The Tears Won't Fall

I keep finding myself wanting to cry but I can't. Each time thar I lose something life affirming, it feels as though the bottom of the pit must be closer. Normally, that wouldn't bother me because I have a fondness for trampolines. Now, I'm like the player who has survived a game of Russian Roulette that has gone on for dozens of rounds. Getting back to my original metaphor, I know that one of these pits has gigantic poisoned metal spikes in the bottom instead of something to get me out of the pit. Depending on how you look at it, life should either have to stop demanding things of me until I'm feeling better or I should get an extended break from the pain and stress to deal with those facts of life.

One problem is that I can just hear my feather's criticism echoing from the past. "John, you're already getting an unreasonable amount of help. It doesn't matter that your health keeps getting worse. I've decided that you can deal with everything because it must be done. It must be done so you do it or get your wife to do it." Forget that it is impossible to do certain things and just do them. It's a great movie plot but it's more like being up shit creek without a paddle in real life. Getting my wife to do it is my favorite line. She has her limits, too. Somehow, she exceeds them every day functioning while at least as frustrated as I am.

A good friend wrote me and told me that her nightmares about her father still bother her 30 years after his death. It doesn't surprise me since my father has been as good as dead to me for a couple of years which is a huge improvement but the nightmares didn't stop. Death doesn't fix the issues you have with someone in life. All it does is make it impossible to gain closure. Then again, another friend advised me of the cold hard truth a long time ago: I will never gain my parents' approval. It wasn't cruelty in its proper context. My suicidal ideation was based on frustration about being about to win their love and approval. Taking away the impossible goal helped me be more realistic about my own expectations.

Life is not all bad even on my hellishly painful days. On my very good days, I can spend a number of hours here at my desk being productive. These days are rare but one can help me get more out of the reasonably good and average days. We're talking a couple of hours at my computer where I might salvage one productive hour of work by combining all I wrote. There are two generally unproductive modes for me to be in and they both involve me being downstairs. If I have some energy, I can use the Playstation which requires me to sit upright to do well. Finally, I can use the tablet well into a state of collapse. My tablet might be the best gift from Melissa since she married me.

Recently, I've installed some new games on the tablet. One is "Cooking Fever" which Melissa enjoys as well and the other is "Star Wars: Uprising." Uprising is unbelievably good so it's a shame that it doesn't run on the old (Melissa's) tablet and she's filled her phone with games. Even on the worst of days, I can divert myself without adding to the wear and tear which is a good thing. Keeping with the "logic" of life back when I was living with my parents, anything I enjoy has to be taken away or, at least, threatened. After all, there is an inverse relationship between the amount of frustration in my life and my grades. (Near flashblack there. I wouldn't be able to write during a true flashback but I want anyone going through similar things to understand. Damage done early on is the worst and most difficult to fix.)

Anyway, I've been having trouble keeping my tablet charged. Sometimes, one of the connections comes loose usually out of my sight. Other times, it just doesn't seem to be taking in much of a charge. I know the battery is the whole point and I'm supposed to hate wires but I'd very much like a cord that plugs directly into a wall that carries more charge than my favorite games use second to second.

This post started when I couldn't keep enough charge in the tablet to check my email and learned that the charger was unplugged at the wall. It was a simple fix but I wanted to do my evening writing. One thing led to another and I found myself ready to detonate in pain and frustration. I never did manage to shed a tear just like I've never been able to mourn the years that have passed since I was 25. On the other hand, I'm guaranteed major pain today/tomorrow because I haven't been sleeping right. I predict screaming, hollering, yelling at a cat who scratched up a Pearl Jam CD in an attempt to be fed ever earlier. I wonder if Maddie sabotaged my tablet.

Open Warfare in My Head

In a bold move unanticipated by everyone involved, my Fall symptoms exploded a bomb in the back of my head covering the entire surgical area. That area is defined by the surgical scar that starts down between the very top of my shoulder blades and continues all the way up to the top of my head where a local doctor found a staple while treating me for some completely unrelated thing. It was removed two years late but everyone is confident that it had nothing to do with my surgery's unsuccessful outcome. Simultaneously, my shattered teeth secreted some sort of acid that made my whole mouth hurt. Finally, another bomb exploded in my jaw connecting the pain in the front of my head to the pain in the back and in the neck.

