Medicine

by

Wotan can KEEP this day as far as I’m concerned

Okay, first off, to begin with‒or should it be “with which to begin”?‒it is the 6th of May today (a Wednesday, though that fact is not terribly relevant) and to continue the Star Wars related references, I will note that today is the date of the Revenge of the Sixth.

Get it?  It’s a bit tortured, I’m afraid.  I don’t think anyone would have come up with the notion had it not been for “May the 4th be with you”.  That, at least, is a more straightforward play on words, and is specific to this month and that day.  “Revenge of the Sixth” doesn’t specify the month; one could, in principle, use that line on any 6th of a month.  But one would not, because this day is “celebrated” only in reaction to Star Wars Day on May 4th.

It’s sort of funny and fun, but it reduces the Sith to merely a perverse notion, existing only in reaction to the Jedi, like a whole order of Force users acting out the parts of rebellious teenagers.

Of course, probably that was sort of what happened in George Lucas’s mind when he came up with the Sith:  They were the anti-Jedi, a parity-violating, distorted reflection of the “good guys”.  But, of course, a whole philosophical movement that sprang up only as an enemy to another is intellectually and narratively vacuous.

It’s somewhat reminiscent of the moronic religious people who seem to think that if one does not believe in God, then one must worship Satan.  It can be very hard for some people to get around the whole “if you’re not with me, then you’re my enemy” notion.  Only in this case it’s not even a philosophical enmity, but is merely a reactive enmity.  Also, it doesn’t take too much thought to realize that such a situation would seem to imply that whichever of the two sides came first would be assumed to be the “good guys”.

But one doesn’t look at any random patch of spacetime and think, “if there’s no electron in this spot then there must instead be a positron”, or vice versa.  As a matter of physics and of logic, this is a pretty glaring error.  Just as indifference, not hate, is the complete absence of love, the default state of reality is not the opposite of some particular presence, it is simple absence.  In physics, that means all the quantum fields being in their vacuum states, with minimal energy (it’s not zero because of the uncertainty principle).

In the Star Wars extended universe, the Sith have a background that is separate in origin (I think) from the Jedi.  I think they began as a race of Force users.  I could be wrong about this; I’m not all that much of a Star Wars nerd.

Ask me questions about the backgrounds of things in the universe(s) of my stories and I could share some serious lore with you.  But no one is going to ask me about those because essentially no one has read them.

Boy, it would be cool to have someone write fanfiction based in the worlds of my stories.  I remember reading a lot of Harry Potter fanfiction while waiting for the next book(s) to come out, back in the day.  Some of it was bad, of course, but not much of it, and some of it was really quite good.  People who love to read and feel the urge to write an homage out of love for a work and its characters tend to be at least somewhat okay at it.

Some of it was downright brilliant.

Of course, humans being what humans are, some of it was smut.  There’s nothing really wrong with that, when you get right down to it.  Members (ha ha) of a sexually reproducing species are going to tend to find sex…engaging, to say the least.  Every human alive (and that has ever lived) comes from a long, unbroken line of ancestors who had sex at least once*.  That includes your parents and your grandparents, by the way.  You’re welcome.

In a species like humans, those who are more into sex and more driven toward it and obsessed with it are, ceteris paribus, going to have more offspring.  It won’t take very many generations for any genes that make one less interested in sex to fade out of the gene pool‒again, and very importantly, ceteris paribus.

All other things are essentially never equal, of course, and there are complex tradeoffs in all such behavioral tendencies, but that’s a can of bees I really don’t have the energy to open right at this moment.

I’m in a truly terrible amount of pain this morning, I’m afraid, continuing from last night and yesterday and so on. and it’s making it a bit hard to write, though that somehow doesn’t keep me from running off at the figurative mouth.

I think it would be harder for me not to write right now, though.  I don’t know for sure.  I haven’t tried.

Even thinking about not writing at all makes me feel squirmy and cringey and quite strange.  It’s not quite as bad not to play or listen to or sing any music‒which I haven’t done for weeks now, alas‒but that does also feel bad.

But I think if I were to stop writing, and at least every week sharing my writing‒particularly now that I don’t have access to Facebook or Threads‒I would pretty rapidly feel that I didn’t even exist.

I have no real life here from day to day.  There is no joy, there is only (attempted) distraction.  Other than my episodic interactions with my youngest child (which are distinctly good and real and joyful to me, a real oasis in the desert) everything in my life from day to day feels less real than the events of the most banal video game.

Yesterday, I started searching eBay and other online sources for used ECT devices (they are out there) and looking up whether one can legally buy insulin over the counter (one can, to some degree), or what medications are prone to produce seizures.  The idea was to see if it would be possible for me to induce a seizure in myself and hopefully treat my depression.

I know it can’t help my underlying ASD, but ECT and other kinds of induced seizures have consistently been shown to work against even highly treatment-resistant depression.  I have tried every class of (legal) medication and many different types of therapy for my dysthymia/depression.  I think most regular readers can tell just how well that arsenal has worked.

