What Brought You Here?

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Winter Cometh

Severe wind conditions today. 50mph is really fast for air to travel. Especially when it doesn't have a ton of water or dust to create drag. I was very much afraid it would rip my car door off or slam the trunk shut and decapitate me while I was half in it. I was trying to prioritize my groceries in order of freezer durability with only one free hand at a time, switching off the clown mitten as quickly as possible after the glove-only hand reached a "flash-freeze" state and quit functioning entirely. Fortunately today's haul included a sizeable proportion of dry goods safe to leave in the tundra while I focused my immediate attention on dairy, bottles of condiments, and approximately 10,000 cans. It would, however, have been mighty inefficient to succeed at the sorting-juggling game had I inadvertently failed to prioritize my head and left it for later retrieval with the baking mixes and crate of boxed stuffing.

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

In Which I further deteriorate

Another month, another brush with acute renal failure. Another 3 days on a potassium IV. Another course of tendon-eating levaquin- with a twist. This time the course is 2 whole weeks.

I suppose I'd better try to see it out this time, no matter how bad the bruising and neuropathy. I don't relish handling my medication schedule with an egg-timer for 8 more days, but I could go happily about the rest of my life without ever seeing that color in a catheter again.

Of course, this does mean I'm going to be sporting medical adhesive for another week. The pressure required to scrub that shit off leaves some unsightely marks.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Wow, am I ugly.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009



Lookit what I made.

Really getting a lot of use out of that new sewing machine. (Just kidding- I'm sure I will use it religiously, once I figure it out. And only at my mother's house- too much noise for this place.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Le Krappste

God, I feel truly and completely decrepit. I've got a Ragin' Cajun UTI which, as the night has crept in, seems to be slithering its way up to take up full squatters' rights in my bladder and kidneys. I've felt nauseous all day, which somehow has failed to be relieved by any amount or matter of food I stuffed down my gullet (and kept!). And to top it all off I've got a lovely lingering headache which reemerges from the analgesic fog of APAP and/or ibuprophen every few hours.

It's really quite lovely.

I also have my longstanding tinea versicolor now possibly enhanced by a vaginal yeast infection.

And I'm supposed to be up and out of here to visit my little brother for the first time in a couple of months in just 4 hours? I really miss him. Maybe I can get authorization from my mother to go and take him out myself one weekend, instead.

Oh, yeah- I turned another year older yesterday, and I am really starting to show it.

Monday, October 26, 2009

Assemble-at-home? Not so much.

Sorry, I had to delete that picture which displayed my flabby boniness in all its splendor Like, gag me with a spoon.

I had this build-it-yourself beverage cart in a box that I left idle for a good three years. I bought it while I was still staying at my mother's house; it went with a cute little bedside table that apparently- being comprised essentially of six sides- was simple enough for me to assemble by myself. I bought a matching trinket case/ bookcase that I left in the skilled-at-reading-Chinglish-hands of my father & the handy-dude at my miniscule Chicago apartment, and it, too, stands perpendicular to the floor. But the beverage cart- cobbled together by me alone- never did hold a right angle for very long.

I'm sure that my inability to comprehend the sketches and crude written instructions except by doing ( as a result of which the top table frame was never actually fixed to the legs, after I attached the brackets to the bottom of it, rather than the top) conributed to the rickety quality of the cart, The fact that the two glass surfaces that served as a center-of-balance of sorts were detached for my move and I found replacing the second one to be too much of a task until a few weeks ago made it even less stable. The really fun part is that last night, I jostled the cart with the balance ball I was sitting on, and the glass shelf I had recently placed fell and smashed the dulcimer that was laying on the wooden shelf beneath it, making a spectacular amount of noise.

I haven't played the dulcimer (bought at a white elephant option for 3$ 12 years ago) in nearly as long. And while the cart was convenient for collecting random junk, it truly did not fit anywhere, and it made a great deal of noise as it fell apart over the past 11 months.

So this morning I finally dragged the POS out to the dumpster. And I put a "free" note on the dulcimer and left it inside the front doorway, being as I'm certain that it's an amp I keep occassionally hearing, and I image an active musician would appreciate it more than I.

I held on to the two plates of glass, for some reason though.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

The Pedant Still Lives

Despite what my browser and /or the Blogger "New Post" template would like to believe, I did not misspell "filet" in the previous post.

More adventures from the Mcfabulous state hospital

Amy was beautiful and always gave away her arrival with the forcefield of urine-stench that warded off predators for a good solid 6-8-foot radius. Those rank molecules were not contained solely by the black duster she wore day in and day out, nor in the white blouse that she never changed- not even in the elegant long black pin-around skirt that fortnightly alternated with the denim miniskirt, for the odor continued to penetrate the miserable air even in the showers.

