health

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New week, still weak

It’s Monday, and although I am not particularly happy to be starting a new work week, I am definitely glad that last week is over.  Last week was a very bad week indeed.  At a first estimate (and a second one as well) last week was among the five hardest weeks of my life.  And that includes the week of my open-heart surgery when I was 18 (1 week after which I went back to start my second year at university) and the week of my back surgery, and the week of my divorce and of my arrest and all that crap.  I’ve also been in residency, during one November of which I had worked 19 days without break, had a day off, then worked another seven or eight days.  I had one on-call time in the ICU when I literally did not sit down for about 30 hours.  I am not exaggerating.

There was also the week when I was in university and, thanks to some very serious issues between my then-fiancée and my parents, my parents cut me off from support for room and board (not just for a week‒we didn’t speak for about 8 years).  I was on a full scholarship, but I had to scramble to be able to pay for housing and food and books and so on.  That was a hell of a thing.  We got past it eventually, but it was pretty rough 

Anyway, my point is, I’ve been through some shit in my life, but last week, between the pain and the stress of moving, and the horrible rest (even for me), and the more pain, and the schedule that was incoherent for the move at work, and the unexpected (by me) work this weekend and so on, was one of the most difficult and unpleasant weeks I’ve known, both objectively and subjectively.  It had a huge silver lining, of course, in the person of Ezra, my youngest, and I cannot easily exaggerate how wonderful that was.  If not for Ezra, last week might have been the hardest week of my life.  I am, after all, older and much less healthy (especially mentally) than I was when dealing with some of my earlier issues.

It’s probably stupid to try to rank or categorize such life events.  After all, the weighting I give now is colored by my current state of mind, and of course, there are many axes* along which one can measure the “difficulty” of a week, and criteria by which one may judge them at any given time.  Reality isn’t even linear, let alone binary.

My point is, last week was one fucking rough week, and in addition to my physical stress, I came very close to a full-on mental breakdown.  And it’s not as though I have fully recovered; I’ve had all of 1 day of comparative rest, and now I’m heading back to battle.  It’s a mark of how physically exhausted I am that I was able to nap for about two hours straight yesterday afternoon.  But as you may know, I often start off on Monday mornings with relative energy, even sometimes with slightly ambitious plans, but by the end of the first day of the week, I am often already completely wiped out.

I’m certainly not starting this week from a place of enthusiasm and energy, even relatively speaking, really.  So I guess I’ll see how it goes.  It would be absurd, magical thinking to expect that I’ll feel better at the end of the day because I’m starting the morning from a relative low, since that would be a sort of “opposite” pattern.  It would be nice if things worked that way, but as far as I can tell, they don’t.

I hope all of you had a good weekend, and I thank you for putting up with my antics, or whatever you might want to call them.  It’s greatly appreciated.

*By which I mean, the axes of a Cartesian style graph, e.g., the x-axis, the y-axis, not as in “more than one sharp, wedge-based tool such as are used for chopping wood”.

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It’s Saturday now

And I’m in the office.  I haven’t come to the office this time, of course, I’ve just been here since yesterday, as I noted in my confusing and single-paragraph post yesterday evening.  I slept at the office, on the floor, and it was just as comfortable in many ways as if I had been at the house.  True, I couldn’t shower, but I’ve buzzed my hair down to 1/4 inch after seeing how it looked after I was in the hospital, and so it’s impossible to tell just by looking that I’ve not showered.  I usually have deodorant and other toiletries at the office, but those are already moved to the new office now, so I’m going to need to go over to the convenience store and get some deodorant and mouthwash this morning.

As for the house, well, there’s a reason I don’t refer to it as home.  It’s not a home to me.  I haven’t felt like I have a home since before I went to FSP.  No, it’s just a place I can hide for a while at a time, and not have to interact with anyone, and where it’s just my stuff inside, such as it is.  But I don’t feel at home there, I don’t feel comfortable, it’s just a place I’m existing.  I don’t even have a real chair there, though I have a piano bench and a folding metal chair tucked into a corner.  When I’m at the house, I just recline on a pile of pillows on the futon on the floor.  It’s good for my back in the short term, though after I stay there for a while it tends to backfire*.

Everything in my existence orbits around pain.  I guess it’s no irony that one of the two songs I have had memorized on piano for decades now is the Police’s King of Pain (the other is Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles).  Maybe it’s because I memorized that song that my life took on its current aspect.

I don’t really believe that, of course.  That’s absurd, magical thinking, and there’s no evidence that it’s the way the real world works, except through confirmation bias and the like.

Right now it still hurts to urinate, with spasms up in my right side and flank, which lingers a little even in between.  It’s nothing compared to the acute onset of the issue, but it’s still there.  And my back and hip and leg pains haven’t ceased to exist out of some strange courtesy.

I’m overwhelmed, and not in a good way.  There is too much happening in my head and around me right now, too many stupid little, annoying changes, too many deeply unpleasant surprises, too much chaos and randomness even in the day-to-day routines.  I am overwhelmed.

I used to be a person who could accomplish things, at least partly because I had people around me whom I loved and for whom I wanted to make things good as much as I could.  I cannot do good for myself.  I cannot live for myself.  But I used to be able to do good and make good things and relieve suffering.  I’ve saved people’s lives and even helped ease people’s deaths when it was appropriate.  Some of the most copious thanks I’ve ever received were from the families of patients who had died.  I was told by one family that, before he died, their 96 year old father/grandfather said I was the first doctor he’d had that he felt that he could trust.