Of course, pain complicates everything.  It taints everything, it erodes everything, it corrodes everything, it corrupts and desecrates everything.  I really want it to stop.  Sometimes I want it to stop at nearly any cost (at least to me, though I can’t in good conscience invoke avoidable costs upon other people).

If I thought inducing seizures would help my pain, I would probably just do it.  I know how to make such things happen‒the research I did yesterday was just to indulge myself so I could more realistically fantasize about the outcome if it were to work.  It was one of those distractions I mentioned above.  But having seizures would probably make my physical pain worse, since seizures are not easy on the body.

They could also kill me, but that would be far from the worst outcome.

Death‒not necessarily seizure-related death, but death generally‒will probably be the only thing that relieves my pain.  Well, “relieves” is not really the right word.  But could death be what ends it?  Yes.  And thankfully, no one is dependent upon me or is very close to me or is really used to having me around, so the collateral damage would be minimal, no matter what all the simple-minded (but well-meaning) Instagram videos try to tell you.

Maybe I’m just as well off not to be able to go to that site anymore.  Everything there would be irritating.  Though, that’s just like more or less everything else in the world, to be fair.  Right now, I could almost wish for everything else in reality to cease to exist so I could just enjoy some silence.  But that would be unkind and terribly presumptuous.  It would be better to go back to the nidus of the pain and pluck that out.

Have a good day.

Though I suspect Mr. Smear would disagree with me:

by

Should you give a fig about a freight train’s Newtons?

It’s Saturday, April 25th, in 2026 AD/CE.  There are only 7 shopping months until Newtonmas (Other holidays are available).

Anyway, I’m very groggy and tired today, though at least I am (for the moment) in slightly less pain than yesterday.  It still sucks, but now it’s more of a neutron star kind of sucking rather than a full scale black hole.

Not that either of those two stellar remnants can be said to “suck” in any atypical way, with respect to gravity.  It is true that the gravitation at the surface of a neutron star is extremely high (to say nothing of the “surface” of a black hole).  But that’s just because everything is so compact, and you can get much closer to the center of gravity than you would be able to do with more spread-out astronomical bodies made of more typical matter.

But, to reiterate a perhaps overused example, if the sun were suddenly (and without any other phenomena that would complicate the picture) to collapse* into a neutron star or even a black hole of the same mass, the Earth’s orbit would not change at all.

There’s no special “supergravity” or whatever some people imagine there might be due to black holes or neutron stars.  It’s just ordinary gravity with a large mass in a small region.  From farther away than the former surface of whatever collapsed into it, the gravity of a neutron star or a black hole is literally indistinguishable from that of the celestial object that became the black hole or neutron star (if it did not lose any mass in its collapse to the latter state, which in reality they almost always do).

How the hell did I get on that subject?  I don’t know.  I guess I’ll see it while editing.

I’m a little out of it this morning, because I took half a Benadryl last night in addition to my other, more typical stuff.  I don’t usually take Benadryl on a work night, but groggy and unpleasant quasi-consciousness that at least helps me to be unconscious is better than not being able even to get to sleep or stay that way for long and being groggy because of that rather than the side effects of an antihistamine.

Something like that, anyway; I’m not sure I made that very clear.

I’ve just now become briefly distracted because a redirected freight train just went by on the track in front of me (going south on the usually-northbound side of the tracks, something for which there were no doubt legitimate reasons, but which still feels quite wrong).  This happens occasionally, and I’m sure the process that leads up to it is somewhat interesting, at least from a certain point of view.

It’s definitely an event that happens only because something has gone wrong somewhere.  The tracks for commuter trains, like the course over which they run, are not really meant for heavy freight trains, so they can’t let them use them very often.  And it was heavy, I’m sure of that. There were numerous tank cars and box cars and all sorts of similar cars carrying potentially heavy stuff.  Even the train’s whistle as it approached was a different, lower pitched sound and had a more somber timbre (sombre timber?) than the usual Tri rail whistle.

I already was pretty sure it wasn’t a regular train when the nearby gates went down to stop traffic, because there’s no scheduled Tri rail train going in either direction at even close to that time on a Saturday.  If it were a behind-schedule train, it would have to have been the first train of the day going south, and it would be quite off its schedule indeed.  Trains only come every hour on the weekend.

I almost wrote “every hour on the hour” there, just for the “sound” of it, but of course it’s not feasible to have a commuter train arrive every hour on the hour at every train station unless the stations are an hour’s traveling distance apart.  That would be one hell of a commute, and not in a good way.

Anyway, I think that’s enough nonsense for today.  I still don’t feel good.  My legs and hips are still channeling low-level but constant DC current (or so it feels), and I am having more and more trouble seeing any point to continuing to try to style my way though all this.  It’s been more than 20 years and things are not improving overall.

It would be more tolerable if I had other people and reasons and points in my daily life, but I don’t, not really.  The comments here below this blog constitute the majority of my socialization, not counting work interactions (which are a different kind of thing, though related).