All I could do was cover the entire inside of my mouth with one of those Orajel style products, take my medicines on time and recline with a cold pack wrapped around as much of my face as it could cover. The key was to remain calm and hold on because one of the medicines was going to work or someone was going to bring me home some medicinal reinforcement. (It's formal name is whiskey but I don't drink it for the taste.) I'll explain later why I didn't have any on hand but I knew that I would make it eventually. Time passes including both the good and bad aspects of life.

As I made it to that meditative state that leads to sleep when I'm physically exhausted. We call those days that end in "y." As soon as the pain was on the separate side of my mind from where I was living, the cat signal went off. (I have trouble describing meditation adequately because I learned so much of it from reading science fiction and fantasy novels.) Maddie insisted that 2 PM was actually 5 PM and so her dinner was about to be late. Normally, I meditate to the sound of my own breathing but a yowling cat makes regular breathing difficult so I played a favorite Pearl Jam CD. It's the bootleg from the night Melissa and I attended. (It's a legal bootleg produced and sold by the band in case you're wondering. I'm not hypocritical about intellectual property rights.)

Madeline (the evil bitch cat from hell or my sweet baby girl depending on the circumstances) jumped up on my CD player and popped out the CD while it was playing. She scratched it up pretty good in the process but I'm hoping to work these scratches out like the ones resulting from being stored badly for months at a time. Unfortunately, Maddie decided that she didn't want me to relax and feel better. She wanted to be fed and didn't care who had to crawl across the broken glass and glowing charcoal floor to do it. (It's my blog. I'll exaggerate when I want to.) She did take several more flying leaps at me and I am touch sensitive all over my body during winter symptoms. Eventually, I hid myself behind a closed door in the office and tried to work while my neighbor the car detailer sent metal spikes through my head. He was cleaning a van and his customer was shouting a conversation over that noise.

Chilly Weekend and Rough Passage are coming along pretty well. I tend to write late at night when the office is most useable to me. One thing slowing the work down is having to listen to my body. Every so often, I can keep one of my symptoms from dialing itself up to 11 by giving my body what it needs. Usually, that's rest or sleep that I need but I'm troubled by nightmares that don't sound so scary to me while fully awake. If I hear an angry or just loud male voice, I dream that my father is in my home. He's decided to keep his distance the way I keep mine for both of our sakes unless I've missed my guess but dreaming his voice leaves me awake and shaking for hours That's the other thing the whiskey does well. If I'm shaking from my PTSD, it helps me stop.

As a day sleeper, this leads to some funny looking journal mentions of having a drink at 7 AM but I assure you that I've been awake anywhere from 12 to 30 hours at that point. It's always five o'clock in that burning war zone I call a nervous system. I had a full morning of work planned but I'm just going to have to try some rest.

Running Out of Things

As long as the weather is right and I don't run out of things, my symptoms are sorta under control. I can only write that with a straight face because of the pain. Yesterday, I got my hands on a new supply of the drug prescribed for Restless Leg Syndrome. As regular readers know, I have Restless Arm Syndrome instead but my innovative pain management specialist decided that I was right about my symptoms just being a weird variation on RLS. Therefore, he prescribed the RLS medication for me as well as the fibromyalgia medicine since I realized some of my symptoms were dead on for that lovely problem. So long as I take the two together along with my arthritis medication, the anti-depressant prescribed for pain control and my two kinds of narcotics, my symptoms are under control. That means I only have a couple hours of severe pain each day.

I have one day's worth of all my medicines together in order to try getting things under control. The key to not freaking out is to remember that it takes a few days for all of my medicines to get their acts together and to make me feel a little better. Some improvement is better than no improvement. Right? Therefore, I am trying to ignore the fact that my arms feel like I just flew in from Europe or Northwest Canada. We've had some wet weather along with a sudden shortage (only a few days ago) of purely medicinal whiskey that numbs the tooth pain so I'm on fire. Admittedly, I've felt worse but that doesn't count for much when you've had brain and spine surgery.

It turns out that September is Chiari Awareness Month though I'm not sure how many outside the community are aware of this. It won't truly count for me until I get to present what I know on the subject and do so professionally. I find it difficult to write about certain things like incontinence even when I'm frustrated. Depends are one of those things that I came very close to running out of this past week. The only reason that I didn't was that I put myself through conservation measures that may have caused me more or less permanent injury. I suppose some outpatient surgery and other humiliation could bring me back to some sort of base level of illness where the skin deterioration would stop for a while.