Now look at me.  Or rather, don’t look at me.  I’m disgusting to start with, with my teeth that used to be good but have been ravaged by years of pain killers and prison and then just an inability to have the energy to take the very good care of them I used to take.  Also, I’m currently crying, and there’s snot on my face.  I don’t look great at the best of times anymore, and certainly no one is going to want to look at me now.

I’m caught in the pincers of some kind of weird metaphorical tweezer.  I cannot stand the thought of trying to change my situation; the idea of moving, of trying to change jobs, of trying to find something, is literally horrifying–imagine needing to wade through a swimming pool filled with roaches and centipedes and maggots and other larvae, above which soars a nearly-opaque cloud of mosquitoes, all female.

But staying where I am, doing what I’m doing, is just as horrifying, and now there are a bunch of new stressors, not the least of which is my fresh, new pain problem, which hopefully will be temporary, though it isn’t gone yet.  I guess a week is a relatively short time, and maybe I’m expecting too much, but it’s a fucking huge level of discomfort, and I don’t have the mental resources to deal with it, not on top of everything else.  Why I am I continuing to endure my already-existing chronic pain, my anxiety, my depression, all the other things associated with my hitherto undiagnosed ASD, and then now dealing with newly discovered problems?

I’m overwhelmed.  I cannot summon the will to make a change, or even the conviction that I ought to do so, because I cannot really think straight.  I cannot imagine what to do.  I don’t know that there is any way at all to escape, except by dying.  And I am always afraid.

You might think that after having pain every day for decades and having lost basically everything that ever mattered to you and for which you had worked so hard for so long you wouldn’t have any need to be afraid anymore.  What do you have to lose, after all?  But fear is not a rational thing, it’s not the conclusion of a thought process, it’s an emotion, one in which nature has invested heavily, and having pain after pain for a long time, of various kinds, can cause a “learned-helplessness” reaction related to depression, but even then, fear doesn’t go away.  One is always afraid of yet more pain.  One is afraid of facing another day with the same old pain.  One is a afraid that one is going to live a long, long life and never for one day of the rest of it not be in significant pain.  One is afraid that one will also be alone for the rest of that long life, with no comfort and little joy.

I don’t know what’s going on.  I mean, I’m writing this post, of course, that’s going on.  But I don’t know what else.  I’m falling apart, I think.  I’m breaking down.  Like I said yesterday, I can practically smell the melting plastic and circuitry in my mind.

Whatever.  Nothing I do or say matters, nothing I am matters.  I don’t know what I expect to happen because I’ve written about this.  I feel a bit like Frodo crying out for his friends in “Fog on the Barrow Downs” after they’ve been separated, but the only answer I will probably get will be from some foul undead spirits.  There’s no Tom Bombadil out there to come rescue me.  I wish there were.  And I could really use Elrond’s healing power, or even Aragorn’s.

That’s enough.  Go on, go read something else.  No one wants to feel miserable, and that’s how I tend to make people feel, so you should probably find something comical or at least entertaining to explore, and just try to have a good weekend.

*Honestly, no pun intended.  I didn’t even notice it until the editing process.

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A nameless Friday blog post

It’s hard to believe, but something truly obvious didn’t even occur to me until yesterday afternoon as I was getting ready to leave the office.  I was really worn out and tired and grumpy, and I said to my coworker, who was very kindly giving me a ride to the train station, “If I were a sane person in a civilized world, I wouldn’t even have come to work at all this week.”

That’s when I thought: the people at the hospital probably didn’t expect me to go back to work this week.

Meanwhile, this has been one of our busiest weeks in a very long time at the office, and the office is in the process of moving to our new location, and I had to iron out the details of the records from Monday and Tuesday, which were a bit off, and then I had to do the payroll on Wednesday all while having the busiest day of this very busy week so far.

Yesterday was not quite as hectic as Wednesday for me, but on Wednesday I had kind of maxxed the pain med dose so I could get done what I needed to do.  Not so on Thursday.  I want to make sure not to overuse the meds in the short term, since I don’t know when a really bad spasm might happen.  Of course, I’m not taking my usual aspirin either, per recommendation, nor any other go-to NSAIDS, so things are complicated.

Anyway, the meds situation wasn’t what I wanted to discuss.  I just wanted to note how pathological I must be to have not only come right back to work after being discharged from the hospital, but to have applied pressure to get me discharged Tuesday afternoon.  I can’t believe that I even said I would sign out AMA* if I had to do so.

But I am basically on my own; if I don’t work, I don’t eat, so to speak.  Even that is misleading, though, and is not my real reason, which is that I have to be productive or useful to someone, in a way that I accept, or else there is no point to the fact of my continued existence.

I mean, I know no one wants to be around me or to have me around them for fun and pleasure; the copious evidence for that is glaring and even blinding.  But I am capable of being useful in quite a few different ways; even my misautonomy doesn’t force me to deny that I have gifts that can be productive and useful and even sometimes beautiful.

So, if I can’t be useful, well…what’s the use of me?  If I were not at work, what would I be doing but lying around in my one room (plus bathroom) with a malfunctioning AC unit?  

Meanwhile, I still haven’t made my follow-up appointments or any of that.  My sister has offered to help, and I think I’m going to have to take her up on that, though she’ll have to be doing stuff from long distance and second-hand and I still find the process daunting.  It’s really quite pathetic.

And if not being useful is a feeling like being in an intergalactic void, it’s even more horrible to feel like I’m a burden or even an inconvenience to someone else, especially someone who really matters to me.  That’s a failure worthy of fire.