I’m so bloody tired.

Anyway, have a good weekend if you can.  For goodness sake, cherish the people you love and who love you, especially if you’re lucky enough to be with them every day.  And remember, when in doubt, don’t ask yourself “What would Newton do?”.  Unless you’re a scientist, that is, in which case, yeah, Newton was a decent role model.

Otherwise, he was a terribly unpleasant, vindictive, and spiteful man (and here I thought it impossible for me to admire him more than I already did).  He is reported to have laughed only once in his life, when someone asked him what was the point of studying Euclid.

I sympathize with Newton there.  That is an idiotic question for anyone who is stuck living in and making their way through three-dimensional, locally Euclidean space.

Mind you, when things like black holes and neutron stars are involved, you need to go beyond Euclid, but you can’t readily go beyond Euclid if you’ve never gotten to Euclid***.

*There’s no known process by which this could happen, by the way, so don’t worry about it.  Also, you don’t need to worry about encountering spherical cows or frictionless surfaces**.

**Though I’ve long thought that “Frictionless Cows” might be a good name for a band.

***You don’t need to read Euclid’s actual book to study Euclidean geometry, any more than you need to read Newton’s Principia Mathematica to learn Newtonian physics.  But it’s worth giving them each a tip of the hat in passing, at least, for they are among humanity’s greatest works.

by

A pox upon those who do not learn the history of science and medicine

Well, I’m back to writing on the smartphone today, with mixed feelings.  One of these feelings is the residual soreness in my thumbs, of course, but the day-long break did seem to help a little bit.  Mind you, some of that is probably in my head, for I don’t write on my smartphone on Sundays, and I also don’t write on non-working Saturdays.  So, if resting is enough, I should feel least sore on Mondays following one of my two-day weekends.  If that is the case‒if I am least sore in those instances‒I certainly haven’t noticed.

Actually, if it isn’t the case, I haven’t noticed either, but at least there it would make sense, since there is nothing to notice.  It can be much harder to notice things that are not so than to notice things that are so.  That’s part of why people don’t give credit to vaccination, for instance:  they can’t see the sickness and death that are prevented.  There’s no It’s A Wonderful Life revelation about all the lives that have been saved and‒perhaps more important*‒all the suffering that has been prevented.

There’s a similar, lesser-known preventative effect of proton pump inhibitors (e.g., omeprazole).  These medicines (and their somewhat weaker predecessors, the H2 blockers**) have prevented untold suffering and death related to gastritis and peptic ulcer disease and esophageal cancers, all of which used to be major contributors to premature death, especially in young men (if memory serves).  So, using these medicines is not necessarily an overindulgence in avoiding transient discomfort.  They are very real and powerful preventative interventions‒though, as with all such things, they do have some long term side-effects, and these must always be weighed against the benefits of taking them.

This is one of the reasons that educating people about history is so important.  If one is not aware of just how horrifying and heartbreaking the effects of smallpox were (for instance), one might think that the smallpox vaccine***** was just a sort of convenience, not a response to a low-flying, slow-moving, global catastrophe.

I suppose it was easier for Ben Franklin to recognize that “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” because there were far fewer preventable ailments and fewer avoidable disasters back in his day.  Still, he was a very smart person; he might have recognized the nature of such things even if he had lived in our more comfortable times.

It is useful, and it may be more than just useful, for people to learn how things were before the arrival of so many powerful technologies and knowledge and social and biological insights.  For 300,000 years, humans existed without (for instance) the internet, and then, starting around 30 years ago, it was here (and widely available).

But that’s a full generation of people who have never known a world without the internet, despite the fact that by default the world has no internet.  It can be immensely useful for those people to learn about what things were like pre-internet, not only so they can truly appreciate this remarkable phenomenon, but also so they can recognize some of its detriments.

Likewise for planes and cars and televisions and even books and agriculture.  What was life like before these things?  What would life be like if they disappeared?  Are their benefits worth their costs?  How can those costs be mitigated, even if they are bearable (for why not make things as net-beneficial as possible?)?

I encourage everyone, myself included, to take these notions seriously, to think about the contrafactual cases, not to accept that things simply are the way they are, because for the most part, historically, they were not that way.  Even humanity itself is a latecomer.

I don’t know how I got onto those subjects, but I guess I’m thinking of health (and particularly of gastric health) more than typically in recent days.  I still don’t feel too well, but that’s nothing unusual for me.  It’s just annoying because it’s a new, or at least atypical, discomfort.

Oh, well.  This brings us back to my point that decreasing/preventing suffering is more important than “saving lives”, since all such saved lives are merely saved for later, if you will.  Death (it seems) cannot be forever avoided, but suffering, in principle, can be eased and even sometimes prevented.  Though, sometimes, the only practical way to stop certain kinds of suffering is to hasten the inevitable other phenomenon.

In any case, I’ll draw at least one instance of your suffering to an end now, by finishing this blog post.  I hope you have a very good day, by any reasonable measure of goodness that you might choose.

