It’s been roughly a year since I was admitted to Richmond General Hospital after waking up from a nap to find my legs refused to take my weight at all.

That prompted me to call 911. Obviously. Not even I could pretend that was something I could ignore till I felt like dealing with it,.

What followed was a 16 day stay in the hospital and that was… an adventure. It involved such things as two more attacks of sleeping incontinence (I had one a few days prior to my stay), learning that the bedpan was passé (phew!), going out of my mind with boredom because all I had to entertain myself with was a book of crossword puzzles (etc) and Carol Burnett’s autobiography.

I snoozed a lot. It helped pass the time.

Thank goodness that won’t happen again because I have my beloved tablet now.

I also developed a habit of eavesdropping on the old man in the bed next to mine, Helmut, who was cranky, rude, demanding, childish, and in general childish, and hence kind of entertaining.

It was a window into someone entirely unlike myself, and I always appreciate that kind of thing both as a writer and spiritually.

Other highlights included having completely normal, healthy blood sugar for most of my stay, making me wonder what the fuck I am doing wrong in my normal life, as well as sleeping fairly well due to a cocktail of Zopiclone, Gabapentin, and a few other drugs taken every night at bedtime.

In fact, in many ways, I was a lot healthier when I was in the hospital than I am at home. Too bad you have to be sick to get in there.

Anyhow, I brought all that up because here it is, a year later, and my legs still don’t work right and nobody has any idea why..

And that pisses me off.

At this point, an actual treatment for the problem is almost beside the point. I just want to know what the fuck is wrong so that I can adjust to that truth.

I would also like to know if it’s going to get worse. So far, it has stayed around the same for a long time, or possibly gotten a little bit better.

I already told you nice people about the time around a month ago when I realized I had unthinkingly gone from my computer to the apartment door and back without realizing it until I sat back down.

The purpose of all this is to remind myself that my case is dead in the water and has been for a very long time and that the only way that will change is if I become my own advocate and agitate the system into remembering me.

And I don’t wanna. And frankly, I don’t think I should have to.

But here we are.

And here I am, having adapted to my new realities and therefore having a hell of a hard time convincing myself to rock the boat on my own behalf.

I don’t “have” to do it. I can do what I always do : ignore the problem till I stop thinking about it entirely.

But I owe it to myself to try to make things better for myself, and that starts with treating myself better than I was treated and taking my own needs and desires seriously.

And I need to know what the fuck happened to my legs.

So no more adapting, This time I’m going to fight.

More after the break.

The boy who knew too much

i have been thinking a lot about innocence lately.

As patient readers know, I lost my innocence so young, I don’t remember it. And for the longest time, in a very “sour grapes” kind of way, I denied the very existence of innocence, thinking it was something that only existed in the hazy realm of self satisfied nostalgia where it’s always a soft focus sun soaked summer day.

Well, that’s what my nostalgia is like anyhow.

I even went around saying, “innocence is just another word for ignorance!”, the implication being that you shouldn’t put ignorance on a pedestal.

And the thing is, as is often the case with me, what I said is true. I am a soothsayer and the sooth I say is always the truth… but by no means the whole truth.

It is often true in a very misleading way, in fact. It is true that. crudely speaking, innocence can be described as a form of ignorance, but only in the sense that the Empire State Building is a concrete rectangular solid.

See what I mean by true but misleading?

Anyhow, I always knew way more than I should. I think what we call innocence is a vitally important mechanism to keep us from learning and knowing things we simply are not ready for, and when mine was shattered by a stranger’s cock, my brilliant little mind had its safety blanket snatched away and I become far too aware for my own good.

From the big one, no longer thinking the world was a safe or good place, all the way down to seeing the minutiae of how people lie to and mistreat one another without ever intending harm, I developed a truly terrifying level of insight into the dark corners of life on Earth for humans before I was even in school.

And I think that really fucked me up.

Childhood, when it progresses naturally, is a time when most of the world is an incomprehensible grey box to us and as our brains mature, more of the picture is filled in as we become capable of handling it

That can only happen, though, if innocence is left intact to do one of its most important functions : keeping us from knowing how little we know.

But I took in way too much way too young for that. I knew what the road ahead of me in life would look like. I learned about the follies of a child’s self-centered POV and how I would change over the years and even what being old would be like from my beloved sitcoms and other TV shows.

And I wasn’t even supposed to be thinking about those things yet. From what I can tell, proper childhood development requires a POV that develops slowly over time, not one that leaps way ahead with dark insights and grim truths.

Other kids could be innocently egocentric and think things they would eventually realize were silly and childish and act on their emotions and have to learn restraint.

Not me though. I always “knew better”.

In that sense, I feel like I was never really a child. I had no age of magic when I could believe in Santa Claus, have an imaginary friend, or feel like my toys were people.

I completely skipped a lot of key developmental phases and I strongly suspect that a lot of that happened before I was raped, just from the sheer power of my little mind.

Maybe I never stood a chance of being normal, even sans life shattering sexual assault. Maybe there is no timeline in which I was anything like a normal kid.

Maybe it fucks you up solid to have all that knowledge and insight when you are a kid.

But it’s clear to me that I knew far too much for my own good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.