Medicine

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Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears moist it again, and frame some feeling blog

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, as you may already know, though if you’re reading this later, you may not.  But now you do know, just in case you care.

I’m writing this at the train station, where I just missed a late previous train because the elevator was slow.  I would think they might have been willing to hold the train for the 5 extra seconds it would have taken for me to board‒certainly, the conductor saw me getting off the elevator.  I would respect their desire not to delay if it were not for the fact that they were the ones already running late, according to a schedule that they had promulgated.

They certainly have no leg to stand on with regard to other people taking an extra moment to get on the train, when they are late almost every day.  If they ran consistently and reliably on time, I would respect their demands for punctuality from passengers.  But it is not so.  They are merely hypocrites.

Anyway, I wasn’t planning to get on that train in the first place, because I wasn’t on time for its scheduled departure.  I’m just irritable.

I’m also getting sick‒and not just in my usual, everyday way.  I have a low-grade fever (about 99.7 or so by core temperature) and feel achy and crappy and have a bit of a dry cough.  It could be Covid, I suppose, but I don’t give a f*ck.  Covid was disappointing in that both times I had it‒before and after vaccination‒it didn’t even come close to killing me.

Boo, I say.

Anyway, I probably ought not to go into work today, but I don’t know if my coworker will be there.  Supposedly he is going to be coming in, but then again, supposedly he was going to be there on Saturday, and I ended up getting a last minute Uber to the office (for which the boss has not offered to compensate me, by the way).  So, I’d rather go in and, if my coworker comes, perhaps leave early.

Ideally, I should have taken a 4-day weekend of sorts.  I should just have rested.  Unfortunately, we are not very civilized about such things here in this part of the world.  If I were like so many other people at work‒having a poor time sense and less than ideal work ethic‒I guess I would just indulge myself and give a mental “up yours” to everyone else.

For reasons of which I am far from certain, however, I don’t seem to be built that way.  This has led to me being taken advantage of quite a few times, sometimes continuously, in my life.  That’s probably a large part of what landed me in prison‒being used as a target and a dupe because I wanted to help people with chronic pain, since I suffer from it myself and knew the prejudice such people face.

I guess I was and am stupid, huh?  I don’t see myself changing this characteristic, except to the extent that avoiding it underlies my unwillingness to get very close to anyone.  I sure as Hell* don’t want any romantic entanglements.  They tend to cause me nothing but heartache and heartbreak, though I am at least truly thankful for my children.  I could never regret anything that led to their existence.  After that, though‒especially after 2013, which was when I last actually saw my kids‒all bets are off, and everything is pretty pointless.

Yes, I know, I wrote my books and stories and have done this blog since then.  Again, I say, everything is pretty pointless.  I’m not persuaded that those things‒this thing‒never having happened would be any loss to the world whatsoever.

Whenever I get sick these days, I hope that it will turn into something like pneumonia and perhaps kill me.  I’d prefer not to die of dysentery, but that would be tolerable.  And I’d rather not get meningitis or encephalitis, just because if I survive I might have brain damage that I wouldn’t like.

Reality rarely seeks one’s opinion of course‒a case in point is that I am still alive even after all those opportunities for pneumonia, and my open heart surgery and my back surgery and all the rest.

I just got on the next train, which was 6 minutes late from its scheduled time.  It’s so irritating.  Why is it difficult for trains to keep a schedule?  Buses sometimes have some excuse, but why trains?

It’s also a bit over air conditioned on board, at least relative to the platform, where I was literally sweating like a human despite just sitting still.  I’ve mentioned how the extreme air conditioning is just making the world slightly worse overall, and it seems obvious to me, but what are you going to do with the stupid humans?

Don’t answer that.  I have plenty of ideas of my own.  Only some of them involve the Hobbesian** point that humans can provide some important protein.

Anyway, if I do stay out of the office sick tomorrow, I won’t be writing a post before Monday.  And if this URI converts into an LRI or something equally serious and kills me, or at least puts me in the hospital, I might not be writing a post Monday…or indeed, perhaps I might not write one ever again.

If that’s a prospect that excites you‒and why would it not?‒just imagine how exciting it is for me to consider!  And yet, so far, I keep recovering every time.  Dammit.  F*ck you, Biology!

So, in case I’m not here tomorrow writing a post, I hope you all are happy and well and that you collectively have a very good weekend.  Try to stay safe and healthy; I don’t wish the negative things for others that I wish for myself.

TTFN

best-anime-about-illness

*Surer than Hell, really.  Hell is quite unlikely actually to exist, even if there is a God.  What sort of benevolent deity would punish for eternity the souls of people It created because they were imperfect?  How about doing some teaching and training and corrective maintenance, instead?  How about doing a better job at creating people?  I’ve often said, if even one person‒no matter how horrible‒is consigned to Hell for eternity for the deeds of a human lifetime, then a God that arranged such a thing is unworthy of worship.

**From Calvin and Hobbes, not the author of The Leviathan.

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A somewhat more positive blog post. That may not be saying much, but take what you can get.

Well, it probably won’t surprise those of you who read my previous post to learn that I left the office early yesterday‒at lunchtime‒and came back to the house where, after eating a bit, I took a melatonin and half a Benadryl.  I’ll say this for that group of meds:  it was only a few minutes after taking them that I felt a strong pressure to sleep, and so I did.

Some of that may just be fulfillment of expectation, and I was, of course, very tired, but they are supposed to be rapidly dissolving melatonin tablets.  Benadryl never seems to act very quickly on me, so I hesitate to credit the fast onset of sleep to it.

I did wake up quite a lot during the night‒about like usual‒but at least the night was effectively longer, and I don’t mean that in the sense that it felt like it lasted a millennium, as I said yesterday about Monday night.  I mean that I was in bed for a good ten hours roughly, and that at least is something special.  I regret to have to inform you that my pain is only slightly abated, but with a bit of rest, at least it’s slightly easier to tolerate.

I’m writing this on my phone today, by the way, because there was no way in hell I was carrying anything I didn’t really need to carry when I left the office, and that meant no laptop computer.

I think I’m going to try to take just a melatonin in the evening tonight, to see if it works to help me drop off.  The fact that I still reawakened frequently throughout the night at least somewhat assuages my fear that I might oversleep if I take it.  I’m too tense about oversleeping anyway, so short of a general anaesthetic, I’m unlikely to sleep through my alarm.

That raises an interesting point for me.  I clearly have a sense of chronic tension, almost all the time.  I suppose it might be called an anxiety syndrome, but that never feels like quite the right term to me.  I don’t feel “anxious”, like I constantly want to run away, figuratively, but more that I’m constantly ready to fight.  Maybe that’s just an example of different people’s reactions to the same process‒the sympathetic nervous system function of fight or flight, which in me seems to tend powerfully toward “fight”.  Thus, in my song Breaking Me Down, I sing, “I always want to hit someone, but I never get in fights.”

I was strongly trained by my father not to get in fights unless it’s truly, absolutely necessary, and I think that’s good training.  But I always feel ready to fight (not necessarily physically, though that’s always an option).  I even keep weapons (nothing that can accidentally go off!) at my side when I sleep and in the office.

I know, that’s a bit weird.  It’s not that I actually expect to be attacked.  Of all the people I know in the office‒and most other places, really‒I am the one most likely to be inclined to violence, but I have always had exceptionally good impulse control.  I’m not even prone to act on wholesome impulses!  But if I need to get in a fight, I do want every advantage available.