*Because death is, as far as anyone can tell, completely inevitable‒it’s a matter of when, not if‒whereas suffering is variable, and boy can it vary, from person to person, from moment to moment, from culture to culture, and so on.

**No, they don’t block molecular hydrogen***, though if one thought that, one could certainly be excused.  Rather, they block the so-called type 2 histamine receptor, the one that responds to stimulus (histamine) by making the stomach secrete more acid.

***Interestingly enough, the proton pump inhibitors do block hydrogen, but it’s not molecular hydrogen, it atomic hydrogen‒or well actually, it’s ionic (cationic, specifically) hydrogen, which is a naked proton, since a hydrogen nucleus is just a proton****, and is the key effective part of essentially all acids, at least regarding their acidity.

****Sorry about all the footnotes within footnotes, but it just occurred to me to wonder what it would be like to make a sample of an acid but with all the ordinary hydrogen atoms replaced with deuterium, so-called heavy hydrogen, which has a neutron in its nucleus as well as a proton.  How would this affect the properties of such an acid?  Of course those properties are almost entirely related to the valence electron or the lack thereof, but when a positive ion of a substance is just a naked nucleus, one cannot completely dismiss the impact of that nucleus’s structure.  So, I would love to see an entirely deuteric acid being put through its paces.  An acid made entirely with tritium (one proton, two neutrons) would be interesting as well, but even in my imagination, that’s asking for a lot of the very tiny amount of tritium in the world.

*****This is the original source of the word “vaccination” since being exposed to Vaccinia (related to cowpox) provided resistance to Variola (smallpox).

by

“Shadows of the evening crawl across the years”

Well, it’s Wednesday morning‒insert your joke of choice related to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home here‒and here is my blog post for the day.  I will not be posting tomorrow (barring the very much unforeseen), since today is Thanksgiving Eve* here in the US, and therefore tomorrow will be Thanksgiving.  I will not be working on Thanksgiving, so there is to be no “traditional” Thursday post.  I’m sure you’re all devastated, but hopefully you can eat yourself into a stupor tomorrow to flee from your sorrow and loss.

Speaking of stupors, I slept a bit better‒or at least a bit longer‒last night than the night before.  This is because, despite it being a weeknight/worknight, I knocked myself out a bit with an OTC sleep aid.  So, if I seem a bit odd today‒for me, I mean‒that’s probably why.

Of course, I’m well aware that the sleep induced by such medications is not proper sleep.  That’s a very interesting fact for someone who gets proper sleep on their own, but it’s pretty theoretical to me.  It’s a bit like quibbling by saying, “going through a wormhole to get to a distant part of spacetime quickly isn’t really going faster than the speed of light”.  Well, okay, if I can find ways to break the laws of causality** I will, but in the meantime, I’ll use the wormhole.

Likewise, sometimes I just want to be unconscious, and I have a hard time achieving it on my own.  Oblivion is such a relief when and if it happens (so to speak).  Yet, even when I do sleep, there’s always a background watchfulness in my head, a feeling that where I am is not safe in some sense, so I cannot completely relax.

I almost never wake up without some manner of start, i.e., a bit of a jump in place.  I don’t know why***.  Maybe this is just the way it is when you’re nominally a member of a species of pack hunters but you’re functionally completely alone, separated from whatever group(s) there were to which you belonged and surviving on your own as best you can.  The world is never fully safe for such a creature.

Well, the world is never fully safe, period, full stop.  No one here gets out alive, after all.  Nevertheless, natural selection tends to lead to the state where the only surviving organisms are descendants of those who feel fear and who feel pain and who try to stay alive indefinitely, even when that survival is pointless (biologically speaking, I mean‒I won’t get into the deeper philosophical questions that can apply, because that would take too much time and energy).

I’m going to bring this to a close here pretty soon, if I can.  My thumb arthritis is acting up, today, and writing this is more painful than it usually is.  Well, actually, I don’t know that “arthritis” is the proper word, since that implies a process that is primarily inflammatory.  It’s probably more precise to say “arthropathy”, which just means “something wrong with a joint”.  “Arthralgia” works quite well here, also, meaning just “joint pain”, but it’s pretty darn vague in its implications of any possible cause.

I suppose it doesn’t make a great deal of difference.

Anyway, I hope everyone who is celebrating has a truly wonderful Thanksgiving Day tomorrow, and that you spend a pleasant time with friends and family (and maybe some football).  I will be back on Friday, barring (as always) the unforeseen.  I work at a sales office, after all, and Friday is “Black Friday”, traditionally the biggest sales day of the year in the US.  Though, there has been a significant degree of “feature creep” or whatever the best term might be regarding that, so now the whole of this time of year is becoming an extended “Black Friday”.  Natural selection tends to encourage such things.

Anyway, I expect to write a post on Friday, so I will “see you” then.  Or at least you will see me.