Maybe it's easier to write about these things when I'm frustrated. Frustration is easier to handle than despair which is where I've been off and on for a while now. This is when I need to remember my lessons from Stephen R. Donaldson. I can't remember the exact quote but there's one about not giving up because wonders may redeem you. There have been times when I have fought on through impossible circumstances and found some sort of unexpected rescue at the end of the tunnel. Of course, I have to remind you that these were impossible looking circumstances for people like me and not anything that would call for Army Rangers or Delta Force. I do what I can while trying to avoid comparing my best to what a healthy person brought up to trust himself might be able to do. After all, it's not my fault if I fail to exceed myself.

A Little Bit Courageous

The title of this post is taken from the REO Speedwagon song, "Keep Pushin' On." It's a song about overcoming heartbreak which does not apply to my current life but I believe that most of it is universal. Despite the vertigo calling to me from the chasm of my doubts, I want to set an example and declare that, "Sometimes, I think I was a little bit courageous." Why? Because I thought about the breaks I took from this project and that project that piled up until I could have left each one for dead. Instead, I move ahead and think no further than this next step embodied in this post.

This is one of those moments, accounting for the nature and scale of my fears, where the building is burning down and I need to face smoke and flame to save it. It may come to pass that I may have to abandon it to save the people who are more important. That's just a metaphor and an exaggeration but it helps in its own way. Compared to the scale of my fears, the matter is colossal. Compared to the most important things in life, the matter (as if it were just one) is trivial. Paying a few fines would be unpleasant but it's something that can be done. Dealing with the extra agony from money that can't be spent on coping will be far worse.

I need to be a little bit more courageous and deal with events before they overwhelm me. Right now, I'm looking at the immediate problems of not having any money until the middle of next week in case something comes up. If I do run out of something crucial, there are people to call upon. The specific problems are: an aggressive automated collections program got me to agree to pay a certain amount of money exactly one day before we will have it. It caught me sleepy and cooperative as if I were on something illegal that I've never tried. The closest I've come involved the first few days on a new pain medication prescribed partially because pain was depriving me of sleep. The result was two or three days of bliss like a faint echo of twilight sedation. Since I took the medicine as prescribed, I came out of it after a few pleasant days with a reduction in pain. In any case, I made arrangements to make that payment and I'm sure that a human would be understanding of the one day.

My electric bill (including all forms of power except people power) is the other concern. I seem to have writhed in agony through an entire month but then my system prevented that bill from falling through the cracks. I paid that month's bill in full as if I had found an old copy of the bill and paid that. Therefore, I would be current on the next due date if not for my screwup from some home repair related disaster. They deferred and divided a balance for me concerning that but my August mistake invalidated the agreement. I'm not up to dealing with a big negotiation but I've taken action to get them enough money to be bargaining from a position of less weakness.

I haven't managed my way though the property tax debacle yet but that's next on the list. Most recently, I emerged from two full days of enforced "rest" to surface and write this. The first day was pure agony. Every time I woke, I was in such horrible pain that I sought escape in sleep or getting as close as I could through meditation. I couldn't eat anything because freaking Jello hurt my teeth. Then I spent yesterday more or less asleep but without the greatest of extremes in pain so also without the greatest extremes of pain control. When I emerged from that state, it was somewhere between four and five AM and I was filled with writing ideas. I believe old "Blahthings" might return in a slightly different form and under a different name.

The urge to write about public policy has returned but not so much about politics. There's a line from "The West Wing" that comes close to summing me up. "[He] doesn't like running for office because it takes too much time away from doing the job." I had to do the brackets around he because the character Josh was talking about the character named CJ who was a woman. I had to wrangle the language a bit to put it into place. I'd rather write about how I'd prefer to see the nation work than why I'm going to vote for the Democratic candidate as you all know that I will.

Of course, Melissa is a lot more courageous than I will ever be. I can't tell you about her journey (even the parts that I know) except to say that it starts with a form of anxiety disorder and continues through her working with the public every day now. Somehow, both of us (quoting Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon singing) will "Keep Pushin' On."