In a sporting situation, fairness is important, but in “real life” I have no interest in fighting fairly.  A fair fight is one where you have a fifty percent chance of losing.  I want to bring that chance as close to zero as I can if things really matter.  I will cheat in any way I can if it’s a fight about something important, and I will feel that I have done right.  The leopard doesn’t offer its prey a head start if it can help it, nor does the prey wait until the leopard has a fair shot at it to run away.

Anyway, enough of that pseudo-macho stuff.  I just mean that, almost all the time, I feel defensive/semi-aggressive, though I strongly dislike getting in arguments (or fights, really), and even feel mortified and ashamed and self-hating if I make a heated comment online.  Sometimes I even feel nervous when I make a positive comment, as though I fear having to deal with anyone responding to me, even if that response is also positive.  It’s weird.  I suppose, to some extent, it’s probably simply the fact that I have always felt weird, like I’m crazy, like I don’t quite function like the people around me, even within my own family.  I think I’ve mentioned that here, before.

All that tension does wear you out, though, and if not tempered, or at least counter-balanced, by positive things, it can make life very unpleasant.  I’m not sure what to do about it, though.  Meditation can soften it, but as I’ve mentioned, meditation often seems to make my depression get worse.  That’s not much of an improvement, if at all.  So, I have my ongoing conundrum.

I don’t know, also, how much‒if at all‒that tension contributes to the worsening of my chronic pain.  It’s possible that it does a fair amount.

In any case, I would say that I probably have some version of chronic anxiety, but that it doesn’t present as what I would call “anxiety”.  I don’t feel worried or afraid, I just feel hostile and often even hateful.  If the Force were real and I had any affinity for it, I don’t see how I could avoid the Dark Side.

Anyway, I’m going in quite early to catch up on things I let go yesterday because I could not focus at all on anything important.  But this pain and this tension and this depression are really grinding me down, and I don’t know how much will and energy I have left.  I’m very, very, very tired.  Maybe if I use the melatonin every day, I’ll gradually feel at least a bit better.  Just because it’s not globally useful doesn’t mean it couldn’t help for certain people in certain circumstances.

If it doesn’t help, I don’t know what I’m going to do.  I keep speaking (or writing) about giving up and dying, but I keep on trying to find solutions or at least palliatives to my physical and psychological difficulties.  And I keep retrying lots of things that have failed before, in a sort of desperation to do something, anything, to see if I can feel less unhealthy.  I’ve not had a lot of luck, but maybe I would have been worse without the various things I’ve tried.  There’s no way to know, since I can’t compare alternate realities.  There’s also no way to know that I might not have been better than I am if I hadn’t tried to combat my dysthymia and pain.

Oh, well.  I’m probably wasting my time and my efforts.  But, if anyone out there knows of any brilliant new ideas, please let me know…but remember, they should probably be truly new, or at least not cliché.  I’m a trained MD, and I’ve read about and tried a lot of things beyond even that extensive training and practice.

The world isn’t made for us, and certainly we were never born to be comfortable.  It’s the feelings of dissatisfaction that prod us to act to stay alive and to thrive and to reproduce.  That’s good engineering, like smoke detectors being hyper-sensitive and fire alarms being extra jarring.  But if the smoke alarm gets stuck in an active position, leaving the alarm always going, eventually you’re going to want to cut power to it, and to hell with the risk of fire.  And if you can’t shut it off no matter what, eventually, you’re either just going to deafen yourself completely or leave the house.

That’s metaphor, of course.

I hope you all have a good day.  If you’re able to get good nights’ sleeps regularly, please make sure not to take it for granted.  And have a nap in my name, if you can!  I know it does me no actual good, but somehow it seems like a nice idea.

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3 billion heartbeats, and what do you get?

Well, it’s Wednesday morning now, as one might expect, if one lives life linearly and ordinally, which is how I do it.  I’m writing this on my little laptop computer today, because my thumbs have been getting sore from the use of the smartphone for blogging—more precisely, the base of my thumbs and my first MCP joints on both sides hurt quite a bit.  Also, I just type faster on the laptop, and It’s easier for me to express myself, though why I ever bother doing that is not quite entirely clear to me.

I feel pretty rotten still—physically, I mean.  I still have body aches and soreness and weakness (or at least asthenia) and a general feeling of being slightly breathless.  I still had a very low-grade fever as of last night, but I checked my oxygen, which was 95-96% saturation, occasionally pushing up to 97%, and my pulse rate was in the high-90s to low 100s, a bit variable with respiration.  That’s actually slightly low for me.  All my life I’ve tended to have a rapid pulse, possibly related to the atrial septal defect with which I was born, which can affect the heart’s inherent pacemaker and conduction system because of its location.

Apparently, the average number of heartbeats in a lifetime for a human (or closely related alien) is about 3 billion.  This is more than that of most mammals, which hover a little below two-thirds that many, if memory serves.  That number is roughly consistent from shrews to blue whales.  Geoffrey West discusses some of this in his book Scale, which is really interesting, and I recommend it.  As for me, I haven’t read anything in over a week, really, other than a few blog posts.

I just did a quick calculation regarding my chronic, diagnosed “sinus tachycardia”*.  If my average heart rate were 110—which my pulse can hover near, at least some of the time—I should have lived to about 51.8 years.  I’m already slightly past that, but within the realm of rough experimental error.  If 105 were closer to my average, my expected lifespan would be about 54.3 years, which would mean I have less than a year to go.  I figured the first number by dividing 3 billion by 110, then by 60, then by 24, then by 365.25.  I then did the second one by replacing the 110 with 105 and repeating the whole thing, but it occurs to me that I could just have taken 51.8 x 110/105 and gotten the same answer more easily.

So, basically, if my pulse has been steadily tachycardic—which I can only infer roughly based on the moments in which I’ve actually measured it, since I obviously didn’t measure it in between—then I’ve already lived just about as many heartbeats as I’m expected to live, on average.

Of course, there are some big “ifs” there.  There have certainly been times when I’ve been more fit, and that has tended to slow my resting heart rate somewhat.  Also, let’s not be too quasi-mystical about all this; it’s not as though there is some ethereal hourglass that measures out not seconds but heartbeats in the platonic space of life and death.  It’s just a rough average.

If the world is deterministic, then of course, one does, in a sense, have a pre-programmed number of heartbeats before one dies, but there’s nothing about that number that would determine the length of one’s life; it would, indeed, be a consequence of the various things that determine the length of one’s life, just as would the length of that life in seconds.  It wouldn’t be a dispositive fact, merely an epiphenomenon.  It would be casual rather than causal, one might say.

This is all a bit silly, but in many ways it’s reassuring to me that, just maybe, I really have come to what will be the natural end of my expected life.  I’ve read that people on the autism spectrum have shorter expected lifespans than people not on the spectrum (the range is wide, apparently anywhere from 36 to 61 years, which seems pretty imprecise) supposedly largely due to the various difficulties with self-care and social support and the like.