*There is no such holiday, official or unofficial, as Thanksgiving Eve, but it’s still obvious what I mean by it.  Isn’t it?

**The speed of light in a vacuum being the speed of causality.  This appears to be a large part of why nothing can travel faster.  How could something move more quickly than causality?

***As far as I can tell, it’s not because of having gone to prison.  For one thing, my sleep problems started way before that pleasant interlude.  For another, I didn’t have any real problems with people starting shit with me in prison.  Apparently, I looked (look?) a bit nuts or something.  Also, honestly, I got along okay with people there, all things considered.

by

“They tumble blindly as they make their way…”

It’s Tuesday morning and I’m beginning the process of making my way to the office.  By the time I finish writing this, and certainly by the time it’s posted, I will be there.

I thought I might stay out sick today, because yesterday at the office I felt pretty crummy and almost as if I had a fever.  I checked, and my temperature was normal, but that’s hard to interpret, because I almost never don’t have NSAIDS and other analgesic/antipyretics on board*.  So I could pretty easily have something brewing that would cause a fever, but my fever response is too suppressed.

That’s not an ideal situation, I know, but the alternative is to try to ignore the chronic pain I have.  That’s not so easy, for good, sound, biological reasons.  I’m not saying it’s impossible, and with the proper motivation I could probably do it, but I have no such motivation.

What would I be trying to achieve by not treating my pain as best I can?  Increased longevity?  Hah!  What would be the point of that?  This life that I have is not really something worth prolonging.

If one has a delicious meal one may want to eat slowly, to relish** it.  If one is spending time with a good friend or spouse or other beloved family member, certainly that’s worth making things last as long as one reasonably can do.  But even people who consider themselves masochists don’t really want to prolong their own suffering.  They tend only to want the pain that gets them excited, which is not really “suffering” as most people would think of it.  In any case, I am no masochist; my inclinations are, if anything, in the opposite direction.

I don’t mean to imply that my own suffering is particularly odious or anything.  I’m sure there are many people who suffer much more than I do.  Some of them have to suffer with being moral and intellectual imbeciles, and that’s pretty horrifying to contemplate; many such people are involved in government, even though these are probably the last people one would reasonably want to have the job of keeping the machinery of the state functioning.

I mean, we can all see how badly that works, though some are deluded enough that they would claim not to know whereof I speak.  Still, what are you going to do?  Force the more competent, moral, disciplined, intellectually humble but rigorous people to be governors and legislators and administrators?  What if they got really pissed off about it and decided just to wreck everything as much as they could because they’ve been forced to work in positions of governance?

You think things are bad now?  Beware the wrath of smart, patient, disciplined, creative people.

Anyway, that’s just a tangential thought, something in which I seem to specialize, though it is not deliberate.  I just tend to let my thoughts meander***.

Speaking of which, yesterday, in recognition of that tendency, I titled my post by paraphrasing the catchphrase of the old cartoon character Ricochet Rabbit.  Since then, I had a related memory pop up of the old toy “Ricochet Racers”.  I never actually owned one of those, but I can vaguely recall the jingle that went with their ads:  “Ricochet Racers on target!  Have a real play [or was it a great play?] with a ricochet.”  Something like that.  That second line may be slightly off, but it gets the gist.

I wish I could convey the tune in writing.  Instead, here’s a video with a later version of the toy, and the guy sings a bit of the original theme, but with a changed second line.  He’s not a great singer, though, and these aren’t exactly the original words.

Thinking about it, I realize that the rhythm of that jingle is at least a little bit interesting.  The song appears to be in some version of 4/4 time, but the first line is sung in a set of slow-ish triplets, each triplet being equivalent to 4 quarter notes.  That’s mildly impressive for a jingle written to sell a long-defunct kids’ toy.

I wonder how many truly skilled composers end up doing such less-than-glorified work because they’ve got to make a living somehow.

We know that many movie composers are truly brilliant, from John Williams and Hans Zimmer through to people who primarily work in other genres but sometimes do films, such as Jonny Greenwood.  But those are large scale, respectable composing jobs.  What of the could-be Mozart who must write songs for McDonalds commercials?

I guess if such a person finds joy and satisfaction in that work, then there’s nothing to lament****.  Perhaps they can do enough composing to make a living that way, and otherwise compose things of their own in their spare time, which might one day be played by fancier musicians for more high-falutin’ purposes.  That seems okay, too.

That might be analogous to what I do here, except that none of my writing makes me any money at all, so it’s a bit less rewarding.  Still, if anyone reading wants to send me money, we could probably figure out a way to do it.

I won’t hold my breath.  But, whatever.  I hope at least some of you, some of the time, enjoy my posts.  And heck, if you like them, you could certainly share them, if you can think about someone who might be interested in reading them.

Here, I wrote a song about such liking and sharing.  It’s no “Ricochet Racers” theme, but I think it’s pretty good.

Have a nice day.

*That means “in my system”, in typical medical jargon, in case that wasn’t clear.  It probably was clear, though, wasn’t it?

