illness

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O, let my blogs be then the eloquence and dumb presages of my speaking breast.

Antarctic

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, and so it’s time for another of my weekly blog posts.  For those of you who are paying attention, I have not (yet) written a post on Iterations of Zero this week.  That parenthetical “yet” may yet become a superfluous “yet”, alas, because I recently suffered from a rather nasty gastroenteritis.  For the first three or so days of this week, I felt almost literally rotten, and I’m still rather washed out, if you’ll pardon the expression.  So, I may have to call this week’s IoZ post a miss, though it pains me to do so after only having done a few weeks’ worth of continuous posting.  I may need just to write a very brief entry there as an apology.

I have been able to keep up with editing Unanimity, though the process was rather slower than usual.  I’m again approaching the latter part of the story, and as expected, it’s not quite as gripping as it was the first several times.  This is good, since it makes me a more ruthless editor, which is a large part of the point of doing it this way.  I’ve already trimmed more than twenty-five thousand words from the original draft, but I’m not near my goal yet, so I must be increasingly brutal as time passes.

I have to admit, at the risk of seeming narcissistic, that I tend to enjoy reading my own stories.  There’s just something about them; it’s as though the author really knows me.

On the other hand, I continue to have trouble finding other people’s tales—including television and movie fiction—engaging.  There are shows and films and books out now that should by all rights be seizing my attention and holding it without ransom, but which barely raise an eyebrow.  I can’t even seem to force myself to partake of them.  It’s not exactly ennui, but maybe that’s the closest thing to it*.  The only stories I’ve been able to focus on lately are the Japanese light novel series whose title is shortened to Oregairo.  It’s about a collection of loners (this is not a contradiction), with a narrator who’s particularly misanthropic and cynical, though none of them are hateful or overly pessimistic.  Unfortunately, I’ve reached the end of the volumes that have been published in English, and though they’re good books, I’m not likely to reread them anytime soon.  This is a glaring departure from my usual pattern for books that I enjoy.  God knows how often I’ve read The Lord of the Rings, but it’s been well over thirty times, and even much more so for The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever.  The Harry Potter books don’t quite reach that level of repetition, but then again, I was already a working and studying adult when they came out.  I didn’t have the free reading time on my hands that I had in grade school, junior high, and high school, when I first read LotR and Thomas Covenant.

Unfortunately, I haven’t even had the will or desire in recent years to reread these great classics.  I’ve started Tolkien**, but I haven’t even gotten to the end of the first section.  Frodo hasn’t even been stabbed on Weathertop yet.  I just lost interest.  And every time I look at either the hard copy or the digital copy of this or any of the other books to consider reading them, I just kind of feel, “meh”.

I do a bit better with nonfiction, especially science books, including audio books.  This is certainly some consolation; I’ve always loved science as much as I’ve loved fiction (though, oddly, only very select science fiction).  Even this has its limits, of course, partly because Brian Greene, Sean Carroll, Richard Dawkins and the like can only write so many popular science books so quickly***.  I tend to devour them rapidly when they come out.  Also, unfortunately, a lot of science books in subjects I enjoy are just rehashing things I already know.  One can only so often read some new person’s attempt to explain General Relativity or Quantum Mechanics or Astrophysics or Evolutionary Biology to the layperson, especially when others have already done a better job on the subjects.

I think part of the trouble I have with enjoying new fiction—and even new nonfiction, but to a lesser extent—is that I simply don’t have the people in my life with whom I used to share that joy.  Because of that absence, even new potential happiness in reading such stories (or watching such shows, etc.) is tainted and soured.  It’s hard to take pleasure looking at photos of—or imagining—sipping cocktails on a tropical beach with one’s estranged significant other or splashing about in the surf with one’s children if one is currently wandering, lost and alone, in a frozen, Antarctic desert.

Not to be melodramatic about it or anything.

In lighter news, I’m thinking of setting up a promotional giveaway of at least electronic versions of my books and/or stories—one per customer—sometime soon…in time for the holidays, perhaps.  If I do, word of it will probably appear here, in this very blog, before it appears anywhere else.  Indeed, in a certain sense, it just has.