One reads plenty of reported evidence that a key determinant of a long and “happy” life is the degree of one’s social support network—not necessarily its size, but certainly its quality.  Well, when one of the fundamental aspects of a dysfunction is difficulty with ordinary social communication and connection, one can expect a group to tend to have a poorer social support network and ability to self-advocate.  And, of course, the three major proximate causes of death are apparently—according to a quick Bing search—epilepsy, heart disease, and suicide.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of epilepsy.  I do have a cavum septum pellucidum cyst in my brain, which was discovered by chance on an MRI done for other reasons.  It’s a benign finding, in and of itself, but it turns out to be slightly more common in people with ASD (the neurologic one, not the cardiac one) as does ASD itself (the cardiac one, this time, which I also had).

So, I do/did have at least one form of heart disease, though I don’t know whether it counts in the measure of what they’re describing as such causes.  I think the third thing in the list is by far the most likely cause of premature death for me, if “premature” is really the right word.  After all, my “social support network” is locally all but nonexistent, and is very limited on a distant scale.

Of course, sleep disorders—also apparently very prevalent in those “on the spectrum”—are significant impediments to a long and happy life for anyone, and my sleep has been disordered for a very long time.  As a case in point, yesterday I was so physically wiped out from work and feeling ill that I just took a ride from the train station to the house and tried just to shut off the light, take half a Benadryl, and go to sleep.  Then—to no one’s surprise, but to my frustration—I could not get to sleep until after midnight, and then I started waking up by no later than two in the morning, awakening on and off every ten to twenty minutes until finally there was no point in delaying anymore.

I don’t know why I’m discussing all this trivia.  Maybe I’m just to try to get the message out that, if I do die “young”** in the near-future, which doesn’t seem terribly unlikely, you shouldn’t think of it as something sad, as some kind of tragedy.  My life is pathetically empty, and rather unpleasant most of the time.

I would never say there aren’t people who have it much worse than I do.  Of course there are.  That will almost certainly always be true, by any set of criteria one might choose.  It’s also irrelevant.  There are people who die young who, based on the quality of their lives, would have been better off having died even younger.  And there are those who live very long lives who still could have lived even longer with great happiness and well-being, and so even after a century, such a death could be considered premature by some criteria.  Futility is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I’m dragging this out, as I tend to do.  I just feel very tired, and very uncomfortable, and I don’t have any particular joy, or prospect of future joy, that makes me want to keep going and live longer.  I’m lonely and sad and uncomfortable and awkward and weird, living in a world in which I feel like an alien or a changeling or a mutant, or whatever.

Well, lets call that good for now, so to speak.  I’m going to get a Lyft to the train again today, because I’ve taken longer than I’d like to catch the bus, and anyway, I’m still just wiped out.  I’m going to try to time the train I take so that I get to my destination after the nearest CVS is open, so I can pick up some cold medicine***.  Maybe a decongestant will help me feel like I can breathe a little better.  Who knows?  But I need to do the payroll today, so at least it might help me stay awake for the time being, even if the decongestant effect doesn’t make much difference.  After that, I don’t think it really matters much.

*Nothing to do with the sinuses in one’s head, but with the sino-atrial node in the heart, the intrinsic pacemaker.  It means that one has a fast heart rate—tachycardia—but that its origin is at the usual source of the heartbeat.  It’s not an aberrant source or a reentrant tachycardia such as might occur when the conduction system of the heart develops a loop that keeps feeding rapidly back into itself and generating a truly and significantly over-fast heartbeat.  That can degenerate into more dangerous arrhythmias, whereas sinus tachycardia does not tend to do so.

**Scare quotes added because I do not feel young in almost any way, other than, perhaps, my ability to remain curious about various things in a way that seems unusual in other people somehow.  Many days I feel as if I’ve lived for centuries, but not in a cool, Anne Rice vampire kind of way.  Rather, I feel more like a mortal who has kept one of the Great Rings.  I’ve discussed that metaphor before and won’t bother going into it now.

***I did time it correctly, and the CVS was open…but the pharmacy was not, and will not be until 9 am.  Unfortunately, one cannot get real Sudafed—the decongestant that actually works without causing dangerous elevations in blood pressure—except at the pharmacy counter, and only in limited amounts, because some people have used it to make amphetamines.

This is a truly absurd and sub-moronic standard.  It’s harder for a law-abiding citizen in Florida to get a product containing pseudoephedrine than it is to get a gun, and all so the state can prevent a small minority of people from willingly taking a substance into their own bodies that no one is forcing them to use, just as some other people use beer or potato chips or Big Macs or ice cream…or tobacco.

And, of course, they aren’t actually preventing anything.  If they wanted to prevent drug use, they’d have to try to find out why life is bleak and empty enough for some people that they seek artificial sources of transient mood elevation (even though those sources are dangerous) and perhaps try to remedy or at least remediate the causes.  But, no, the same sort of people who would decry government overreach if corporate or upper-echelon income taxes were raised slightly, or if the government tried to ensure that people are vaccinated to curtail the spread of actual contagion to millions, and who would take up arms in open rebellion against any attempt to restrict gun ownership at any level, are willing to have the state keep people from using a comparatively safe medication for congestion and force them to use more dangerous ones—like oxymetazoline, which I am going to have to use, today.

The law truly is “a ass” and “a idiot”, and it’s written by people who are—and who are voted into power by—cretins and troglodytes who cannot even comprehend the nature of and the science behind the comforts and technologies which keep them alive and relatively safe.  If any readers here have any influence in this particular issue, please try to do something about it.  If necessary, just burn it all—the whole stupid planet—and let nature start over in some new state.  There are still a billion or so habitable years on Earth in which hopefully to bring an actually intelligent species into existence for the first time.

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“Don’t think I need anything at all.”

“No, don’t think I need anything at all.”

It’s Wednesday morning, and this morning I’m writing this blog post on my laptop computer, which at the moment of writing this sentence is, in fact, resting atop some form of my actual lap.  Actually, it’s more on my right thigh and lower left leg, the latter of which is crossed over the former in what’s sometimes called a “figure four” posture, rather than being a true, traditional “lap”, like you might find in Lapland (presumably at discount prices).  Unfortunately, though useful, that figure four posture puts strain on my left knee—at least if it’s in any kind of sore state, which it is at the moment—so I’m probably going to have to switch that out.

I’m really tired, even for me.

I’m tired of trying.  I feel that I’ve been trying hard all my life, and in many objective senses, I honestly have.

I was never a slacker in school.  I graduated with all “As”, I was class valedictorian, I was a National Merit Scholar, all that bullshit.  I got a full ride scholarship to Cornell, without having anyone with any kind of real background knowledge or connections about how to apply to a high-level university or anything.  We certainly had no “connections”.

Anyway, you all know all that stuff:  blue collar town, scholarship to college, heart defect discovered and heart surgery done during my first summer of college, significant mood and (temporary) cognitive side-effects from open-heart surgery, leading to switched major.

Graduated with honors*, had a temporary (but severe) estrangement from my parents** due to issues involving my now-ex-wife.  Was administratively discharged from the Navy for health reasons related to the heart defect and also to my mood disorder.  Was not able, at that age, to finish my novel-in-progress, and so decided to go to medical school.  Got the distribution requirements easily enough, went to medical school on a partial scholarship, had some pretty bad trouble with mood disorder during third year or so.  Did residency, had kids, moved to Florida to start practice.

