as long as he shows remorse and immediately gets things back on track, I will forgive and move on.
But if he doesn’t make me happy in that conversation, I will burn his ass at the stake.
More after the break.
Twilight of the soul
Feeling pretty dark at the moment.
But not despairing or depressed, exactly. Just a very low, dark, brooding mood that makes me feel insular and contemplative and mildly antisocial.
Like what I really want to do is climb up a mountain till I find a nice sturdy rocky promontory to perch atop, like Batman on a gargoyle, and lose myself in my own turbulent thoughts so that I might find a new and better path out come dawn.
It’s my own clumsily poetic way of trying to process my emotions, I suppose. And I need all the help I can get in that department.
I know a million ways to fool myself into thinking I am making progress in my fight for mental health but the truth is, most of it is just the mental masturbation. Writerly wanking of a well-worn psychophallus that produces just enough actual catharsis to give this bullshit the flavour of progress but not enough to produce the real thing.
Because real progress is scary.
Real progress changes things.
Real progress requires doing the difficult and painful emotional work that can actually resolve age-old traumas instead of merely distracting me from my symptoms.
And I don’t know, off the top of my head, what to do about that. It would be glib and easy to say, “Simple. Grow a pair!” and berate myself for being such a delicate little daisy that I can’t bring myself to do what I know need to be done if I am to get better.
Psychologically, at least.
But that would not be helpful. Once again, I find myself feeling like I am stuck in a position from which there are no winning moves. There is no sequence of plays that will get me to where I want to go. No matter how I look at it, I just don’t have what it takes.
So then what? What now?
Well continuing to try to learn how to feed my soul seems like a good start. I have been in a state of spiritual starvation for as long as I can remember and I know there are good, wholesome, healthy, life-affirming things in this world that might really help me but again I have no idea how to find them, let alone access them,
But maybe that’s my problem. I need to know things before I act. I can grok the concept of “feeling my way” in terms of following my intuition instead of my overtaxed and untrustworthy reason, and I even agree that it would probably work, but….
That doesn’t bring me any closer to actually doing it.
I feel like I need to go on a long spiritual journey, but I am too sick to travel and have no spiritual tradition to start from in the first place.
So it’s going to have to be one of those Zen mystic journeys where it all happens inside my head and is all dreamlike and metaphorical and shit.
Frankly, I don’t know if I can summon the earnestness to do that.
I am Gen X, and we are not big on earnestness or believing in things.
But I don’t know where else to turn.
There has to be a way out of this labyrinth.
Even if I have to bash down the walls to make it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.