**Or whatever garnish or condiment one might like on one’s food.

***Like a restless wind inside a letter box, if you will.

****Imagine a lament for a writer of jingles.  Rather “meta” isn’t it?

by

I’m back, despite my back holding me back

I apologize for not writing a post yesterday.  I did not go in to the office, because the pain I was having on Monday just continued and worsened, and by yesterday morning I was just exhausted.  I’m frankly not feeling a whole lot better today, to be honest (and to be redundant, since I already said “frankly” which means essentially the same thing as “to be honest”).

In case any of you don’t already know, I have a thing called “failed back surgery syndrome”, which seems a bit unfair to the surgeon, who was a colleague of mine.  He did as good a job as science and technology allowed.  I just had a fairly bad lower back injury:  specifically, a ruptured L5-S1 intervertebral disk.

That’s not a bulging disk, that’s a rupture‒it was torn all the way down into the nucleus pulposus of the disk, which is the delicious jelly center from which the bouncability arises.  I had all sorts of investigations after the pain began, because it didn’t first present as back pain but with pain in my legs.  And then once the disk issue was confirmed, I tried a lot of less invasive interventions to treat my pain, none of which did anything much.

Even after the surgery, I tried and was on various medications, of various classes‒including opioids‒which helped some but which caused their own issues over time.  But the pain has never gone away since its onset, over twenty years ago, and which has contributed greatly to things like the failure of my marriage and the ruination of my career.  Still, the surgery did reduce the pain at least to some degree.

But of course, these last several days have been worse than usual, probably partly because I was exercising (low impact) to try to improve my condition and help my pain.  Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes, can’t it?

Anyway, I have to go to work today because it’s payroll day.  That was the same reason I kind of pushed to be let out of the hospital early with my recent kidney stone:  I had to do the payroll the next day.  That was unpleasant, I can tell you.

Such is my life now, it seems:  Chronic pain with varying intensity, insomnia, tension/anxiety and depression‒both at least partly (probably) related to ASD‒and work, then going back to the house to lie down to try to recover for the next day.  The only real bright spots are seeing my youngest child now and then (this was started by the kidney stone, curiously enough, so that at least paid for itself) and talking to my sister on the phone once every week or so.

In case anyone wonders why I have suicidal ideation, well, all the above should explain at least some of it.  Of course, I’ve had such thoughts since I was a teenager, long before my chronic pain developed, but I did have chronic depression (AKA dysthymia) starting at that time.  Looking back, this was probably at least partly because of my long-undiagnosed ASD (level 2).

I also had the other kind of ASD‒an atrial septal defect‒until I was 18 and had heart surgery for it.  Interestingly enough, there is a higher incidence of the heart-based ASD in people with the other kind of ASD, according to some studies I have read.  There’s also some increased prevalence of spina bifida occulta, which often has its effects very low down the spine.  I sometimes wonder if I might have had a very slight version of this that made me prone to have the back injury I had, but I may be going through “second year medical student syndrome” again with respect to that possibility.

Okay, well, sorry about annoying you with my medical history and medical/psychiatric complaints.  For the most part, it’s all I have to talk about anymore.  I don’t do anything interesting; I don’t do anything much at all other than work and trying to rest and distract myself.  It’s really quite pathetic and pointless.

I keep hoping that all the aspirin I take (among the other strictly OTC meds I now use) will lead me to have some form of hemorrhage and take this all away from me, but I have had no luck so far.  I guess it’s true what they say, that if you want something done “right” you need to do it yourself.

I don’t know if that’s always true, though.  I think what really happens is that people want to do something in a particular way for personal, often aesthetic, reasons, and want to be able to have some control over something, so they do it themselves.  Then, no matter how badly they fuck it up or how much better someone else might have done the job, they convince themselves that what they did was best, since confirmation bias is one of the easiest fallacies of reasoning into which people can fall.

Anyway, that’s enough for today.  I hope you feel better than I do, since that would at least be some comfort for me.  I’ll probably be back to write a post tomorrow, Batman knows why.  But he’s not telling.

by

A hot and muggy morning blog post*

Okay, well, it’s Wednesday morning, and I didn’t write a blog post yesterday.  I didn’t go to work yesterday, either, because yesterday was my appointment to get the stent taken out of my right ureterovesical junction—you can look that up in case you don’t already know to what I refer.  In any case, my thought process was that, since to get to my appointment on time from the office would have taken most of two hours, I would’ve had to leave work very shortly after it started, and I was not feeling well at all on Monday, nor on Tuesday.

Now, I am pleased to report, the stent came out without much trouble, though it was terribly uncomfortable.  Nevertheless, it is a true relief to have it gone.  Now, without the access “thread” from the stent hanging out, I can actually not feel like I have to use the bathroom constantly.  That’s a tremendous relief.

The urologist recommended that I drink lots of liquid every day from now on, and when I suggested “At least three liters?” he shook his head and pointed up with his thumb The Accountant style, and told me “Four or five at least”.