Had a back injury, with consequent chronic pain, worsening mood disorder, divorce, “temporary disability”.  Tried to do at least part-time medical work to help other people with chronic pain, but was not the sharpest tool in the shed when it comes to certain things that are beyond the straightforward (i.e., trying to help people with chronic pain but not realizing that some people—some patients and people with whom I worked, as well as the State itself—had ulterior motives of one kind or another) and thus not even recognizing that there was a chance that I could be arrested or charged with anything, since I wasn’t trying to do anything wrong…I was just doing what I saw as the essence of my job (trying to relieve suffering), and had no desire even for personal enrichment.  Seriously.  I gave away most of what I made to other people.  I’ve done that a lot, and consistently, throughout much of my life.

I’m stupid that way.

Then, of course, I went to jail and prison, and I haven’t seen my kids in over ten years.  I haven’t spoken (in any sense) with my son in that time***.  I’m still in chronic pain, my mood disorder is as bad as ever or worse, and I’ve recently discovered that I’m possibly/probably on the autism spectrum, which would explain a lot of my not understanding or expecting the issues that led me to be arrested, among other things.

It probably also explains part of why I had so much trouble with (for instance) dictating charts after I went into private practice.  I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned that last bit here, but that was a nightmare for me.  I had the most horrible time trying to dictate chart notes, and always ended up getting backed up—a lot—no matter where I was in practice.  It seems all the other doctors and everybody just loved dictating charts; they thought it was so much easier than writing.  For me it was like trying to build a sand castle using knitting needles.  But I didn’t understand why I had so much trouble with it, I thought I was just being lazy or weak or something, and I just had to force myself to learn to do better, so I kept on trying, and I kept on getting backed up (severely) over and over again.

It’s a stupid idea, anyway.  Writing and speaking are two different kinds of processes, and organization and recording of medical notes is better done in writing.  Also, that way there’s also not delay in getting the notes into the chart.  I couldn’t speak and say the things I’m writing here with anything approaching the speed and clarity with which I am typing them.

Nowadays, I think most medical charting is done using portable computers, which—if the system is good—is probably an excellent option.

Anyway, all that leads up to now, when I’m living alone in a single room (with attached shower/bathroom), in a house that is not my home, working at a job that I’ve worked at basically just to keep myself alive and fed while writing fiction…but now I’m no longer writing fiction, I’m no longer doing music, I’m no longer doing anything apart from this blog.

Tomorrow would have been my 32nd wedding anniversary.  Though I’ve been divorced longer than I was married, it’s still an important, or at least consequential, day to me, though I’m guessing it isn’t as important to my ex-wife.  I don’t know, I think I’m a member of a species that mates for life to a single mate (though clearly that was not the case for her).  I certainly have no desire to get romantically involved with anyone else ever again—it’s not worth the risk.  I also can’t imagine anyone wanting to get involved with me.  The few minor attempts I made after my divorce were laughably bad.

There’s nothing good coming down the pike.

And no one is going to help me, I’m pretty sure of that.  I’ve sent out coded and not-so-coded distress signals, here and elsewhere, over and over again, in various ways, some of which are perhaps opaque, but others of which I think are rather obvious.  Maybe it’s just a case of some form of “the bystander effect”, I don’t know.

I’ve tried to do therapy again**** (online this time), with limited and very temporary effects, and I’ve called 988 and spoken to the very lovely person who was there—they deserve all the plaudits and support they can be given.  (I’ve tried to call it more than once, the first occasion of which involved a misadventure due to T-Mobile’s bad service at the time).

It’s all ultimately not getting me anywhere.  I’m not accomplishing anything or contributing anymore to the net worth of civilization.  I’m certainly not contributing to my own well-being, because I don’t think that even exists.  I’m just adding my little, inconsequential bit of entropy to the eventual (probable) heat death of the universe.

I need to die.  I’m just having a hard time working up the nerve to do it.  I wish I had a drug or alcohol problem, because the use of those is associated with higher rates of suicide, and even “accidental” overdose death, but I don’t seem prone to such things.  I have large bottles of aspirin and acetaminophen and naproxen that I could take, but such means are unreliable, and the process tends to be quite drawn out.  I don’t own any guns anymore.  I did buy two helium tanks and a non-rebreather mask and tubing, but setting that up and applying it turned out to be difficult, and I didn’t have a good place to do it.  I hate the idea of leaving a mess for innocent people, though that may be unavoidable.  That’s also the main reason for not just cutting various arteries open after ensuring that I’m adequately anticoagulated—I’m not afraid of blood (and I’m demonstrably not afraid of cutting myself), but I know other people are, and I don’t really want to traumatize others more than I already have in my life, if I can help it.

I had a rather strong bourbon and diet-Pepsi last night; alcohol is supposed to help one harm oneself, but it’s just made me feel more tired today than usual because of worse-than-usual sleep.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I don’t know if or what I’ll write after this.  I hope the rest of you are feeling better than I am.

*After initially missing the deadline for my honors thesis, thinking it was due a month later than it was, and having to write the whole thing—52 pages!—in one weekend.  I might have gotten more than a basic cum laude if I’d been better able to manage deadlines and all that, but it was never my own idea to try for honors, anyway.  Not that I regret it, but it was not my ambition.

**And more indirectly, in consequence, with the rest of my family, since they were caught between.  I feel very bad about that, and about the time I missed with them and my parents, all over someone who left me in the end.

***His choice, not mine.  We have exchanged one email in that time, and he sends along his thanks via his sister for birthday presents and the like.  He’s a good person, and I love him and am proud of him and do not blame him.  He’s not much better at dealing with things like this and with other people and with radical changes of circumstance than I am, and I think he was badly hurt by everything that happened.

****I’ve gone to at least four or five therapists, and I’ve even been (very briefly) hospitalized once for depression while I was out on bail.  I’ve tried at least seven different anti-depressants with mixed results, at best.  And here I am.

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Tsukiyomi no mori no ban’nin, hikage no shinshi, tsuki no tesaki ni narimashou.

It’s Monday morning again.  I can only think of two songs off the top of my head that provide fun references to the day, and I think I’ve used them both more than once, so I’m not going to do that here.  I suppose I could refer to the Carpenters’ song about Rainy Days and Mondays, but that’s a slightly gloomy and glum song, though pretty (and, to be fair, with some upbeat aspects), and I can do gloomy and glum just fine by myself, thanks*.

Yesterday was pretty uneventful, which is not a bad attribute for a day off.  I did my laundry, which was good, and I also got some rest‒I took several naps throughout the day, which, again, is good.  In all fairness, that’s pretty much what I do throughout most nights:  taking lots of short naps and waking up in between.  I even did that on Saturday night after taking two Benadryl before going to sleep.  In fact, I started having a hard time even dozing back off at about 4 am on Sunday.  But that’s just too early to be getting up and starting laundry, even for me.  So I toughed it out until about 6:30.

You’ve got to be hard on yourself sometimes.

Oh, I’m writing this post on my phone this morning, because I just felt too lazy to bring the laptop with me on Saturday.  There was no particular reason to avoid it.  I just didn’t want to bother.  I’m not sure what I’ll do today; I don’t want to force myself to decide in advance.

I’m somewhat disappointed to report that I don’t seem to have suffered any ill-effects, at least so far, of the little experiments that I began the other day.  It’s not impossible that some could accrue yet, but I think I shouldn’t get my hopes up.  It would be such a weight off if I could just start having a GI bleed or something.  Maybe I’m too half-assed about it.