I wish all of you all manner of wellnesses, including ones you’ve never even imagined before, and which certainly I have never had the courage to contemplate.  May each of your personal world-lines become ever better with the passage of time.

TTFN

*It’s almost certainly dysthymia, with its attendant curse anhedonia.

**I’ve even tried rereading The Silmarillion, which I’ve read at least a dozen times in the past.  (It’s not as though I could have read it in the future, is it?)  No luck.

***Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould have been slacking off lately to an inexcusable degree, in my opinion.

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Who would fardels blog, to grunt and sweat under a weary life?

[The initial part of this blog post was meant to be published a week ago, as will become clear.]

Hello, good morning, and good Thursday (it’s also the day before “Good Friday”).  I’m feeling rather poorly this morning, and I am, in fact, going to the doctor before work today.  Yes, I’m planning to go to work afterwards.  It’s not as though I have health insurance or anything, so if I’m going to go to the doctor—ironically—I needs must pay for it out of mine own pocket, even though I’m a qualified medical doctor myself.  This is the eminently sane and rational society in which we live.  Isn’t it grand?

As per last week’s posting, I’ve been focused almost entirely on editing this week, so I’m making significantly faster progress than before, though the road is long.  Also, I’ve just not felt well at all for a while, now, and it’s taking some of the wind out of my sails.  Ordinarily, it’s difficult to get me to slow down and shut up, and I can’t completely rule out the possibility that I’m being subtly poisoned by someone (or more than one) who finds me too annoying.

I’m kidding.  I really don’t suspect some nefarious plot.  It’s just the sort of thing that crosses my mind when I think of myself, so I occasionally imagine that other people might feel similarly.  Actually, other people tend to be more patient with me than I am with myself, but then again, they can get away from me, can’t they?  No matter where I go, as they say, there I am.

I have a few things in the works for IoZ, which might or might not be interesting.  I have an audio blog still to post, and I’m trying to write some posts long-hand (in first draft) to see if that makes me produce them more often.  I also have plans for another post that began its life as a response to a Facebook meme about the tides, stating that, since the moon affects the oceans, there’s no reason to think it wouldn’t affect us since we’re 70% water.  This meme was so misguided and riddled with misunderstandings about basic physics that I couldn’t resist going through the whole Newtonian universal law of gravitation, why there are tides, why they are not dependent upon water, and how tiny the tidal differences due to the moon are from one end of any given person to  the other end.  Yes, I did the math, and shared all the numbers (to significant figures, or thereabouts).  And I’m going to post a version of it on Iterations of Zero once I tweak it a little.

That notion of someone poisoning me doesn’t quite sound so crazy and paranoid now, does it?

I haven’t been promoting my already-published books much lately.  I’ve felt a bit of aversion to Facebook and so haven’t much wanted to give them money, but they really are the best venue I have through which I can promote, unless anyone out there has any better suggestions.  I ought to get back into it.  I just feel kind of obnoxious pushing my own stuff overtly.  I suppose this is why people hire agents and advertisers and marketing firms, but I don’t have that kind of money to spare.

Anyway, the editing of Unanimity and on Free-Range Meat is going well.  As far as short stories go, I still plan both to publish the stories from Welcome to Paradox City as individual Kindle editions and to eventually release a new collection, in hard copy and Kindle, of such “short” stories, so that’s something for you all to look forward to.

Always assuming I live long enough, of course.

TTFN

 

***

 

Okay, well, as you might have noticed, I didn’t, in fact, publish my blog last week, so I’m just going to do a follow-up now and continue the story, as it were, where I left off.

The reason I never posted last week was because, after going to the walk-in clinic and telling them my symptoms and my history, and after the doctor there gave me a once-over, he said (more or less), “Look…I can do some tests here and charge you for them, but unless they show a clear and easily treatable cause of your symptoms and problems, I’m going to recommend that you go the emergency room anyway.  So, let’s skip a step, I won’t charge you for this visit, and I’m going to give you a referral to the ER.”