Of two things I was certain: one- that Amy had been seriously overmedicated at some point, leaving her shapely legs unable to adapt a normal standing pose, and two- that there was more to Amy than met the eye.

Carrying a perma-stench was a grevous sin, unlike- for instance- shitting your pants. Sure, one might stew for half and hour or so during shift change, but shit was an inherently temporary state. With shit, eventually, depending on your perceived level of competence, someone would either come along and clean you up or berate you until you cleaned up after yourself. With urine, eventually, stuff dried.

By affirming my vegetarian diet somewhere in the shuffle of intake paperwork, I’d foolishly assumed that I had kosher in the bag. So comfortable and homey was the system that I didn’t even know from which end to begin my rant when the day came that my tray came out with a sticker on the side reading “BEGONIAS- VEGETARIAN” and bearing a steaming fried catfish filet.

Such are the times that testify to the utility of the trays being served by through a slit in a steel door, visual contact between patients and food first being made through Plexiglas and (if the tech is so kind) drawn blinds), requests for condiments being heard (or not) through a hole drilled through. Presumably, there was some rhyme or reason behind the restrictions placed on the number and variety of condiment packets issued each patient: the mind reels at the possibilities: Secret hallucinogenic properties of a sugar rush acquired from the consumption of greater than four packets of sugar in a single sitting? A magical midnight feast drawn together of mixed jelly, mustard, aspartame, and pepper? Generally the reasons behind condiment rationing weren’t so exciting: most often, they were simply out of stock. Occasionally, the serving tech would deem the requested condiments inappropriate for meal congruence and deny them on a whim.

Sometimes, they would decline to serve an entire meal to a patient whose behavior was, in their opinion, not suited to the kitchen on a unit of a high-security state mental hospital.

Friday, October 16, 2009

A *real* Bipolar Life

. . .not descriptive my moods nearly as distinctively as my life. It takes a year or two for my depressive episodes to successfully mentally castrate me.

For instance, I became pretty gung-ho about suicide at the ripe old age of 9. Or maybe I was 8? What I know for sure is that I was in the fourth grade. So commenced my long, boring, often worthless/ detrimental life in therapy. However, it wasn't until the 6th grade that I opted to trade off leisure time and my brain-mouth filter for passing grades and freedom from the tyrannies of detention.

5 years after that I quit high school and, over the 7 years to follow, spent my time essentially being a winner at life. I travelled around the US and to the opposite end of the Earth. I followed the Grateful Dead (the *real* Dead) I travelled the Russian countryside "riding the dog" (Russian colloquialism for taking the train without buying a ticket.) I dyed my hair blue, red, pink, and purple and taught college classes without considering removing my nosering. I won over 20,000 dollars in grants, largely for the express purpose of going to study in countries known for hard drinking. I met a fabulous girl and married her.

Unfortunately, in my 2nd year of grad school I was socked in the belly by the most ruthless depression I had, till then, experienced. My concentration was so poor that, not only could not read for awhile, but I couldn''t even sustain attention long enough to make it through a sitcom anymore. I also lost a huge chunk of my appetite; I probably averaged a couple hundred calories a day for about 3 weeks. Oddly enough, I didn't notice that I was getting malnourished until one night in bed I discovered my cervical vertabrae. At the time, I also noted how much money I hadn't spent on groceries.

Of course, cash flow from starving myself ended very shortly. I relapsed with my bulimia in all its former glory. I was genuinely aurprised and secretly proud when I was diagnosed with Anorexia a few months later. I mean, I knew that I could puke my way thin, but this was the first I'd heard my 100,000-calories-per-day habit included in the criteria for AN.

While its true that earned my M.A. that year, and, two years later, was awarded my second FLAS fellowship to spend a year drinking in Poland, I never recovered totally mentally/physically and certainly not intellectually. My flame had burned out, and I slogged my way through the fifth year. Unfortunately, 5th year is when your committee and your advisor seem to expect brilliant ideas to actually be developed and ardent copyediting of every last draft. The ten=day long exam sounds like it would suck, as well. I started getting occasional Cs, whereas in my first term I'd actually cried about A minuses. I always felt like a mental midget in graduate school after maintaining a 4.0 GPA (in my field only) through my BA. While my specialty isn't large enough to be considered a big pond, I did feel that I'd gone from big fish/small pond to small fish/small pond.