Rat poison used to be primarily comprised of “super-coumadins” in diatomaceous earth**.  That might have been a useful option.  Nowadays, though, most rat poisons (I have checked) seem to be the new neurologically targeted stuff that’s highly specific toward rat nervous systems, and much less dangerous for humans and dogs and cats if they accidentally ingest it.  I know, that’s a good thing (unless you’re a rat or love rats).  But it’s disappointing if you want to have readily available options for encouraging your own self to bleed without a prescription.

Thank goodness aspirin was discovered millennia before the FDA or DEA and has never been used to “get high” by anyone***.  If it were discovered in the modern world, it would never be available without a prescription‒not in the US, anyway.  You even have to go to the effing pharmacy counter to get pseudoephedrine for your cold and allergy symptoms, because some people turned a certain amount of it into amphetamines of one kind or another.

Makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?  Let’s keep a useful and comparatively harmless medicine**** restricted in availability for people who want to use it for legitimate reasons, in order to prevent rare people from turning it into a product other rare people use because they like it.  Remember, illicit drugs aren’t forced on their users.  People buy them because they want them, just like people do with fast food and candy and beer and tobacco and fast cars and the like, none of which are without drawbacks.

Ah, to hell with it.  It would be nice to improve human civilization using reasoned action with actual measurement of end-points and serious attempts to obtain good data, with a goal of improving things overall, in general, for everyone.  But that’s not how humans are built, is it?

I really want to check out of this madhouse hotel.  It’s noisy and garish and smelly and loud, and it’s almost impossible for me to get a good night’s sleep in it.  And I can’t seem to find anything to do here that’s any fun.

Oh, well.  Maybe things will get better this week.  Try not to laugh; that’s me attempting my closest approach to cautious optimism.  I’m not very good at it.

Princess_Tomoyo

*The “pretty” part might be a personal deficiency in my work, I’ll admit, but sometimes you’ve got to let gloomy and glum just be full-on ugly, and not try to sweeten the hit.  I can do that.

**Coumadin is a brand name of warfarin, an anticoagulant that interferes with vitamin K dependent aspects of the coagulation cascade (is that factors 1, 2, 7, and 9, or am I misremembering?) and of course, diatomaceous earth is basically composed of bajillions of microscopic silica-based skeletons of ancient marine organisms (diatoms), which have tiny little spiky projections everywhere.  I believe that the idea was that the diatoms would make lots of little perforations in rat GI tracts, but I don’t know that it ever did much.  Super-coumadins are more than able to induce various kinds of massive hemorrhaging on their own.

***That factor seems to be the main issue with a great many of the drugs that are illegal, if not all of them.  If people can, at will, do something that will make themselves feel good, even if only temporarily, then what carrots and sticks can keep them being fully productive cogs in the spontaneously self-assembled machine?  Caffeine, on the other hand, is by far the most widely used and abused drug in the world but is quite legal‒and Starbucks is the world’s largest drug pusher, followed closely by Dunkin Donuts and then McDonald’s, or those were the rankings the last time I checked.

****The over-the-counter decongestants available are not as effective, are not as long-acting even in slow-release forms, and are associated with significant and sometimes acutely dangerous elevations of blood pressure, even at their usual dosages.  Blood pressure elevation is, generally, only a theoretic concern with pseudoephedrine; I never saw it actually cause secondary hypertension in anyone.

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The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees is left this vault to blog of.

Hello and good morning, all.  Though I suppose I should leave it up to each of your own individual intuitions and criteria about whether it really is a “good” morning, and indeed, what such a term even could mean.  But, really, it’s what they call “a polite nothing” I suppose, because it has no other purpose than being a ritual greeting.

Weird.

It’s June 8th.  In 10 days it will be “Fathers’ Day” (I’m not sure about the “official” placement of the apostrophe).  In 21 days it will be my wedding anniversary, so to speak; anyway, it will have been 32 years since I got married, and I will have been divorced for 2 years longer than I was married, which is a crappy, crappy milestone.  I’ve also already gone roughly 10 years without seeing my kids in person, which is getting close to being as long as I was a part of their lives.

What an utter waste of years and effort it has been for me to be alive since then.

I’m writing this on my phone still/again, at the house, before heading for the bus stop.  There’s not much going on so far today, except to note that I had an unusually bad sleep last night, even for me, so I’m starting the day already feeling exhausted.

As you may recall, yesterday I did not take any “antidepressant”, and I likewise have not taken any today.  I did feel less tense yesterday than I had the days before, and that was certainly a relief, but it’s the sort of thing that happens whenever I change something like that.  I had a brief elevation in my mood when I started the Wort, also.  I suspect it’s just a placebo effect, and/or a reverse version of the same.

Anyway, I can’t blame either starting or stopping the stuff for my sleep problems.  They were there before any meds and they’ll be there after them, probably for the rest of my life.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if I were to keep having sleep problems after I die.

Well…yes, I would.  Both the fact of still having sleep problems and having the ability to be aware of them would be quite surprising to me after I’m dead.  In fact, the ability to be surprised would be quite a surprise after I’m dead.  It would certainly be intriguing, as would the fact of being capable of being intrigued.  In fact, it’s hard to see that, if one is capable of surprise or intrigue or any other emotion, one should actually be considered “dead” in any useful sense.

Of course, I don’t think any of that is possible, really.  I’m quite convinced (provisionally, as always) that death entails merely oblivion, which is one of the things that makes it so appealing.  Indeed, my “Bayesian Prior” on that is so high that I would, so to speak, be willing to bet my life on it.  Admittedly, that’s a cheap bet, from my point of view, but I don’t have any right to bet anyone else’s life, so it’s all I have, worthless and disgusting though it may be.

Almost none of the various antidepressants I’ve taken have ever seemed to help my sleep.  Tricyclics, Effexor, Trazodone, Wellbutrin, Celexa/Lexapro and most other SSRIs…they didn’t make it better and some made it worse.  Only Paxil seemed at least to make me enjoy sleeping, which had never happened to me before, but its other effects were not good.  One downside was that I gained a lot of weight, and that’s not good in someone like me, who is constitutionally prone to overweight and its related effects.  That wasn’t the only problem, either.

Anyway, I don’t know why, but my depression, after initially responding to meds and therapy, has become tougher to treat over the years.  I don’t know if this is partly related to my apparent ASD, or whatever form of atypical, non-human neurology I have, or to something about the nature of depression, or to these and other factors mixed together.

What’s more, I don’t think anyone else in the world could actually know, either.  At most, at best, hypotheses could be made and tested, by me and by other medical/scientific people.  But it’s simply a fact that “we”, meaning all consciousnesses of which any of us are actually aware, don’t know well enough the nature of the normal functioning of the brain, let alone the nature of things like depression, dysthymia, autism spectrum disorders, insomnia (or in fact what sleep really does at all levels) very deeply and/or causally.  It’s extremely complex, and not enough resources have been or are put into the study.

We do spend a lot of money on science, but still more on war, and on politics, and on sporting events and so on.  Actually, I don’t know which if any of those things receives a greater proportion of civilizational resources than science does, but it feels as though it would be nice to divert at least some of the resources away from such things and into science.  The advancement of science is something that can benefit everyone, current and subsequent, especially since, once the information is learned, is discovered, it can (in principle) be shared at vanishingly small cost, to the potential benefit of the whole planet and its future inhabitants.