I thought this was, perhaps, a little alarmist, but I was persuaded—not happily—to follow his advice, and I went.  I guess the ER agreed with the clinic doctor’s assessment, because they admitted me for about thirty or so hours, ruled out heart attack and DVT/pulmonary embolism, and did an echocardiogram (among other things).  They also, thankfully, gave me some antibiotics for a chronic/recurrent ear infection, which quite temporarily relieved it…though it’s already recurring even as I write this.

Then, at the beginning of this week, after a reasonably restful holiday weekend in which I neither celebrated any of various potential causes for celebration nor had any interactions with those with whom I would have wanted to celebrate, I got calls from both the cardiologist who read my echocardiogram and from the attending physician who managed my care during my brief hospitalization.

Before I get into what they said, let me give you a bit of back story:

When I was eighteen, I was diagnosed with an atrial-septal defect, secundum type (read about it here if you like), quite a good-sized one, with a greater-than-two-to-one shunt.  This was promptly evaluated, and I had open-heart surgery to close it, performed at Children’s Hospital in Detroit by the man who wrote the textbook on the surgery.  This experience, which was quite painful but at least interesting, was influential on my decision eventually to go to medical school.  Subsequent follow-up was unremarkable, the surgery was a success, I was discharged from ongoing care, etc., etc., etc.

Anyway, it turns out, based on this new echocardiogram, that my previous defect did not remain completely closed through the intervening years, and that I have some equivalent of a patent foramen ovale with, apparently as indicated on the echo, a shunt that is sometimes reversing…i.e. some blood from my pulmonary circulation is shifting to the systemic circulation without having passed through the lungs to blow off CO2 and get oxygenated.  This is why (as was the case before my initial surgery) I seem to have a high resting heart rate (or did when checked at the clinic and the hospital) and now tend to have a lowish oxygen saturation, at least in the right circumstances.

This is all not imminently life-threatening, but as I know, the fact that there is even occasional right-to-left shunting means that there is a potentially serious problem.  And the attending internist recommended that I start seeing the cardiologist before even coming to her for general medical follow-up, with plans for eventual intervention and closure of the defect.  But, of course, as stated above, I don’t have health insurance right now, and as it is, I’m going to be paying for this hospital visit for quite some time to come.  It is true that closure of such PFO’s nowadays is much less of an undertaking than it was thirty years ago, but I still don’t think it’s going to be cheap.

And, finally, what’s the point?  Apart from the inherent drive to stay alive that’s been beaten into my genes by hundreds of millions of years of multi-cellular evolution, I honestly don’t have any compelling reason to try to improve my health and/or prolong my existence.

I have neither colleagues nor close friends with whom I can really have any enjoyable conversations, or with whom I ever do anything fun…mainly because the things I think are fun are rarely what those around me find enjoyable, and vice versa.

I have a housemate who’s a good guy, and we get along well, but we don’t have a great deal in common (though I’ve bought some great guitars from him).

I’m a divorced, ex-con, MD who can’t practice medicine anymore, whose son won’t talk to him, and who is only able to interact with his daughter through Facebook and similar venues, who works merely to stay alive so he can write and publish sci-fi/fantasy/horror stories that few if any people will ever read, and who occasionally diddles around with writing, producing, and sharing songs, and drawing pictures, and stuff like that.

Oh, and I also make blog posts like this one.

I come from a line of people who tended to be somewhat socially restricted, by nature and choice, but my mother and father at least had each other through their natural life-spans, as was the general rule in the past.  I, however, am a card-carrying inhabitant* of the easy divorce era, bereft of my chosen and beloved family by the will of the love of my life.  I have no strong desire to go through the gauntlet of trying to find some replacement love who is no more likely to have a sense of enduring commitment than the one who came before her, especially when I have so little to offer anymore.

I’m inclined to think that this story’s gone on well past any reasonable degree of interest.  I guess I might change my mind; who knows?  But for now, it’s hard to see the point of bothering to go through all these medical processes again, even if the interventions are less severe and relatively less expensive than they were in the past.  What, as they say, is the point?  I’m basically a weird, weary, and alone person in a world in which the forces of stupidity seem not only to be ascendant now but always to have been so.

It’s enough, I’m thinking.

