Not My Pain Today

I'm very lucky these days. It's been a long time since any of the women I know and care most about have faced violent hate crimes with nothing to do with sex. It seemed as though it was a weekly event in my college days. Sometimes, there were a few degrees of separation but there always seemed to be a woman I knew well suffering from violence or the long aftermath. If you don't limit it to physical violence, it was an everyday event in truth. There were women all around me who believed that they needed to submit to sex in order to be in a relationship. If you want to expand it to a verbal level, I was one of the tens of millions of men who used words like bitch on a regular basis though usually not at someone. That just means they weren't in the room so I guess that doesn't count for much.

Honestly, I have to admit that bitch doesn't strike me as a particularly offensive word even when I've meant it to be hurtful. Like the classic f-bomb, it tends to be so divorced from its literal meaning that I hardly consider its meaning at all. If I've been offended by a man, I'm likely to refer to said person as an asshole. If the offensive person is a woman, I'm more likely to say bitch. For much of my life, women provided more of my emotional trauma than men did though that was likely because I preferred the company of women. Let me be clear and state that I'm not referring to sexual company of any sort. I'm what I might jokingly call a mono-sexual meaning that I'm devoted to my wife and she's the only person I've ever seriously thought of as a sexual partner.

Thus, the supposed motivations of the California mass murderer seem like something that belong on another planet. If we're going to talk about good old Earth, I've been deluding myself for a long time that such misogyny is limited to other cultures like jihadist type Islamist groups. (If I've misused either religious term, I apologize and welcome gentle corrections.) I remember my college days when it seemed that nearly everyone who went out did so find an attractive girl drunk enough to want to go home with him. It used to bother me that this was considered OK as long as no one got AIDS or got pregnant. Most of my friends were women yet there were few objections toward any other effects this behavior might have.

I do not understand anyone who feels a need to "get laid." I understand the desire and the pleasure involved but only at the highest levels of commitment. I believed this was related to my birth defect. If I had proper bladder and bowel control with nothing deformed, I believed that I might have tried to join the hook up culture. Of course, serious history students try to avoid wasting time on counterfactuals. (What if Hitler had been killed in the First World War?)  That's how seriously I take the concept of being born normal. If being born normal meant that I would need sex to see myself as a man, I guess I'm glad of spina bifida.

If I asked a woman out, it was because I wanted to spend time with her and that was time with our clothes on. As often as not, I was as interested in the suggested activity as I was the company. I'm ashamed that I felt anger about the series of rejections that marked the first 20 years of my life but I think I was being rejected by a lot of young women who thought I wanted more than I did. There was one time when a woman made it very clear that she might just be sexually available for the asking and this struck me as a bad idea despite all the alcohol we'd consumed. How could I trust her that much when we barely knew each other? The main thing that kept me from running away was the fact that we were in my room! Thankfully, she closed the door on the subject quickly.

People talk about masculine culture and blame it for sexual violence but I don't know. I'm far from an expert on the subject but the closest thing I've had to a big brother in my lifetime was a self described "male whore." He was heterosexual and liked sex with willing women so much that he seemed to be involved with a lot of them. He never seemed to believe that they were anything but what he would be if he were a woman. At the same time, he respected my decision to wait for the right woman and never so much as teased me about it. He also respected my views on violence in general and showed me how to avoid looking like a victim without having to fight anyone. I associate masculine culture with him though he is likely a minority of one among the "manly men." I know other perfectly decent men but they would never describe themselves as being terribly masculine.

I never touched anyone without permission even when I was touch deprived enough to enjoy sitting in an over-occupied car or bumping into someone in the hallway. No, I'm not contradicting myself because I let people bump into me and the car thing was mutual crowding. It was nothing sexual but simple touch is impossibly important for human beings.

I want to know what it is that we need to do to make college campus safe for women and everyone else who suffers. Do we need to eliminate the culture of freedom that allows young men and women to flaunt what few rules there are and go from co-education to near cohabitation? I hope not. I remember and treasure so many late night and early morning conversations that I shared with women friends. If it would have kept more of my friends safe, I guess we could have talked on the phone. What do we need to do to help keep women safe?