Also, I am tired of being in pain.  Everything in my life centers around pain.  I suppose it should have been obvious for quite a while, but at least since the time I was sent to be a guest at FSP West, pain has been the central fact, the only consistent thing, about my existence.  Now I’ve just added another color, another flavor, another timbre and type of pain to my usual mix.

I suppose one could almost call it refreshing as a change, or one might if it weren’t just absolutely overwhelming at its peak, and none too pleasant when it’s at a lower level.  And while, if one’s pain is in one’s back and legs, it is possible to rest them to some degree, you can’t really rest your urinary tract when it is where the pain is focused.  If you try to drink less, you’ll only make the primary problem worse, but of course, drinking more (hopefully to get the stone to pass) does mean more of the acute discomfort in the meantime.

Why am I doing any of this?  Why am I continuing?  It’s certainly not out of any sense of my personal value.  I’m just a maggot-ridden turd lying by a dirt path in a humid, stagnant, pollen laden drizzle that doesn’t refresh anything or allow anything but mold and fungi and coprophagic organisms to grow.  I’m so tired.  I have no purpose, and I am so tired.

Anyway, this ought to be it for this week.  I don’t think there’s a plan for the office to be open tomorrow.  If it is, by rights I ought not to come in anyway.  But since the alternative is just lying around by myself, and since I’m stupid, and I don’t live in a civilized world, and I am certainly not sane, if they open the office, I will probably be here.  If so, I’ll probably write a blog post.

Until my next post, whenever it is, I truly and sincerely and urgently hope you all have objectively good days and nights and everything else.  If my words have the power to make anything real, that is what I would want.

*Against medical advice.

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You blogs, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday, and here I am writing another blog post to prove that yesterday’s was not a fluke nor a false flag nor any other term beginning with “f” other than perhaps “fair play”.

By the way, I may have previously used the Shakespeare-based title above‒it’s just so easy to make, and I’ve always loved that line from Julius Caesar‒but I don’t care.  It’s too perfect for my current circumstances to miss the chance now.  I mean, blogs and stones?  Come on!

I’m on my way to the office, and speaking of stones, I am far from being over the process of having, let alone passing, my kidney stone.  I’m trying not to overuse my pain meds, largely because they tend to have diminishing returns, and I want them to work when I really need them.  Also, they are quite…well, constipating.  Now, it’s true that I didn’t eat all that much over the course of the early part of this week, and of what I did eat, much of it didn’t stay down.  Still, I went Sunday through Wednesday without doing anything but peeing.

I have been doing a lot of that of course, deliberately.  It is not pleasant.  The pain is not like it was Saturday night, Sunday, and Monday, but it still doesn’t let me forget.  And, of course, we’re moving office this week, and that adds extra hecticity*.  

I don’t know how much you all would want to hear (that I haven’t already said) about what went on in the hospital.  I did talk about it a great deal yesterday.  I suppose I’ll play it by ear and just bring up things that occur to me as interesting.

I have not yet made my follow-up appointments, but I need to try to do so today, if I can.  Even writing about it makes me feel very tense and anxious.  I know there’s no good reason for feeling anxiety and resistance toward such things, but at least now I know something of the cause:  It has to do with ASD, with possibly some pathological demand avoidance, but also just with associated, fairly severe, social anxiety.

But I have to try, and I want to try.  I’ve been rather impressed by the hospital and its associated staff and attending physicians and their network and such, and I would like to get myself plugged into their system if I am able to do so.

They seem quite generous and caring as a tendency and policy.  They do everything from providing free meds for when you go home to getting you a Lyft if you don’t have a ride.  I think that’s pretty nice.

It was oddly nostalgic, being in the hospital.  Well, I suppose it’s not so odd.  I spent much of my earlier adult life in and around hospitals, from med school to residency to medical practice, nineteen years in total.  I guess I miss it.  It was nice working with intelligent, disciplined, professional people at all levels and being able to relieve and even prevent suffering, all while getting a good amount of intellectual stimulation in the form of understanding and solving complex problems.

I don’t expect that I will ever do it again, though.  There are ways, I am sure, to fight to try to get my license back and so on, but it’s not the sort of process for which I have any avidity.  When civilization falls apart, as it appears to be about to do, I can perhaps find a time and reason to lend my skills to the survivors, if I am one of them, which seems unlikely.  Otherwise, I don’t feel a lot of enthusiasm for supporting the world as it is.  Humans have revealed themselves over and over‒by and large‒to be inadequate to tasks that require actual cooperation and consideration and compassion and humility.

It’s ironic that humility is so challenging for humans.  Given how profound their limitations and failings are (despite undeniable strengths, as well) you might imagine that humility would be easy.

But somehow, the default setting even of those who try to be humble is to characterize themselves as absolutely worthless‒which from a certain point of view is always true, but which misses the point of real humility.

Humility is not self-hatred or self-contempt or self-destruction (from which, to some, the only rescue is through some imaginary supernatural being); it is a recognition that one is and will always be limited, capable of error, and incapable of being perfectly objective about oneself and the nature of one’s existence.  With such self-knowledge, one will tend to be better able to make good choices about oneself and others.

Maybe I should try meditating again, to try to keep myself calm when possible.  It might help with my serious social anxiety.  It would probably also help me to get less upset over the idiocy of the current administration**.  And perhaps my mind would then be more useful overall.

