There was a TV show or a movie or maybe even a book on recently that gave me some new thoughts about the math of being alive. That's right! It was an episode of "Criminal Minds" that, oddly enough, ended in a suicide. The dying character kept citing one of my old motives for wanting to die: she wanted to go out on her own terms instead of waiting until she was too sick to make her own decisions. She came to this conclusion after nearly a year and a half of suffering through ALS or Lou Gehring's disease. ALS is one of the most painful, frightening and humbling ways that you can die so she decided to die while she was still herself.
My initial reaction to this was sympathy. I don't know how many times I tried to kill myself or seriously considered doing so but the reason was almost exactly the same. I feared a loss of freedom, choice and the loss of everything I'd struggled to gain. This fictional Caroline wanted to go out before she had suffered beyond a certain point and I thought about Chiari. I took a step back and saw who I was, when I got sick and how things changed after that. Now that I have a history to examine, I can look back and see specific benchmarks and apply my question to them. Where was my high point where I could have left on my own terms?
When could I have left at the top? My first thought was that I could have left at the top at Christmas of 1999. I was a newlywed and ecstatic about it. I was on an emotional high that I don't expect to match. The next landmark along the road was diagnosis and surgery. Looking back, I know that the first surgery made me sicker after an additional wait. I should have known that I was 70% likely to keep symptoms but I was still a newlywed and good times remained. The hope of the second surgery came next. My second surgeon knew what had gone wrong the first time and he would fix it all.
If you want to solve the formula for y instead of x this time, there was a moment before the second surgery when I couldn't take it anymore. There was absolutely nothing that could motivate me to survive a third year of this awfulness. I kept faith that I would find a way to get better and, well, there was some improvement and even more decline but I survived into my 15th year. On one hand, there was no one willing to accept my surrender and then care for me. The war would go on even if I tried to give up but I would stop enjoying my small victories here and there.
The point of all this pseudo-math is that depressed people make poor logical assumptions. I'm in awful pain every day but that does not preclude fun. My long time best friend named Dave and I have these esoteric conversations sometimes and he's the only person who enjoys having them with me. We discovered the existence of a law of supply and demand that applies to fun, free time and other good things in life. We never quantified anything but then we suspected that the specifics are different for each person.
Life is all the more precious when you suspect that you are dying without planning to do so. I'm done hiding what the precious things in my life have been. Time spent with Melissa is number one with time spent with non-romantic loved ones coming in a close second. That includes time spent with those feline babies. Why don't I force Madeline to move sooner when she's forcing me into an uncomfortable position? It's simple. I may want to do something that doesn't involve Maddie, Pippi and Meeks but I still dislike the fact that the moving around requires them to leave me alone for a while. I'm also very food and drink oriented despite all the years I was taught to be ashamed of this. I'd love to take a couple of years deciding whether I prefer Scottish ale, Belgian ale or 12 year old Scotch the most. Before I die, I'd like to enjoy some 20 year old single malt. What about Irish whiskey? I've never had the pleasure of trying it and hope to do that as well.
Of course, a day like today gives me second thoughts. I spent the day in hideous pain with my meds giving next to no relief. Melissa went in to work an opening shift after we got paid but before any stores opened. For about the third day in a row, she cooked dinner which was a good thing but she didn't understand that I wanted something that required no work at all in order to eat. The pain is bad enough that I don't want to try working my jaw. When she figured out that something was wrong, she made me chicken nuggets which were good enough.
What I really wanted was liquid anesthetic (strong alcohol) to make it through the boredom.and through this god awful constant pain. As Thomas Paine once wrote, "These are the times that try men's souls." I've tried many times to tell her that I'd much rather drink my dinner in times like these. I'm so sick of the pain that I want to be unconscious or barely conscious so that I can listen to music while I'm mostly asleep. Maybe that would kill me sooner than the pain would but I don't care very much. I'm pledged to resist the urge to kill myself. That doesn't mean that I look forward to a subjectively long experience with pain.
I'll play the hand I was dealt but that means I intend to play it for every bit of relief that I can get. It's all I can do now on a bad day like this. Obviously, I'm not going to make any major decisions right now because I know I'm depressed but it is no fun to use up a whole day's worth of medication and have the day not be over yet. I won't overdose even a little because I don't want to hurry tolerance along any more than I am now.