Of course, the company Elsevier apparently owns many of the premier scientific journals‒it did not originate them, it just bought them and is now rent-seeking through them‒and it not only charges a frankly obscene amount for subscriptions, but it even charges scientists who want to publish in the journals.  That is, in a sense, an actual white-collar crime against humanity, against civilization.

Such people deserve to be strapped down onto tables and have one drop of liquid Drano applied to their skin every hour, or perhaps even just every day, or somewhere in between, until it finally dissolves them away enough for it to kill them.  They could be kept alive in the meantime, and suffering for as long as possible, by IV infusions and naso-gastric feeding.

It’s just a thought.  Probably, even if I were given the power and resources to do so without the risk of consequences for me, I wouldn’t actually torture such people.  They’re just monkeys doing what monkeys do, after all.  But I might take away all their wealth and make them work at subsistence level jobs for the rest of their days.  It’s not the worst punishment, maybe, but getting medical and scientific knowledge out of the control of such people would be the real goal.

Anyway, I’m going to need to head to the bus stop here in a moment.  I feel tired and grumpy, and I’m not looking forward to anything about today at all, not even to its end, since the end of each day is merely a prelude to the dismal cycle of the next day and the next and so on.

I never look forward to going to bed, because going to bed merely ushers in the beginning of the next dreary, worthless day, probably to be faced with too little, too fragmented sleep, and with ongoing pain, and without being around or with any of the people I love.  It’s not the sort of thing to which one would look forward with anything better than weary resignation, and often with frank horror and disgust…and sometimes, honestly, with something akin to terror.

What are you gonna do?  That’s life.  It’s not for the faint-hearted.  And I cannot, in good conscience, recommend it without significant caveats and reservations and misgivings.

TTFN

broken wine glasselectronic

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I think I’m going to stop my antidepressant

It’s not working.  I don’t feel any less depressed or less stressed or less unable to tolerate the noise and chaos and other nonsense.  I very briefly had a lift in my mood–for about a few days–but I now strongly suspect that to have been a placebo effect.  Perhaps all that I’ve ever gained, such as it is, from antidepressants of any type or brand or what have you has all been placebo.  Anyway, it’s not like I feel any less like I want to die than I did whatever it was, six weeks or so ago, when I restarted.  If anything, I’m just spiraling farther downward.  So, I think I’m going to call it a failure, like most things I attempt, and just see what happens.

I kicked my black Strat in frustration today, but all I did was break a string (and bruised my left big toe), and broke the nearby retro PSP that I had.  Oh, well.  I feel like shit.  I feel tighter than any string of any guitar or cello or whatever.  I think I just need to go away, completely.  No one can do anything to help me, it seems, and I’m not able to help myself.  I’m just an unpleasant presence much of the time.  And I can’t sleep.  And I’m losing almost all of what little joy or interest I’ve had in anything.  I probably ought to take a dirt vacation*.

I don’t know what to do.  I don’t know how to do anything that would have any benefit whatsoever, to anyone at all.

Oh, by the way, I despise the new WordPress block editor functions that interfere with doing things the way one used to do it.  I’ve been paying for this domain and use for years, and for my other one that I almost never use.  I’m sick of things being changed when they were working fine.  It’s one thing to add functionality, to make more things available, but don’t do things that interfere with prior functionality that people were using, and for which they were paying.  That’s my message to WordPress.

Anyway, that’s completely an aside.  It’s just one of a seemingly limitless number of things that frustrate and stress me out.  Obviously, the problem is mainly just me.  And I don’t have very many options for what to do to solve that problem.  I’ve tried many things in the past, and obviously none have done very much.  I’m trying to eat right and exercise, I don’t have a drug or alcohol problem (unfortunately), I’m just a fucked up, faulty machine.  And I’m tired of it.  But the St John’s Wort isn’t helping so far.  And it may be making me more tense.  So I think I’m probably not going to take any more starting tomorrow.  And we’ll see how that makes me feel.

Honestly, I wish something would just kill me, preferably painlessly–or if painfully, maybe something prolonged so that maybe I’d get a chance to say goodbye to my kids, if they wanted.

Whatever.

*That’s like a dirt nap, but even longer.

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Be fire with fire. Threaten the threat’ner, and outface the brow of blogging horror.

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday again.  It feels as though it ought to be Friday—some Friday in 2029, or 2929, or 20,299 or something, given how horribly long this week feels as though it has lasted.

I’ve rarely felt as unpleasant as I do this week.  First of all, as you know, despite medication and my attempts to improving my schedule and lifestyle, my depression has been very bad, and it doesn’t really seem to be improving.  Also, my pain has just been awful this week.

Yesterday I felt as if everything from my left shoulder blade on down was being eaten away by Drano™ or something similar from the inside out.  Then it spread out a bit.  It’s not much better now, though it’s not as severe as at its worst.  I don’t know what has set it off.  I’ve tried not to do stupid things, physically.  I’ve tried using knee braces and ankle braces and shoe inserts, but those quickly seemed just to make things worse (annoyingly).  I’ve tried various different brands and types of shoes.  And, of course, I’ve slightly but frequently overdosed on naproxen and aspirin and acetaminophen, which don’t help me feel much better.

There have been several times that I’ve been tempted just to grab a double fistful of aspirin and/or acetaminophen and just gulp them down—I only have about ten or twelve naproxen left in the little bottle on my desk, so I could add them to the meal, but they probably wouldn’t make much difference.  However, I know that the process of dying from even a large overdose of such combinations would be extremely drawn out, and I would probably have bad nausea and vomiting and the like as part of it.  It would be hard to tolerate without seeking some kind of help, and certainly without being obvious and intrusive to other people.  I hate nausea probably more than most anything else (I doubt this is unusual, given the nature of nausea and the purpose it serves).

I have to admit that I have harkened back with some nostalgia to the time when I had prescription opioids of one kind or another.  The side-effects and the dependency on those is annoying—so annoying that I weaned myself off the meds on my own—but at least they definitely work, for a while, to alleviate pain.

I’m getting very tired of pain.  That’s an unusual reaction, isn’t it?  Ha ha.

Seriously, though, I’ve been in chronic pain for a little more than twenty years now, and it’s not really getting better, or stabilizing, and although I’m still alive despite it—obviously—it cannot be said that I’m getting used to it, other than to say that it’s become almost a part of my identity by now, which is a horrifying and infuriating thought.

I keep thinking of a line from the movie Dragonslayer, when the wizard, Ulrich, says, “When a dragon gets this old, it knows nothing but pain, constant pain.  It grows decrepit…crippled…pitiful.  Spiteful!”  I can definitely sympathize with the dragon’s wish to burn the entire countryside, the entire world, out of frustration and rage and hatred because of constant pain—though I have no interest in burning and eating young virgins.  Is that the dragon equivalent of veal or lamb?  I don’t know.

I’ve tried many massagers (and I used my seat and feet massagers about five times yesterday at the office, to little or no avail), and patches, and creams, and ointments, and stretches, and exercises, and of course, medicines.  I’ve tried herbal things, and I’ve changed chairs, and I’ve changed the way I sleep.  I’m not a person who gives up easily; I tend always to be willing to check things out and experiment.  But there is a reason that opioids exist, despite the fact that they can be abused by those who suffer from psychological as well as physical pain:  they work.  What’s more, unlike the various OTC meds, when necessary, their doses can be increased without causing inescapable and catastrophic organ failure and a lingering, horrible death.