Anyway, that’s enough for now.  I hope you all have a good day and try not to get too upset, yourselves.  The world is going to end soon, but that has always been the case‒it’s just a matter of time scales.  On other scales, even a single mayfly’s life is practically eternal.

TTFN

*I think I made that word up, but it seems too good not to use.

**It would be nice to administer a fair amount of current to the members of this US administration, though‒alternating current, with enough voltage and amperage to cause serious discomfort, but not enough to kill them…at least not quickly***.

***See?  Upset.

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I am not Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror…

…nor am I King Under the Mountain.

Nevertheless I return.

I hope no one was too worried about me these last few days, though I have probably given you cause to worry.  Honestly, though, I was in a fairly dire situation.  On Saturday night/Sunday morning I woke up just after midnight with what started as right lower quadrant abdominal pain, which at first I thought was some “normal” GI cramping, maybe from something I ate that I shouldn’t have eaten.

As it rapidly worsened, I became more concerned.  I checked myself for fever (didn’t have one) and for abdominal tenderness, including rebound tenderness.  That wasn’t really there either.

If you are a medical professional, you might recognize that I was worrying about my appendix.  And though the location was right (lower quadrant, ha ha), there were some things missing.  Still, I was concerned, and the pain was worsening.

To make sure I wasn’t being reckless or silly, I bothered my poor sister with a phone call in the middle of the night (she was very kind about it).  She asked me a few questions, tried a little light-hearted banter to try to relax me (I was, regrettably, not amenable, and I fear I might’ve been rude).  The final thing she said was to point out that I have chronic, often severe, pain.  If this was much worse than that‒and it was‒then I needed to get it looked at.

She is wise, my sister.

I had to finish the call quickly and call 911 because the pain continued to increase.  There was no other credible option but an ambulance.  I don’t have a car, but even if I did, I was not capable of driving at all, let alone safely.  There was no one who could drive me, nor was I going to call an Uber or Lyft.  The delay in that, both at pre-pickup and at the hospital, would be intolerable.

As I tried to keep speaking with the 911 operator, I went outside, onto the back patio, where I eventually laid down on the concrete, confusing at least one cat to a level that would have made Monty Python proud.  I figured it would be easier to get to me there, outside.  The lying down part was because I didn’t want to sit or stand, and didn’t care about getting dirty.  I also didn’t have any shoes on.

Then it occurred to me that I didn’t want to awaken my housemates, who have dogs that would bark if people walked up beside the house with a stretcher, so I made my awkward way to the front of the house, to the sidewalk, where I sat down, first with my back to the gate post.  Then the first real right mid-back (or flank) pain added itself to the mix and I think I cursed as quietly as I could and slumped to my side, trying to ease the pressure.

The 911 operator told me the EMTs were just arriving, and she was right.  I thanked her and said goodbye (my Mom and Dad did not raise their children to be rude to those who legitimately and professionally help others in emergencies).

The EMTs were very professional, and they were the first to recognize what turned out to be the case, though the ER doc also took one look at me and ordered an immediate non-contrast abdomen and pelvis CT which revealed the specifics of what he and the EMTs had clearly recognized:  I had a kidney stone in my right ureter.

So, to bring an already drawn-out explanation to a provisional conclusion, that’s why I’ve not written a blog post either on Monday or Tuesday of this week.  I’ve been in a torture chamber of my own body’s making.

Still, there are some compensations.  One gets pretty thorough evaluations when in hospital.  I learned, for instance, that though my blood sugar was rather high at first, largely due extreme physical stress, it came down to just above normal.  A hemoglobin A1C that was added on showed that I was high normal/low abnormal, or pre-diabetic.  Diabetes does run in my family, and also, I’m sure I have chronically elevated levels of cortisol and related hormones in my body that make such things worse.

Of more mild interest was that I had lowish hemoglobin and hematocrit, and my blood concentrations of hemoglobin and RBCs were low.  In other words, I was borderline anemic.  This was a mild surprise until I thought about how much aspirin I take.  As part of taking that aspirin, I also take acid blockers to protect my stomach (and to combat GERD).  So, from two ends, that can explain a bit of anemia:  some low-level blood loss over time from aspirin’s antiplatelet effects and probably chronic gastritis, and somewhat decreased iron absorption, since the acid in one’s stomach facilitates that absorption.

I know this much in such detail because of a cool service the hospital offers, which is an app on which you can access your test results and (to some degree) other medical records.  It’s really quite nice, because too often, people have only vague ideas of what their tests mean, and they arrive when the occasion might already be fading in their minds.  That doesn’t happen to me, of course‒mine is the superior mind, like Khan, who was even more in his own way than I tend to be.

Ha ha.  I am of course exaggerating, and not just about Khan being more in his own way than I am.  This app’s data is great information to have.  They even give you little notification dings when new stuff is added.  It can be handy.

I’ll go more into what happened in the hospital at another time, but I will give a spoiler or two now:  I have not passed the stone, but I have a stent in my right ureter and I am on meds to try to help that to let the stone pass.  My pain is not completely gone, but there is only a bit of right flank ache and spasm sometimes when I use the bathroom*, and a fair amount of blood and irritation in the urethra from the stent placement.  That’s always fun.

Also, I kind of pushed to get out earlier than they really wanted me to leave, because I have to do payroll for the office today.  It would be possible for my coworker or my boss to do it, but when you’re doing something you don’t usually do, there are much more likely to be errors, and I don’t want people to be accidentally underpaid (or overpaid).

