In short : not good. Vis :

That’s the basic story. Apparently I have the sort of injury that causes me some pain but is not actually serious enough to, you know, do anything about. The doctors (junior and senior) basically told me to keep using that Voltaren and taking my Tylenol Artritis and to work on my quad muscles (big muscles on top of leg, between hip and knee) to strengthen them and thus strengthen the muscular support system for the knee. Makes sense to me.

But it irritates me to no end that I am once more in a medical gray area. I was really hoping for some kind of definitive answer and solution. It’s X, the treatment is Y, and that will fix it right up.

Instead, I get wishy washy bullshit and a big hunk of my time wasted.

One thing they did mention was putting a brace on the knee. That strikes me as potentially a good idea. If I had something on there that kept the knee from twisting, I could probably ditch the cane and go around more or less like normal.

If not a little better.

The part of the knee that they think is messed up is called the meniscus, which I thought was the name for the curve that forms on the top of a liquid.

Show what my home ec teacher knew. Oh well, I hated her anyhow. Child hating stuck up yuppie bitch.

Anyhoo, the meniscus is one of the smaller players in the upright locomotion game. The Wiki article on it says it helps spread the load where the tibia meets the fibia. Makes sense that we need it… this whole upright bipedal stance thing is a heck of a lot mopre complicated than it looks. We had to develop some fairly complex structures all over our bodies in order to make it work.

And apparently, I broke one of mine.

(WE INTERRUPT THIS DEPRESSING LOOK AT THE FRAGILITY OF THE BODY FOR THIS EVEN MORE DEPRESSING NEWS ABOUT THE FRAGILITY OF LIFE)

Holy fuck, I just heard the news…. Robin Williams is dead, and it looks like it was suicide. He was 63 years old.

Jesus, that is depressing. As if this day didn’t suck enough already. Some days it just rains shit and all you can do is cling to your little umbrella.

I was a very big fan of Robin Williams way back in the Eighties. I thought he was brilliant and funny and wacky and just an amazing person all round. If he was going to be on a show, I was going to watch it.

But it was more than his talent that appealed to me. I really identified with him. Something about his manic wit and kind nature really resonated with me and I used to think that I could be him and that we were, on a deep level, the same kind of person. I felt he and I would get along.

Well, okay, maybe not BE him. Maybe him at 75 percent speed.

So the news of his death really hits me hard. Him dying at 63 would be bad enough. But for him to commit suicide really feels like a stab in the heart. It suggests that he lost a battle with depression, and that’s the same fight that I fight each and every day of my life.

Not that I am making this all about me. Some people might say that the person who is hurt the most by this is Robin Williams, but I would disagree. Robin Williams is beyond all hurt or hope now. He escaped.

The people who are hurt the most by suicide are the people close to the deceased. They are the ones whose lives have been left torn open and bleeding by the violent removal of someone they knew and cared about. They are the ones left wondering if there was something they could have done.

They are the ones for whom the pain is just beginning.

That is why I consider suicide to be an incredibly selfish act of violence against everyone who knows and loves you. The fact that it is done by a person who knows full well that they won’t have to live with the consequences makes even worse.

(Felicity, I know you don’t agree. )

So yeah. If it really was suicide, I am pretty angry at Robin Williams for doing it. No matter what you are going through emotionally, there is no justification for the act of suicide, intractable pain/horrible incurable illness aside.

Whatever it is, it will end, and you will be glad you didn’t do it.

I came pretty close to suicide as a depressed teenager, and somewhat close when I first moved to this area and was living alone in a bachelor apartment and slid into the worst depression of my life.

Luckily, that time, I was usually too depressed to think about suicide. It works that way sometimes. Often what saves us sufferers is the lack of mental coherence necessary to think of doing it, let alone plan and execute it.

From the perspective of someone who came close to suicide himself, I completely understand how you get there. Depression negates everything good inside you and it can seem like the only way out of the trap before it negates you too is to die.

But for me, the knowledge of how badly it would hurt everybody I knew was enough to keep me from doing that. I just could not do that to people, especially my family. Imagine how bad it would be to have a son or brother commit suicide all the way on the other side of the country.

That is what makes me feel I have the right to judge. Fuck you for committing suicide, Robin Williams. Fuck you for that ultimately selfish act. Fuck you fo rdoing irreparable injury to those around you.

And what the hell, fuck you for how your suicide hurts me, too.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.