Even when one does die from opioids, it’s liable to be more peaceful than dying from too much Tylenol.  That is a terrible spectacle, involving total liver failure and all the dreadful, slow, wretched, painful ordeals that brings to the body.  NSAIDs, including aspirin, are not much better.  I suppose if one has a sudden, severe GI bleed from aspirin, it can be relatively quick, but it is likely to be messy, and extremely unpleasant, with nausea and pain as well as vomiting and/or defecating blood.

It’s somewhat ironic that the main cause of my disgrace and loss of career and what little was left of my life was born of my desire to try to help other people who have chronic pain—people who might not have the resources I had—to get their pain treated with the best medicines we had, however flawed they may be, in a society that looks at everyone* who picks up a prescription for an opiate or opioid as a disgusting, weak, criminal, degenerate drug addict who doesn’t really have any serious pain.  Only people with terminal cancer get a pass on treating their pain, even though, ironically, their course is usually much shorter.  It’s okay to treat your pain if you’re dying—which it ought to be, of course—but if you have to keep on living with your pain, and to keep on trying to make a living, then treating your pain makes humans see you as just a disgusting lowlife, which makes no sense at all.

Even those on the floors of hospitals taking care of patients with, for instance, sickle cell disease sometimes have the temerity to sneeringly refer to “drug-seeking” behavior in their patients.  As if they would not seek drugs for pain if I were to take a large baseball bat or sledge hammer and smash their major limb joints into powder for them, which is much of what the experience of a sick cell crisis can feel like.

Believe me, it was sometimes tempting to do such a thing.  Okay, it was often tempting.  See above about the whole “burning the countryside” thing.

Was I naïve about the pain treatment practice?  Of course I was.  I don’t tend to look for ulterior motives in people unless and until it’s glaringly obviously that I need to do so, and I don’t generally even try to understand hidden motivations and machinations of humans, who rarely seem to understand their own minds.  But even the book promulgated by the Florida Department of Health (or lack thereof) said—correctly—that there is no way accurately to test the degree of a person’s pain, and the general guideline is to take patients at their word unless and until there is a clear and good reason not to do so.  They actually sent this book out to all the doctors in the state who worked in that business.

Patients, in other words, should be considered innocent until proven guilty.  Too bad our justice system doesn’t have a principle like that to apply to it.  Oh, wait!  It supposedly does.  However, that really only applies to those who are wealthy enough to hire private defense attorneys (a rather obscene notion if you think about it).  It certainly doesn’t apply to the average person, certainly not to a person who has to use public defenders because he cannot afford an attorney, a person who hasn’t saved any money because his own life is in disarray from chronic pain, and because he doesn’t have a clue about money management or life management, or the ability to focus on them, and ends up giving much of what he earns away, and having the rest of it taken from him, because humans tend to take advantage of people like him, who are very smart and capable in some ways, but who are so very bad at taking care of themselves, and who find it hard to understand people who use others and take advantage of others and set them up to take a fall, and so on.

Again, see above about the burning of the countryside and/or the planet.  Doing that becomes more and more attractive with every moment.  Not just humans, but every life form on Earth is unworthy of existence, frankly.  At least, that’s how I often feel.  There is no innocent form of life.  Even green plants compete ruthlessly, choking each other, jockeying for the light and for water and all that stuff.  It’s all ugly and disgusting, even when it’s beautiful and amazing.

Anyway, that’s that.  I don’t even really know what I’ve written, other than general vague impressions, though of course, I will reread it as I edit it before posting.  I hate the universe at the moment, though not as much as I hate myself.  But I’m still grateful to those of you who read this blog, and so, to you especially, I hope you have a good day.

TTFN

Vermithrax

*This includes doctors, as I knew from repetitive experience.

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Though it’s Wednesday morning again, I’ll avoid quoting from She’s Leaving Home…

Though it’s Wednesday morning again, I’ll avoid quoting from She’s Leaving Home, or referring to my tied-for-favorite of Charles Addams’s characters.  I’m back at the bus stop, just as I was yesterday and the day before, of course, and I still feel very tired.

In fact, I feel a bit more tired than I did yesterday, though I had a nominally better sleep last night—almost five hours (it wasn’t uninterrupted, though).  For me, that’s middling to decent, but it’s very clear from the inside that it is not the amount of sleep my body requires for optimal, let alone maximal, function.  It may, however, be the most sleep my nervous system is able to accomplish without pharmaceutical intervention.

But, of course, with such interventions, I always feel more tired even after a long sleep than I would normally.  Actually, come to think of it, last night I took half a Benadryl™ before going to bed, so I did have some slight pharmaceutical influence, perhaps accounting for the fact that I got all of five hours of sleep.

Jeez, that’s all really boring, isn’t it?  I’m so sorry.  My life is boring, unfortunately, so if I talk about my life, things are generally going to be boring.  I appreciate your patience.

I also appreciate the people who commented and responded and so on to my previous two blog posts.  You’re greatly appreciated, I want that to be very clear, even if in supporting me I fear you are throwing pearls before swine.

I’m considering going back on Saint John’s Wort, which is an “antidepressant” that worked for me in the past, when I first took it (along with therapy, so it isn’t easy to separate variables).  I wouldn’t expect much from it.  I’m actually almost hoping to get that little bump in motivation that sometimes comes at the beginning of antidepressant treatment and puts a depressed person at increased risk for suicide, because before, they were too crippled by lack of energy to take action, but now that the will is growing, they can do it.

The last time I took it, though—which was far from the first—I just felt worse overall in general, even after several weeks, so I don’t even know that it’s going to do anything if I take it.  I can hardly be certain that the first time I took it the beneficial result was anything more than a placebo effect.

I’ve been on other antidepressants, of course, from Paxil to Celexa and Lexapro, to Effexor and Wellbutrin, as well as more old-school ones like Amitriptyline.  They clearly had effects (including benefits), of course, but I don’t know that they were for the better.  Coming off Paxil led me to experience the only two episodes of sleep paralysis I’ve ever had, which were utterly terrifying but still quite fascinating, at least in retrospect.  So in that sense it was worth the course of treatment.  The side-effects weren’t good, though.

I can’t really take prescription antidepressants now, though, because I don’t have a doctor to prescribe them, ironically enough.  I have neither a general practitioner nor a psychiatrist (nor psychologist or social worked, either, but they can’t prescribe anything, anyway*).  I don’t even have a dentist.  My only interaction with any medical care since 2015 or so has been the time I went to an urgent care place with a respiratory infection/complaint and was sent to the ER and admitted because I was de-satting, and they thought maybe my congenital heart defect had reappeared a bit (based on an echocardiogram, not just my symptoms and the drop in oxygenation).

That was maybe five or six years ago.  They wanted me to get follow-up, obviously, but I have no interest in pursuing it, and certainly cannot summon the motivation to do so.  For one thing, I’m unconvinced that they’re correct, though that in itself is not a good reason not to pursue more information.  For another, I have no health insurance, and I certainly have no money to be able to get involved in paying for significant healthcare myself.  Also, I don’t want to have any more cardiac interventions of any kind, frankly.  I went through all that when I was 18, and I don’t want to go through it, or anything like it, again.

I also don’t have the mental resources—in terms of will, executive function, whatever you want to call it—to be able to seek out any kind of state or federal healthcare assistance.  I’m in Florida, anyway, and the public programs here suck.  Anyway, I’m no good at taking care of myself; I see myself as a nuisance, and I really want me to leave myself alone, but that’s obviously difficult.