Even before I finished the first draft of this blog post, I already found two places where that would have happened had I not come back.  So, while I was probably somewhat foolish‒I’ll tell you later about another extremely foolish thing I considered doing when my pain first subsided a bit on Sunday‒I am also confirmed in my judgement.  And the needs of the many (ceteris paribus***) outweigh the needs of the few or the one.

One final thing, the most important of all things, before I go.  While I was in the hospital, my youngest, Ezra, having followed my little comments on Threads or Instagram, realized that I was in the hospital and why and contacted me and came to visit me in the hospital!  That’s right, for the first time in almost 13 years, I got to hug my child.  They also made plans to get together with me more regularly.  

So, let me address the notorious question:  Is a kidney stone the worst pain I’ve ever experienced?

Absolutely.  And I’ve been through open-heart surgery and fractured my right scapula and had back surgery and “failed back surgery syndrome”.  We ASDers, supposedly, do not like to exaggerate if we can avoid it, but there was at least one time, and I think several, when I was asked what my pain was on a scale of 1 to 10, and I said 10 with no hesitation.  Sometimes I only said 7 or 8.5 or 9 or 9.5.  I try to be as precise as feasible.  But there were 10s in there, and I normally treat 10s on such scales like massive objects trying to go the speed of light, or probabilities in the real world trying to get to 1.

Was it worth it to get to see my child again?  Well, I would be afraid to offer to experience it again with that outcome in mind, but I would be willing.  Yes, it was worth it.

I will speak more about this tomorrow.  Thank you for your patience and apologies for any anxiety you might have had on my behalf.

*Perhaps because I’m not using it for that for which it is intended, which is, obviously, to bathe**.

**That’s an attempted joke.

***In the real world, ceteris is almost never paribus.

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Nothing very interesting

It’s Friday.  I wish I could feel happy about that.  I can remember back in high school, especially, when I would look forward to Friday, because my friends and I would probably be getting together at one of our houses to play role playing games over the weekend.  Other kids might sometimes abuse certain drugs (usually nothing worse than marijuana) but we just abused coffee.  We were often up waaay into the night.

I was almost always the first one to wake up even after a long night of gaming.  I was also the first one in my house to wake up during the week.  I guess one could see the shadow of where the insomnia tree was growing already, but I didn’t know to recognize the signs.

In college, I would often go downtown on Saturday to the city center where there were some shops and stuff, just to wander around (though there was a pretty good comic book store there).  For a while, I would go to temple downtown on Friday evening and Saturday morning.

Anyway, enough reminiscing.  The good days of the past are not going to return, so whatever.

I’m on my way to the office as I write this, though editing and posting will take place after I get there.  It’s already way too humid down here, such that I sweat just while standing still outside.

We’ve been packing some things from the office and so on to bring over to the new place.  Yesterday, I gathered my science books and my black Strat (see below) at the office and put them in a big, industrial garbage bag.  I was planning to bring them to the dumpster, but my boss asked to take the guitar and stuff for either his brother or cousin, who apparently has only an acoustic.  So, he took that yesterday.

I still haven’t brought my science books to the garbage yet, partly because they are heavy, and I have been having particularly bad issues with my chronic pain this week, as you may know if you’ve read this.  Also, the dumpster was ridiculously full.  It seems we’re not the only people moving.

Actually, I would have thrown away much more of my stuff, but much of it is little things people gave me over time that I never would’ve gotten for myself, like Funcopop(?) figures or whatever you call those.  One doesn’t throw away things that were gifts‒that would be rude.  One of those figures is of Hannibal Lecter, and he would not approve of me being rude with him especially.

Anyway, that’s it.  No more delusions that I’m going to play guitar at the office anymore‒there isn’t even going to be a space for me to do so.  Also, no more deluding myself that I will actually read the various science books ever before the end of my life.  It would be cool, but I don’t see how it’s going to happen.  I don’t expect (or hope) to live much longer, honestly.

Oh, I got a box of syringes delivered yesterday, with needles, in case I want to try the idea from yesterday (nothing drug related, for those of you who don’t go back and check it out).

It’s all a bit frightening, these ideas of how to complete my personal arch of time.  I’ve said before how hard it is to override the idiot biological drive to avoid injury and pain and death.  That’s probably why so many suicides are associated with alcohol and other psychoactive substances.  Maybe I should take up heavy drinking.

That’s not likely to happen.  When I drink alcohol, it seems always to lead to my chronic pain worsening afterward.  Neurochemical stuff is probably involved, a reaction of my nervous system with a rebound after the alcohol.  Anyway, I’ve never been much of a drinker.

I can’t think of anything else about which to write.  Nor to sing, not to draw, nor to play, nor nothing else.  I know, that was technically a sentence fragment, just now.  Sue me*.

If I come to the office tomorrow, I’ll probably write a post.  I apologize again to all those dedicated readers who keep hoping for something interesting or good or amusing or whatever in these posts.  I’m out of fuel, out of ammo, out of pocket, out of this world, and out of my mind.

I hope you have a good day.

*That was not a sentence fragment.

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Morose, meandering musings of a misautonomous moron

Every time I write a blog post on a Wednesday morning, I feel the urge to include a reference to the Beatles song She’s Leaving Home, as in “Wednesday morning at five o’clock as the day begins…”

There, see, I just did it again.  At least it was self consciously done, not some quote put in as if it were my own words, intended only for those “in the know” to recognize.  I guess that’s a way for me to feel vaguely clever‒and sometimes funny‒while actually just following the often irresistible compulsion to quote shit* at every turn.

