Still recovering from yesterday’s encounter with coldness.
Haven’t confronted Joe about it yet. That will probably happen tonight, when we’re doing out midnight “hanging out to watch things off the PVR” thing.
Still pretty mad about it. I’ve been through this with Joe like five times already, though admittedly, I only deduced that it is probably him yesterday.
I guess there is something about freezing your nuts off in August that sharpened my deductive capacities on that front.
But I have been through it with both Joe and Julian, collectively, like five times before, and each time I was more emphatic about how important it was that nobody EVER lower my thermostat again because incidents like the one from yesterday morning don’t just lead to me feeling cold for a bit, they have lasting health effects that I will be feeling for days and cause a shock to my system that I can ill afford given my fragile health.
Apparently, though, this was not enough incentive for Joe to remember not to do in my room what he presumably does at least a dozen times a day at work which is, like I said yesterday, turning the thermostat all the way down when he leaves a room after school hours so that the school district isn’t paying to heat an empty room overnight.
For most of the year, Joe’s hours begin when the school day ends.
Or maybe Joe naively thought he was saving us money on our heating bill. Which would be very stupid because the heat only kicks in when the room is too cold and therefore only kicks in when it is needed.
Needed especially by the sick guy. Namely me.
And I am always here. That’s what always gets me. I spend the vast majority of my time right here in my bedroom, ergo there are very few times when we would be paying to heat an empty room.
I mean shit, I’m only out of the apartment for like four hours a week. Add in the times I am watching things with Le Gang and it bumps up to maybe twelve hours a week.
The other 156 hours of the week, I am within these same four walls.
So on both a physical and psychological level, it’s vitally important that this little cage of mine remains safe for me.
RIght now, I am worried that being cold gave me a cold. I have a heavy, raspy feeling in my lungs and throat that seems to be getting worse over time.
Plus my nose is running. But it’s always running. So that doesn’t count.
And I am very sensitive to cold. Even the slightest breeze from the one window I still have open (it’s hard to reach) can make me shiver for a few seconds. And even when I don’t feel cold, I still have the urge to huddle under my comforter like a small rodent wiggling deeper into its burrow.
This CANNOT be allowed to happen again. Next time, it could kill me. Or at least send me to the ER.
More after the break.
The absentminded cripple
Sometimes I forget just how fucked up I am.
Took a fall during my Saturday Night adventure. That’s when I order in despite there being nobody around to retrieve my order from the door for me so I have to go get it myself, and for someone in my condition, that’s an adventure.
Got to the door just fine. Too fine, perhaps.
But for some reason, on the way back with my McD’s, the walker kept pitching forward, and eventually it pitched all the way forward and ended up flat on its front on the ground, sending me down on to my knees.
I am pretty sure the fault lay not in my walker but in myself. I think I got overconfident and a bit too keen and was pushing the walker too hard and that is what caused it and I to have a bit of a spill.
No harm done, really. I’m a little shaken up but apart from a slightly abraded feeling (rug burn?) my knees feel fine, and still work, so I think I am okay.
But that got me thinking about how easy it is for me to forget how disabled I am. After all, I spend most of my time either lying in bed or sitting in front of this here compu-box of mine, and therefore the fact that my legs don’t work doesn’t come up much except when I have to go get food twice a day.
Well, and when I get up to pee. But thanks to my receptacle, I don’t have to get to the bathroom for that very often.
Disability is incompatible with dignity.
And that got me thinking about how other people would not find my condition so easy to live with, and that got me thinking about how little attention I pay to the physical world.
I have always lived mostly in my head. I am intensely internally driven. First I retreated into my mind when I was raped, then I was left bored out of my gourd mostly of the time in school, and these two factors made me a thinker.
For me, the “real world” is something I deal with as little as possible.
And that’s bad. There needs to be a balance or you go crazy. My reality is unstable and insecure precisely because there is far too little of the stabilizing influence of the actual, literal, solid., persistent real world in it.
The world of the mind might be comfortable to me, but it is not safe.
And yet, to change that would be to alter lifelong habits of thought and behaviour so ingrained into me that to alter them seems almost impossible.
Especially because, due to my inability to clean, my immediate environment is not exactly a delight for the senses.
It’s mostly awful, to be honest.
So trying to extend my awareness into that level of reality is a no go. It will only drive me to despair about how helpless I am to do even the most basic things for myself.
Maybe I will finally go through with a plan to go someplace nice where I can just sit on a park bench and soak up some fresh air and sunshine for a while.
That always made me feel better when I was going to VFS.
Of course, Julian would have to drive me there and pick me up after and it would have to be pretty damned close to a parking space.
But I think an hour at Garry Point Park could do me a lot of good.
Even if all I do there is play games on my tablet.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.