I’m not going to resist that advice, of course.  I already live in south Florida, and the heat and humidity are ridiculous.  I probably need to drink quite a bit more than even that if I can; the threat of recurrent kidney stones is a powerful one.  What’s worse, my room’s air conditioner is on the fritz, and it has been for some time.  I looked this morning at a little digital thermometer that I have and that I had forgotten for a while, and the temperature in my room was 89.5 degrees Fahrenheit.  This was at four in the morning.

Well, I already have a new, portable air conditioning unit on the way, which should arrive no later than Friday.  I look forward to it because, although I have quite a good and powerful floor fan, that leaves me with more of a tendency to dehydrate because it cools by evaporation.

I know, all this is rather boring.  I apologize.  I never told anyone I have an exciting or interesting life, though it carries its share of intense drama and angst, I guess.  Still, I can write about much more interesting things than would ever happen to me, and I can even give people happy endings to their stories, which is something that is almost certainly not going to happen to me.

Oh, I forgot to mention, I am writing this blog post on my mini laptop computer, as I suggested I might on Monday (I think I suggested it then, but I’m not going to check to be sure—I’ll have put a link to it, so anyone out there who so desires can go check on my behalf).  It’s been just over a month since the last time I wrote on the laptop computer.  It is a pleasant change to be able to write so fluidly, and in a way that feels much more natural and easier.

That being said, I don’t really have much about which to write other than my recent medical issues.  I continue not to write fiction, and I continue not to play music, let alone to compose it, and I continue not to draw or paint, and I haven’t been reading anything educational at all, whether about physics or mathematics or neuroscience or biology more generally.

Maybe I should get Richard Dawkins’s recent work about the genetic book of the dead.  His stuff is usually pretty gripping, and I like biology.  It’s harder to find physics books that I want to read, because much of the popular writing about physics is stuff that I already know, and about which I know more than is usually discussed in popular books.

I guess that’s just the way it goes.  The world wasn’t built for any of us or for all of us.  It just happened, as did our so-called civilization.  That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying to make it a better situation for as many of us as we can and to try to avoid committing injustice to others.  But that requires reflection and calm assessment, and humans in general are not strongly disposed to such things.

We can only try, I suppose.  Meanwhile, at least try to have a good day.

*By which I mean that the morning is hot and muggy, not that the blog post is hot and muggy.  What would that even mean?

by

Another very brief Monday blog post

It’s Monday again.  In fact, it’s the last Monday in May of 2025, the end of a very small and arbitrary era.  It’s also Memorial Day, a day on which I don’t like to say, “Happy Memorial Day,” since it’s a day of remembrance of the fallen, but I do wish you well on this holiday.

I don’t really have anything to write about today.  My brain is borderline completely fried, not least because no matter how often I use the bathroom, I still feel like I have to go, and urgently.  So, I haven’t been getting much sleep, even for me, and what little I get is interrupted every half an hour to an hour.

This is all nothing new, and I’m sure it’s terribly boring for all of you readers.  I do apologize.  I’m basically a boring person.

I have my appointment with the urologist tomorrow, and hopefully that will spell the end of this current situation, at least.  If not, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

Actually, I don’t know what I’m going to do either way.  I am fairly clueless and at a loss.  I don’t know what to do about the future or whatever.  Life is just so uncomfortable all the time.  The Buddhists underestimated things when they said merely that life is inherently unsatisfactory.  Life is frequently quite a bit more than unsatisfactory.

That’s not exactly a rip-roaring insight, is it?  My brain is so foggy and fatigued.  I’m glad that work has at least been productive over these past two weeks, given how uncomfortable and worn out I am.  I’m glad that the discomfort isn’t a necessary prerequisite for work being productive.  If it were, I’m afraid that I would be forced to withdraw my services, so to speak.

Ugh, I’m tired of writing these posts on my smartphone.  It continues to irritate my thumb joints, and I make so many typos because the “keys” are not suited to adult male hands, and probably not to adult female hands, either.  I should just bring my little laptop computer again instead of being lazy.

Of course, that computer is getting on a bit, and frankly, so is this phone.  But I really don’t feel like replacing either of them.  I’ve had the thought, and the intention, that they, like everything else, should be the last of such things that I own.

I don’t know.  I can’t think of anything else to say.  Move along, folks, nothing left to see here today, you know?

Anyway, try to have a good day and a good week.

by

What shall we do now?

Well, it’s Wednesday now, and since I have no appointments for X-rays or anything similar, I am heading on in to the office.  It’s continued to be a hectic time, and today is supposed to be the day on which we finally begin to do business in the new office, though many things have been moved during the day over the last few days.  I would have thought that the uprooting and shifting would have made working more difficult, but we’ve had very big days, especially yesterday.

It’s good I guess, but it’s annoying, because it means I’m very stressed out by more than one thing.