In high school, when I was a senior (and maybe when I was a junior?) I was pretty confident in my place as one of the “leaders” of our school orchestra, and I used to go to the orchestra room first thing in the morning before school, usually arriving before the teacher, and then I hung out there (with other orchestra members and friends who arrived a bit later) until time for classes to start.  While there, pretty much every day, I would write a quote from something‒Shakespeare**, Tolkien, Stephen R. Donaldson, Poe, etc.‒on the board.  I even won the “Dusty Cello Award” at our end of the year orchestra party because of it.

I’ve always had that habit of quoting books and movies and plays and shows and so on, and even doing the voices of people when I could.

I think reading fiction in particular was very good for helping me to understand what goes on in other people’s minds, at least in principle.  But I also just liked being able to go to those other worlds and other lives.  It’s better in general than watching TV or movies, though the latter are easier and also easier to enjoy with other people, if you have other people with whom to enjoy them.

Anyway, that’s neither here nor there.  My past and my thoughts about it are of no moment to anyone but me, and even I find them boring.  It’s just that they’re all I really have.

I’ve tried to interact with people to some degree online, but that just gets me weird feedback, like getting almost 3,000 “likes” in less than 24 hours for pointing out in a comment that the biblical Jesus would not approve of a particular, supposedly religion-based, exclusion reported in a thread about a shopkeeper toward a trans woman (ironic for a nonbeliever to be pointing out Jesus’s very clear attitudes, but I am one who remembers characters and quotes).

On the other hand, when I noted yesterday on the same site that the office where I work was 3.4 miles from the nearest “beach” (and a fishing pier) and I thought it might be good to walk down to the shore, kick off my shoes and socks, and just start swimming east into the Atlantic and not come back (pointing out that it would leave no need for cleanup, and it wouldn’t mess up anyone’s day, or anything of that sort) I got 3 likes (after quite a while) and only one comment by a person saying she doesn’t like to dwell on such thoughts.

This is, supposedly, Mental Health Awareness month, but I don’t know what good such a thing does, especially if such is the response to someone expressing suicidal ideation.  I’m aware of mental health in general, but it’s been a long time since I had any personal experience of mental health (if I ever have).  It’s been at least 13 years since I’ve had even moments of mental pseudo-health.  That was the last time I saw my kids in person, for one afternoon.

I’ve only recently realized that it’s now been a longer time since I saw my children than how old they were when I last saw them.  So, I’ve missed more than half of their lives now, and that fraction is only going to get bigger.

What would I possibly know about mental health?

Physical health is not my biggest attribute either (not many people had open-heart surgery at age 18).  But I know it gets very boring for people to hear about‒for instance‒the fact that I feel right now as if my entire right side from the lower ribs on down to the ball of my foot feels as though it’s filled with molten lead, which is quite painful, in case you were wondering.  But that’s always the way it is, for much longer than 13 years (more than 20, actually) and though it waxes and wanes and shifts locations, pain never fully goes away while I’m conscious (and probably contributes to the worsening of my insomnia).

Anyway, I know, Waah, waah, waah, shut the fuck up, Robert, no one wants to hear all this shit*** over and over again!  It’s tiresome to face nothing but complaints.  I’m sorry.  I’m very, very sorry.  I really am.  To everybody.

I really should just try that swim.  There isn’t much to prevent it.  I’m not particularly afraid of drowning (other than in an instinctive sense) though I do have misgivings about sharks and other sea creatures.  That’s probably silly, since, even in shark infested waters, statistically people are far more likely to drown than to be attacked by a shark.

I have to do something, or at least to have something done to me.  I don’t have the will or the wherewithal to take action to save myself in any way (and wouldn’t know where to start if I could) but I don’t have the strength to keep living, not for much longer.  And I don’t have any good reason to keep living.

But that same problem with “executive function” or whatever it is makes it hard for me to take action to kill myself.  So, for the moment, I just hurt myself to try to distract myself from other pain and to punish myself for being such a lame and shitty person, but weirdly, I have a hard time making such things hurt very much anymore.  Maybe I’ve always got too much pain medication in me, but I just don’t realize it because it doesn’t do all that much for my back and joint pains.  It’s weird.

Then again, I’m weird, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  Like the song says, “I’m a creep.  I’m a weirdo.  What the hell am I doing here?  I don’t belong here.”

I don’t belong here.

*This is the nonjudgmental version of the word “shit”.  It’s more or less synonymous with “stuff” but it flows better (so to speak).  I don’t mean to imply that the song to which I refer is in any way shit.  It’s one of the most beautiful songs I know.

**Yes, I loved Shakespeare even back then.

***Here, the use of “shit” is much more in the derogatory, excrement-related vein.  Though if someone had excrement in their veins, they would be in big trouble, because that excrement would be carried to the lungs and then heart and could cause horrible endocarditis and pneumonias and so on.

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How long should one keep smacking the bottom of that bottle?

I made it through Monday again, it seems.  It wasn’t particularly easy.  Starting in the morning, I developed a nasty, unilateral headache that I couldn’t seem to get to go away.  I finally left the office at lunchtime and went back to the house, where I mostly laid around and tried to sedate myself, with some success.

The headache didn’t really start to fade until around midnight, so I didn’t have quite the rest I might have desired, but at least I got some rest.  And now, only a faint residue of the headache remains.

It didn’t feel like a typical migraine, which I have from time to time‒thankfully not very often‒but almost more like a bad, unilateral sinus headache.  Hopefully, it has pretty much run its course now.