TTFN

*I don’t actually carry a card

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For who would bear the whips and scorns of time…the blog’s delay?

Okay, to begin with:  an apology.  I didn’t write a blog post last Thursday because I was sick in bed, and I felt so low and grungy that I wasn’t even up to composing a brief paragraph to let everyone know of my state.  Perhaps I should have, in case any of you were worried about me, or awaited my blog post with bated breath, your happiness intrinsically and inescapably tied to the weekly presence of my words.  If such a person exists anywhere in the multiverse, I apologize especially to that individual (and recommend psychiatric care).

Other than those days in which I accomplished very little due to my illness, I’ve been proceeding at a good pace.  Some improvements in my schedule have given me a bit more time (and energy) in the mornings, so I’ve written slightly more than usual on Unanimity this week—about two thousand words a day.  It’s coming along well; the story arcs toward its climax, which is on the distant horizon at least, if not yet in easy reach.

As followers of the blog (and of my Facebook page and Twitter feed) will know, I haven’t been remiss in recording and posting the audio for the chapters of The Chasm and the Collision.  You can listen to Chapter 6, with the name “Discussion and Encounter”* here, or you can listen to the “video” on YouTube, here.  It’s shorter than the preceding chapters, but new and surprising things are happening to Alex, Meghan, and Simon, and they’ll soon learn much more about the strange events in which they’ve become embroiled.

I’m vaguely embarrassed by some minor recording glitches that happened for a short time in the middle of Chapter 6’s audio.  I did my best to correct them in the edit, and maybe they aren’t noticeable to anyone but me, but I find them annoying.  However, despite that annoyance, the prospect of going back and re-recording those sections was too daunting.  Your enjoyment of the story shouldn’t be diminished by them, but I will try to keep them from happening again.

On other matters, I was a bit surprised (dare I say disappointed?) that the third installment of “My heroes have always been villains” didn’t get more readership than it did.  I would have thought that Hannibal Lecter would be an extremely popular character to discuss, but maybe he’s not in the front of everyone’s minds anymore.  Or perhaps most people know him solely from the movies, and the fact that I focused on the character in the books was too alien an approach.  If anyone has feedback to give, I would certainly welcome it.  In any case, I invite and encourage you to go back and read it, here, if you missed it.

On to still other topics:  looking back, I realize that, with the exception of my author’s notes, and “My heroes have always been villains,” these blog posts tend to have the character of a sort of weekly report, as though I were summarizing my activities for an employer.  Of course, in a sense, those of you who read this, and especially those who buy my books, are my employers, so that’s not an inappropriate format for the posts to take.  Still, some of you may find them unexciting, and if you have any suggestions, please forward them to me here in the comments, or send them to me via Facebook or Twitter.  I’m always interested in getting your feedback.

There’s not much else to report, meanwhile, given that my productivity was impaired a bit this last fortnight.  Unanimity approaches its climax, and once it’s finished I’ll give it a bit of a rest (about a month or so, as per the practice of my role model, Stephen King), before beginning the arduous but rewarding tasks of rewriting and editing.  I already have one short story to write during that break time, and I may end up writing two, because there’s another one that’s been percolating and festering in my brain for ages.  My head, it turns out, is an excellent environment for such festering; I’m just lucky that way.  After that, I will begin my next novel—probably even as I rewrite and edit Unanimity, if I can make that work—which will be called Neko/Neneko.  More on that later, but it’s going to be much more lighthearted than Unanimity, and probably considerably shorter.  At sometime in the not-too-distant future, I really need to work on the second book in the saga of Mark Red.  I don’t want to leave Mark, and especially Morgan (my favorite of my characters so far) alone for too long.  They deserve better.

With that, I will bid you adieu for another week, and this time it really should be just one week.  I’m also going to try to increase the rate of my posting on Iterations of Zero, so keep your eyes on that; I just need to work out effective scheduling for it.  Be well, all of you, and again, feel free to give me your feedback.

TTFN

*This may sound like an inauspicious title, but it’s not always easy to keep finding intense and gripping chapter names for an entire novel.  It’s a pivotal chapter, however, and at the end of it, some very dramatic events occur, so be of good cheer.