2 AM

"Baby, it's 3 AM. I must be lonely." - Matchbox 20

Did you know that old, overplayed song was about the lead singer's mother and her battles with chronic pain? It doesn't make the song any less overplayed but I had a sort of second wind experience with it. Then, it got overplayed through that second chance. There's something in the song I can identify with. It's 2 AM for me and not 3:00 but there's something about the middle of the night. I'm not claustrophobic but the walls seem like they're closing in. I'm not paranoid but that's when everything does seem out to get me. All my friends and loved ones abandon me at 2 AM but they always come back. Usually, they're back by 3 AM just like they never left. Imagine that!

As I've felt my usual partial symptom improvement that comes with warm weather along with the improvement from taking my meds "as needed" again, other things have crept in. As the pain recedes, I find the brain space to think of other things and other people. I've said it before and I'll say it again. You might as well go ahead and list crippling guilt as a Chiari symptom. There's an old expression that says knowing is half the battle but it doesn't seem to work that way in this case. I know the facts and I still have that metaphorical wish for a meteorite to come down and smash me in my chair without inconveniencing anyone else. That would make it an awfully small meteorite but that doesn't matter in the moment.

I'm not looking for practical advice right now. If I could be asleep every night at 2 AM, I would be but sleep comes unreliably yet not always during the day now. If I might risk making others feel bad, what I want is one of the late great Lois Silvestri's hugs. She was the one person who knew how to hug without hurting. I can still hear her voice and put myself in her kitchen as one of the safe places I've stored up. I let her talk without saying much and she's not really saying anything either despite doing all the talking. It only makes sense in dreams and old memories.

After one of dear Lois' hugs, I'd take about a ton of ice cream of assorted varieties not including anything with strawberries or coconut. Yesterday was so damp that it was cold. Today, I am starting to remember everything I learned about relative humidity. Hot air holds the most moisture. My eyes keep closing in the heat. I want my snow back!

The "little b" Kind of Better

It can be tough to keep track of time especially when I find myself losing sleep. One strange time distortion is that days seem to crawl by but every other day seems to be Sunday when I fill my medication containers for the week. Sometimes, it seems as if I go to the pain doc once a week and not once a month. My own personal study into the subject suggests that we humans require markers in order to measure time accurately. If each day is just like the one before it except for medication filling day, you're likely to feel as if every day is medication filling day.

For a long time, pain doc days had become mind numbing routine. I list the same symptoms with the same intensity because it averages out that way in truth. The thing about pain doc day is that I tend to want it to be routine because I am at the upper limits of opioid pain medicine and because I fear change. Therefore, I was just about flattened with panic when one of my pain docs hit me with a statement that seemed out of left field. I won't get to ask her about it because she's on vacation during my next appointment so I expected to feel somewhat queasy in anticipation of potential change.

Changes have been dreadful things during the last year or so. The start of my major health disruptions dates back to a trip to visit my New York family in May of 2013. Things got much worse with the plumbing issues that followed but today would mark the one year point in this pain spike. Things have only changed health wise by getting worse during this time. Therefore, my favorite pain doc made a comment about taking me off my most effective pain medication. It sounded like the worst idea in the world since it was supposed to be my breakthrough pain medicine and I had started taking it on a schedule at the pain doc's suggestion. I insisted that the pain meds are helping and they have been at least by some definitions of "help."

After I took a week recovering from the physical and mental stress of pain doc day, I thought about what she might have meant. When you're taking all your breakthrough pain meds on a regular schedule that doesn't even cover most of the breakthrough pain, something has to give. I decided to take a small risk and went "off schedule" for the breakthrough meds so that I could take them as needed again.

Miracle of miracles, it worked at least a little. Okay. It just plain worked. I have to remember that no one ever said that taking fewer pills would cure me of anything. The goal was to be able to take my pain medication when I was in pain so that I would feel little "b" better.