It might be nice if there could be a situation in which one could go through some period of painful illness, but then come out afterwards with one’s prior, chronic pain somehow eliminated.  Of course, that’s not likely to happen in real life.  It certainly hasn’t happened to me.

It is true, apparently, that a bad measles infection can effectively wipe out prior immunities, making one vulnerable to diseases to which one had previous resistance.  I suppose that might even be a boon in someone with an autoimmune dysfunction, though it would be difficult to time the infection just right.

I’m not aware of anyone having tried such a therapy, and I don’t think it’s something I would recommend, even if it were workable (which it really isn’t).  Better just to keep vaccination for measles and other preventable illnesses going and look for other avenues to treat autoimmune disorders.

As for what else to discuss…I’m coming up empty here at the moment.  Actually, it’s not just at the moment, is it?  I’ve been squeezing the dregs out of the mustard bottle that is my life force for a long time now.

Sorry, I know that’s a terrible metaphor, but I don’t feel that I’m really worthy of anything fancier.  Anyway, I’ve certainly spread that condiment out over a lot of sandwiches (that’s my continuing the rotten metaphor, with a sandwich representing a day).  But there’s hardly anything left in there, and there are no refills available, as far as I know, and now I’m really just going through the motions.  There’s just a dribbly little, watery remnant, with no flavor left and very little color.

I really pushed that one to the crumpling point, I fear.  But I hope I at least got my point across.  If I didn’t, that would be a real shame.  What a thing not only to have used a truly lame metaphor but to have it fail to do what one intended.  What a tragic joke that would be.

It wouldn’t be very tragic, of course‒it’s hardly anything of consequence.  But still, it would be sad.

I’m really tired and wiped out, even though I went back to the house early yesterday.  Well, I mean, I did just say that my headache didn’t really start to go away until about midnight, and as per my usual self, I was awake today well before three in the morning.

I know, I know, this is all so boring and repetitive!  I’m very sorry.  I wish I could be telling you all about a new story I’m writing, or about my return to a past story, or about some new music I was learning or writing, or even some new drawings I might have done.

Heck, I’d like to tell you I was making progress in studying quantum mechanics and general relativity or differential geometry or computer programming and computer science in general.  I wish I could tell you (and do so honestly) that I was learning more Japanese, or refreshing my Spanish or learning Russian or German, or even French, all of which languages are interesting.

But I’m not doing any of those things.  I’m not doing anything creative or productive or even just distractive (that’s probably not a formally recognized word, but maybe it is).  I don’t have the energy to do anything creative other than this, if this even counts.

Of course, I go to work and do my job, and that’s all well and good as far as it goes, since I don’t like being a burden to people.  But that’s as good as it gets, I think.

I don’t know what else I can do.  I’m just a mess.  I feel like a tattered and smeared old wrapper from a cheap, fast food hamburger.  I suppose some of the smeared matter on the wrapper might be mustard, if we want to keep the metaphor‒or simile, in this case‒consistent.

Well, my train will be here soon, so I’ll bring this to a close.  I hope I haven’t been too much of a downer.  If I have, well, take comfort in the fact that you are only reading these thoughts.  You don’t actually have to experience them.

Please try to have a good day, and try to have better thoughts than mine.

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I have not become comfortably numb

     Well, I misjudged things a bit, and though when I wrote my post yesterday I didn’t realize it, I had developed blisters on my feet from my long walking‒especially the right one, on which I had been wearing a spandex brace (prophylactically*‒I hadn’t yet been having any ankle problems, but wanted to avoid them if possible).  So, today, I am not walking, at least not to the train/work.

     I have realized that topical lidocaine creams, such as the max strength versions of “Icy Hot”, dull the irritation of blisters.  That’s nice to know, in a pinch, though I don’t know if it would dull the pain of a pinch; it seems only to work with superficial pain, not deeper pain.  Curiously, it also seems to dull some of the local signs and effects of inflammation (though Ibuprofen contributed to that).  Don’t worry, I’m not expecting to cover up my pain and forget about it.  That doesn’t seem doable.  I’ve tried.

     If I could slather lidocaine all over my body and thus numb all my pain, believe me, I would do it.  But I always hit a wall beyond which the numbing doesn’t reach.  Heck, I’ve had multiple steroid/lidocaine epidural injections and they didn’t seem to do anything to my pain, even temporarily.

     I should probably study up on the nature of congenital insensitivity to pain, just to see if the metabolic pathways involved in the condition shed any light on the sorts of things that might make a person have their pain sense shut off.  Mind you, given the nature of that disorder**, I suspect that its effects come about through some aberrant development of the nervous system, not by the presence (or absence) of some neurotransmitter.

     If memory serves, the saliva of the vampire bat has significant pain-reducing as well as anticoagulant properties.  I’ve heard all my life about people thinking it would be good to investigate as a source of potential powerful analgesics, but nothing has come of it, as far as I’m aware.  It wouldn’t be all that hard to separate out the molecules in vampire bat saliva and examine them and try to replicate them.  Heck, if you can figure out the bat’s biochemical process for making the molecules, you could develop transgenic bacteria that could produce the substance en masse, like how replacement thyroid hormone is made.

     No, either there were unforeseen difficulties with using the vampire bat’s saliva analgesic, or no one was interested in doing the research (which seems unlikely but is not impossible), or “big pharma” has blocked the research because it would interfere with the sales of opioids and NSAIDs and so on (see picture below for an example of such interference).  I would like to think that’s unlikely; after all, there would be tremendous potential for legitimate profit in a revolutionary new pain treatment.

