This having to crawl up out of a deep dark cavern of sleep every day sucks.
But so does slowly losing my mind to a lack of REM sleep.
:Like always, I have no good options and must choose that which sucks less.
And that… varies.
Under the Dome
Ordered from some place called The Dome last night.
It’s a place with a curiously limited menu. One that leads me to believe that the place is one of these little hole in the wall restaurants where they have a deep fryer and that is it.
I mean, check this shit out.
Anyhow, they had a $5 off introductory thing so I decided to give it a try. I ordered the sub, fries, and onion rings.
And the sub was decent. Tasty when it was hot, but a tad too spicy for me now that I am eating the second half cold,.
Turns out, it has jalapeno poppers in it. Makes me wonder why that did not bother me last night when the thing was hot.
Physically hot as well as chemically hot.
The onion rings were delicious but too greasy for my stomach. Keep forgetting to avoid super greasy foods. Ever since I had my gall bladder out, my system can’t quite handle them and they end up making me a little queasy.
But the fries…. my god, the fries….
The fries were crazy delicious. My mind was blown. They might well be the best fries I have ever had, and that’s truly saying something.
Whatever oil they fry them in gives them this sort of buttered toast flavour that is truly outstanding. Plus they were fried to crisp perfection.
Which means that I will likely be ordering from them again, even though the sub was only okay-ish and the onion rings were too greasy for me.
Next time I will just get the nuggets instead.
The lurking panic
I’ve talked before about how there is this anxiety attack always kind of lurking around my consciousness waiting to strike me the second I let my guard down before.
Well I have been thinking about just what is going on there, and I have scarily concluded that it has something to do with my poor respiration.
This is a crazy dangerous topic for me, for it comes with a serious danger of triggering a panic attack from my phobia of smothering (which, of course, makes me feel like I am smothering), but I have to do it anyhow.
Might keep me from, ya know, dying in a hospital with tubes everywhere.
The idea is that my waking respiration is so bad that I run low on oxygen all the time, and the lurking panic is actually my body trying to tell me this and triggering the appropriate response, which is panic.
But my anti-panic psychological defenses won’t let it through.
If that is correct, then I am actually in pretty bad shape and should really take a trip to the ER because I am short of breath nearly all the time these days.
And that’s, like, bad.
But to do that, I have to get past the anti-panic defenses I have so carefully constructed in an attempt to make myself sane.
Now, I shall lay down and try to stop thinking about it so I can calm down.
More after the break.
Now where was I?
Oh right, the fact that I might probably be dying.
I realized that I have unconsciously learned to take slow, steady breaths in and out. A lot like how one breathes in their sleep, in fact.
Presumably, this is how my autonomic nervous system copes with the slow disintegration of my working lung capacity.
As over time the carbon dioxide that doesn’t make it out accumulates in the bottom of my lungs, it leaves me with less working lung capacity as the air I breathe in never makes it to the alveoli down there.
Isn’t it cute how I am going scientific to keep from panicking?
Anyhow, it now occurs to me that said alveoli might die if they do not get enough oxygen on a regular basis and so I might be losing lung capacity permanently.
That would also be BAD. Very, very BAD .
Better get my ass to a doctor pretty quick, right?
Right. But also, wrong.
No matter the stakes, it will take some time to accumulate the energy necessary to overcome my inertia and anxiety and let me decide to act.
So my trip won’t be for a few days yet, maybe not even till Thursday or Friday.
That’s not the way I want it to be, but that’s the way it is.
If I had my druthers, I would be perfectly capable of swift and decisive action when the situation demands it, even when it involves me.
But I am not so lucky. It will have to wait till I can make myself do it or until things get bad enough to warrant a 911 call.
And I am sure that, in the future, I will be cursing the me of right now for not acting sooner when the warning signs were perfectly clear and all that noise.
But I hope I will have the humility and the self-awareness to remember how hard things are for me right now, and how from my point of view at this exact moment in my personal history, it seems equally possible that I would go to the ER and they would check me out and then tell me there is nothing wrong with me, or at least, nothing wrong enough for them to bother doing anything when there are actual worthwhile human beings who need their help.
And I find that rather discouraging.
Depression makes me easily discouraged. Everything in my psyche is geared towards doing nothing (that matters) as a way to keep myself “safe”.
It’s very hard for me to work up the motivation to do anything because my internal resistance is so very strong.
Depression is like friction in that way.
So before I go risk another humiliating rejection by the medical system, I am going ot need to work up a lot of energy, and that takes time.
And if I get sick or die before I am ready, oh well.
I did the best that I could.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.