I’m still quite beat, by which I mean I’m so very tired and worn down and exhausted.  I told the boss yesterday that this last week plus had been one of the top five hardest weeks of my life‒and I pointed out the various other horrible weeks I’ve had so I could try to put it in perspective for him‒but I really don’t think he quite got the point.

I think my inability to convey how I feel, or the tendency for it not to show, as well as my own inherent tendency toward a kind of nihilistic stoicism, means that people don’t really know or at least don’t understand when I’m feeling truly horrible.  I’ve said before that this is why the line from Pink Floyd’s Brain Damage resonates with me so much:  “And if the cloudbursts thunder in your ear, you shout and no one seems to hear…”

I don’t even feel I’m at some breaking point anymore; I think I’m already broken, but I’m hobbling along because of inertia, holding the remnants of me together with paperclips and twine and baling wire.

Anyway, I’m exhausted.  I wish I could get back into writing or drawing or creating songs and doing music or studying more science and math, but though I have had passion for all those things at various times, there is only so much one can do to produce creative things in a vacuum, with nearly no feedback or appreciation, before one gives up.

Van Gogh had a similar situation, I guess (not that I am comparing my ability with his) in that he produced many brilliant works of art, but only one was bought by anyone in his lifetime and no one but his sibling appreciated his ability.  And, of course, finally, he shot himself in the torso and died from the wound not long after.  I can sympathize very much, even with his choice to shoot himself in a way that would not be immediately lethal.  It’s both a fear thing‒a lethal shot is scary to do‒and a form of self-punishment and self-hatred‒one doesn’t feel that one deserves an easy death.

I don’t know what I, myself, am going to do.  I’m just too exhausted from my current situation, and from the feeling that I need to use the bathroom 24 hours a day.

Okay, well, that’s enough for today.  I’m very tired, as I said, and it’s only early morning.  But, of course, my sleep is even worse than usual because of the whole bathroom urgency and flank pain thing.  Ah, whataya gonna do?

I hop that what you will do is have a good day.

***

Addendum:  Well, I’m at the office, and even though the Wi-Fi was supposed to be still active this morning in the office, it seems the movers, such as they are, took the router over with them.  My phone’s mobile hotspot function doesn’t get good enough reception here, and so far the public Xfinity Wi-Fi doesn’t seem to have any ability to do adequate data, so I cannot get anything done at the office.

Why did I bother to come in?  Well, of course, that was largely because I couldn’t sleep and there was no air conditioning at the house, but I also like to get a head start on office stuff.  I’ve even finished the last of the series’ of “light novels” with which I was trying to distract myself, so I can’t even count on any reading to help me.

I apparently will not have a closed area in the new office where I will be able to be at least partly cut off from the noise and all.  I wish I had just stayed at the house today, and maybe never left again.  I don’t even have a guitar here anymore, because I gave away my black Strat.  That action was one of those “gesture” things, to be honest, and I was hoping someone would pick up on the point of it, but either they didn’t recognize it, or‒more likely‒they don’t really much care.

I shouldn’t be surprised.  There are very few people for whom it would actually matter if I die.

I’ve finally been able to get the Xfinity thing working a bit, so I should be able to post this.  After that, I don’t know.  There’s just too much for me to deal with right now.  I wish I could just go to sleep and stay that way.  I hate this life.

by

A quick, belated post

This is going to be brief (I suspect) in addition to being late (already).  I have an appointment for an X-ray this morning to follow up and see if the kidney stone has passed, which I hope it has.  So, I’m going to the office late, and writing this‒well starting this‒as I wait for my ride to the hospital to get the study done.  I don’t expect to finish it until afterwards, but who knows?

I wonder whether the little app thing for the hospital system will give me the result of the X-ray when it is read, before I see the urologist.  That would be kind of cool, actually.  I like being able to review my labs and radiology reports without needing the priestly intervention of the physicians, especially since I am one, though no longer in practice.

***

Okay, I’m done with the X-ray, which went very quickly.  They seem to be a very well-run place over there.

It’s terribly frustrating that I have to quick duck into the restroom at every full stop (and even some commas).  There’s just a never-ending sense of urgency, probably because of the stent in place and the thread that goes from it to the outside world, and I don’t want to ignore it, of course, because the last thing I want to do is create circumstances for more kidney stones.

It’s a bit of a negative nostalgia situation, as well.  I was the youngest of 3 children (well…I still am) and I tended to have to pee a lot, certainly more than anyone else in my family.  So I ended up having to hold my urine in much more than did my peers*.  Not that people were unkind (though my sixth grade teacher gave me the nickname “Straight Pipes” which is somewhat unkind, I guess, but I took it as affectionate teasing).  But it just means that I have quite a lot of nonspecific memories of desperately trying not to wet my pants while waiting for, for instance, the family car to get somewhere I could use the restroom.

I don’t know, maybe that tendency has something to do with ASD.  I wonder if it could be some sort of sensory sensitivity.  I’m probably overthinking it.

Anyway, this’ll do for now.  Sorry for the delay, and please have a good day.

*Sorry, I couldn’t resist.