     Still, if it turned out that anyone in a big drug company or companies did block research into such a potential pain killer, then all the people involved would need to be strapped to tables and have all their joints and other “tender areas”, like genitals and nipples and lips and eyes, injected with some combination of‒for instance‒capsaicin and gympie-gympie leaf extract and fire ant venom, with some uric acid crystals*** thrown in for good measure.  Oh, and also they should be given constant, powerful stimulants so that they cannot escape their pain by losing consciousness.

     That’s if I don’t think of anything even better to do to them.

     Obviously, I take pain treatment seriously.  That should come as no surprise, given my personal, decades-long chronic pain and my own having gone to prison for trying (naively) to treat other people’s pain, only to be thrown under the bus by people who were taking advantage of my naïveté.  I have very little patience for those who would interfere with other people reducing their pain and suffering, or who would make light of the suffering of innocent people.

     Mind you, though I think vindictive thoughts and entertain vindictive fantasies, I would probably (like a moron and a sucker) feel pity even for people who had done such horrible deeds, and I would probably end their lives with minimal pain.

     I would not feel bad about that though.  People who willfully engender greater suffering in others for their own short-term (or long-term) profit, whatever form that might take (unless it is truly and honestly and reasonably something they perceive to be an emergency or an absolute survival need) are more than worthy of being erased from existence.  And while it might be reasonable for those who knew them to miss them, they would not deserve to be mourned.

     Look at me, getting all murderously vindictive about purely imaginary people, when there are so many real people who are thoroughly deserving of such animus.  But, anyway, that’s enough of this weird-ass blog post for today.  I’ll let you go to enjoy something more wholesome.  Please have a good day if you’re able.

*I am pleased to note that my right ankle is in no danger of an unwanted pregnancy.

**And yes, it is a disorder, not just a “difference”, because it significantly reduces the survival and thrival of people who have it.

***Look them up; they’re related to gout.

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Monday morning nonsense

     It’s Monday again; aren’t you all just delighted?  I’m writing this on my smartphone, starting at the train station, after having walked here from the house.

     I did a lot of walking this weekend:  about ten and a half miles on Saturday, then a little over six on Sunday, then just about six so far today.  My new shoes seem to be a good choice so far.  Of course, I have some modest blistering on my right foot (I’m not entirely sure why it’s only on the right, though I have a hypothesis or two) but not enough to cause serious trouble.  The goal is to try just to do more and more of my traveling on foot and to get in better condition‒not just because of the sort of things that filled me with rage on Friday morning, but also just to try to get myself healthier, or at least stronger.

     Of course, the popular wisdom is that regular exercise like walking can help with depression, though I’ve never been completely convinced by the data I’ve seen on that.  Also, to be honest, I had some of my worst trouble with depression in college when I was doing pretty serious exercise.  I was running six plus miles and doing ridiculous numbers of push ups and so on at the time.  Perhaps my episodes of depression had (and still have) more to do with burnout, possibly from masking and related ASD based issues than with more garden-variety depression.  Who knows?

     This was a momentous weekend, holiday-wise.  It was the end of Passover and yesterday was also Easter (they tend to fall around the same time of year and that’s no mere coincidence‒remember that Jesus’s “last supper” was a Passover Seder).  And for those for whom marijuana is a bit of a modern sacrament, yesterday was 4/20, which for some reason is the number related to marijuana use.  I’ve heard some rather dubious explanations for that association, but since I don’t have any convincing reasons to believe any given one, I won’t get into it.

     Yesterday was also a day of very important remembrance for me, and for some modicum of hope related to that remembrance.  But that hope was unfulfilled, which unfortunately comes as no surprise.  I really need to stop with any and all “hope” nonsense.  What’s the line from A Christmas Carol about comfort?  It comes from other regions and is conveyed by other ministers to other kinds of men.  That about sums up the notion of “hope” when it comes to me.

     I really don’t have any hope for anything good at all in the world, and particularly not for me.  Look at the state of things, and the degree to which reason and ethics seem to have deteriorated.  Is human civilization even worth saving?  I suppose there are many innocent people among the throng of humans, and it would be a shame for them to suffer unnecessarily just because a vocal, moronic minority causes so much trouble.  But good grief, it can be frustrating.

     As for me and my life, well…there’s nothing much to say.  I suppose we’ll see if, after enough time doing it, my walking will help my outlook and my mood.  At the very least, it might help my physical condition.  That’s a positive thing, assuming all other things are equal.

     I’m not going to get into political discussion right now, though I will say that I would rather hear the thoughts of the dead worm in RFK, Jr’s head than whatever nonsense he voices with his own minimally functioning brain.  He’s just pathetic.

     Of course, pathetic is the typical order of things, and I certainly match that adjective, myself…but not in the way he does.

     Anyway, I’m a bit sleepy, probably from the long walk, and I’m on the train now.  I’m going to make this blog post short today; maybe tomorrow I’ll write more and something of greater interest or consequence.  Or, maybe I’ll get hit by a truck while crossing a street or something.  That wouldn’t be such a tragedy, though it would be a shame to screw up an honest truck driver’s workday.

     In any case, I hope you all had a very good weekend and that you also have a very good week.  Actually, even if you didn’t have a good weekend, I hope you have a good week.  You might as well.  You are readers, and readers are the people who embrace the greatest invention of the human race.  Please do your best to encourage and spread that love.  Written language is still the best thing we have.