Yeah, Florida really doesn’t make much very easy.  But, hey, at least there’s no income tax, so people like the Donald can enjoy living here.  The government is dicey at best, of course, at state and local levels, even relative to many other states and the national government—though our representatives there also aren’t exactly the cream of the mental or moral crop.  We really are the Mordor of the United States, in many ways, and not merely because it’s down here in the southeast.  Unfortunately, there are no volcanoes, and though we have big spiders, none of them are Shelob-scale ones.

Anyway, I probably won’t take any antidepressants, and I don’t expect to seek out any healthcare or mental healthcare.  It’s too much trouble, it’s too difficult, I can’t focus or concentrate on things like that.  I’ve been dealing with that shit too often in my life, and for too long, and despite my best previous efforts, I’ve ended up here in Mordor, all by myself.  I’m sick of it.  It’s not worth the effort.

I’m not worth the effort.

*I did get on BetterHelp for a bit, and it was okay as far as it went, but some difficulties arose, not anyone’s fault, certainly not my therapist’s, and I was off it after a little over a month, I think.

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I blog not you, you elements, with unkindness

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, February 2nd, and the day of the week on which I’ve long done my semi-traditional blog posting.

I don’t know whether I have the energy to hunt for a Shakespeare quote to alter and/or a picture to put at the bottom, both vaguely related to whatever “subject” I address in the blog.  But, of course, by now, you readers will know what decision I, the writer, will have made, even as you read the words I’m writing while I do not know.

It’s a bit wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey, isn’t it?

Of course, the biological experience of time is much more malleable and irregular than the actual nature of time, but time is not a simple, straight, linear dimension.  It’s warped by the planet beneath your feet, among many other things.  Your physical body’s tendency to want to follow the most “direct” path through it‒and the fact that the planet is in the way, preventing you from following that path‒creates what we call gravity, locally.

When you’re free-falling, you’re coasting through time (and space, of course), and it’s the ground that actually accelerates you once you reach it.  It’s a hell of an acceleration if you’ve been pursuing your geodesic unimpeded for long by the time the ground throws itself into your path.  Human’s aren’t built to withstand that kind of acceleration.

I’m writing with my smartphone again, today, by the way.  It’s just too annoying to deal with the laptop at the bus stop.  I also wrote more words than I really had meant to write yesterday, probably because I type faster on the laptop, but I don’t think the increased number of words was associated with an increase in actual content.  I think the signal-to-noise ratio, if you will, of my blog post yesterday was lower than it has tended to be with the phone.  That’s not an objective measure, however, and others may disagree.

As for my thumbs, they already feel a bit better than they did, and they’re not giving me too much trouble now.  I have some Voltaren cream (or is it an ointment?) that I can apply to the joints if necessary, though I already take round-the-clock NSAIDs every day for my chronic pain, so it’s not really recommended that I add the Voltaren, a strong NSAID in it’s own right.  It increases the risk for kidney damage and liver damage and stomach issues and so on.  But I’m already at risk for those things (though I take Omeprazole for my stomach protection) and I don’t see easy short-term solutions to the problem.

This is one of the conundrums (conundra?  Probably not) that make opiates and opioids both necessary and yet culturally difficult‒our non-psychoactive pain medications are literally toxic to our bodies above a quite low threshold relative to their analgesic powers.  Yet pain does not easily just go away on its own in many cases‒biology is subject to much stronger pressures for pain to persist than to allow it easily to be relieved, and those incentives will remain so in any evolutionarily stable form of life.

Opiates and the like can work against nearly any degree of pain with limited direct toxicity, but with diminishing success and tolerance, requiring increasing doses over time*.  But they do affect neural circuitry, reward, and motivation, among other things, and so their use is complicated‒and it’s additionally complicated by the fact that the treatment of pain, physical and psychological, is somewhat taboo in our society.

The use of various substances in one’s own body is even criminalized, and so black markets arise to take advantage of the inevitable demand.  And without matters being out in the open and subject to expert scrutiny and monitoring and education, various abuses and issues relating to lack of access to appropriate guidance and treatment and support arise and worsen.

And they will persist.

Do you think continuing to criminalize the use of drugs of various kinds will decrease abuse and death and even violence related to the drugs?  You hypocrites!  I say to you that it is the criminalization of that use that created the black markets and abuse and danger and sordidness‒and, indeed, the majority of the deaths‒in the first place!

You punish people for trying, however imperfectly, to treat chronic pain and those who suffer from it from addressing it, and are surprised that sufferers turn to the market you have created for illicit meds.  You have the temerity to be “shocked” that people die from the unmonitored, unregulated, inexpert use and manufacture of these things which you have removed from the bailiwick of expert awareness and oversight and monitoring.  You took an area that should have been medical and made it criminal and are stupid enough to be surprised that opportunistic criminals (whether they be gangs or governments or otherwise) are not as careful and caring as actual medical professionals.

And sometimes you are so hopelessly moronic as to imagine that further punishments of both producers and suppliers‒and even users‒of drugs will change the problem or decrease it or make it go away.  As if making an already suffering person’s life even more difficult and miserable is going to diminish their urge for relief and escape from at least some forms of pain, and their willingness to risk the permanent end to their pain that is death by overdose.  I’d need to exist macroscopically in all the ten spatial dimensions of M Theory to be able to give that the eye roll that nonsense deserves.

Phew.  That was a heckuva tangent.

I don’t actually use opioids or related medications, though I have been prescribed them in the past.  They interact with my rather peculiar nervous system in ways I find truly unpleasant, though they can help with pain.  So, instead, I suffer constant daily assaults on my kidneys and GI tract and my liver, and I accept that.

It’s not as though I will seek treatment if my organs fail.  I have no insurance, for one thing, but also, I just don’t see any point in trying to preserve my existence.  Heck, I’ve been told I have a possible recurrence or deterioration of my congenital heart problem‒I’m not fully convinced that it’s really any kind of recurrence‒for which I had heart surgery when I was 18, but I have no interest in pursuing possible further exploration or treatment of it, anyway.

Let my kidneys fail, let my liver fail, let my heart fail!  Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks!  Why would I try to preserve or prolong my existence when I don’t even like myself, let alone have anyone else nearby who likes me and spends time with me***?

Anyway, that went off the rails pretty quickly, didn’t it?  It also got longer than I expected.  Sorry.

I still don’t know the answer to my initial wondering about titles and pictures‒but you all do.  And I love you for it.

TTFN

windstormandmanscaled

*Though at least they don’t directly poison livers and kidneys, and the needed doses don’t keep going up without limit, though they are nevertheless often higher than most doctors are willing to prescribe.  This is largely because doctors fear having what happened to me happen to them, and who can blame them?  The only exception to this general hesitancy is with cancer.  People with cancer are allowed to be treated with whatever level of pain medicine it takes to reduce their pain, because in the typical human “mind” having cancer pain is different, and people with cancer are special.  They’re allowed to be dependent on pain medications, because surely they have the only type of pain that can go on and on without resolving and can steal all the joy from their lives, eventually killing them.  Anyone else is just a disgusting drug addict, a scum of the Earth, and deserves merely contempt**.

**The latter portion of the above paragraph is sarcastic.

***I cannot blame them, so don’t be defensive on my behalf.  I find myself infuriating and disgusting.