It's pretty much been upstream in cold waters since then. I've gradually lost interest/ability in everything that once made me at least minimally sociable and lucky enough to have varying regular opportunities to appreciate singlehood (from taking exstacy to going dancing at the S&M club, to taking random jobs- some under the counter- and leaving them on a whim and dying my hair to clash with my mostly Goodwill couture). My friends were family to me and our fundamental duty to one another was to let the good times roll. Having to quit graduate school did a number on my self-esteem & my work ethic. When I thought nothing could be any worse, 2004 really was spectacularly bad, especially exogenously. (Nearly had my foot amputated, the last year of my 20s, an awful president was elected for the first time to a second term, my wife left me.) 2005 sucked me dry and spit me into the wind as I dealt with the end of my marriage by honestly applying myself to suicide. I just went round-and-round the drain of my own misery, pulling anyone who tried to care about me in to drown, too. To top it off, my eating disorder- which is now old enough to drink, BTW- has managed to mature into its most feral and extreme depths in the past 4 years.

I would really like to grow out of this stage, but I honestly believe that 34 may be too late for me to accomplish a life worth writing about, not to mention worth reading about.

(If you actually managed to read this thing, kudos! Leave a comment so I can single you out on tEEf)

Thursday, September 24, 2009

But it won't get you ativan. . .

I told my psychiatrist the truth and he didn't fire me.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The Moss is Always Greener on the Other Side of the Stump

Tomorrow I have an appointment with the shrink who's covering my new shrink at the formerly-off-limits OP Psychiatry Department of the "better" medical center in town. I like this guy- he treated me when I was on the psych ward (local) last week. He confirmed/ reaffirmed my diagnosis as M.D.D., discontinued my "mood stabilizers", and started me on an ass-kicking new anti-depressant. It seems to be working- almost too well. I was bordering on hypomanic this weekend. But I think I just need to adapt to it. Generally my initial response to anti-Ds (that go on to actually be effective) is a couple weeks of definitive activation syndrome.

I seriously need some Ativan. I promised myself that I would do my best to adhere to Doctors' Orders with this new opportunity. The doctors and other staff of this medical center actually have some experience with Eating Disorders, which has apparently eluded the shrinks at the county mental health center despite their many years of practice and (presumably) hundreds- no, make that thousands, of patients treated.

Dr. Covering New Guy offered to get me in to see a therapist who does EDs. I conceded. Most of my experience in therapy has been regressive and clumsy at best, downright traumatizing at the other end of the spectrum. Perhaps every 12th one was moderately helpful. It's hard to treat an eating disorder on the back of the Federal Poverty and Disability Insurance. It's simply not covered. So I definitely owe myself a trial with an actual referred therapist. It probably won't kill me.

It might even make me stronger. My side of the tree stump still looks greener, despite what I expected before going around it.

Monday, September 21, 2009

Bueller? Bueller?

Is there anybody out there?

I care terribly what you think of me, or even that you think of me at all.

Please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please please leave a comment. Any comment at all, including the silly and unrelated. Just stroke my ego.

Examples: It's raining frogs and grape jelly in the UP today.

or

Yo! I'm here!

Istanbul was Constantinople

In addition to colostomy bag guy, there were other fascinating characters populating the tragicomedy of my latest admit to that fine public institution, the state hospital. Take, for instance, the Turk. He spoke perfectly decent English, suitable for embellishing on his illustrious- and presumably largely imaginary- academic career. He claimed a portfolio spread of PhDs in the hard sciences and in literature, decorated by any number of Nobel prizes. Yet he also claimed to have been born in 1996, which was clearly a delusion. He was easily three times the age he claimed. He would hold forth with extended manifestos of silliness in his native language, but he was entirely harmless and generally friendly.

Unfortunately he stuck out like a sore thumb on this secure ward of a midwestern and somewhat ignorant state hospital and caught a disproportionate amount of grief merely for expressing himself in his native tongue- from both the more agitated and aggressive patients and- a great deal less acceptably- from much of the staff. He was repeatedly singled out as being "loud" and sent to his room several times a day for not speaking English.

I actually enjoyed him, in measured doses. He was neither hostile nor agressively sexual toward me/ the limited female population. He clearly had a good head on his shoulders underneath all the detritus. And he taught me a Turkish word- "dura"- which means "hold on/ wait a minute."

He also served endless entertainment unbeknowest to him thanks to his unbelievably high-waisted jeans.

Monday, September 14, 2009

I am the ultimate asshole

Nothing poetic about it- I am scum of the earth and, ultimately, show loyalty and love only to my twisted compulsions.

I had some hope today- an appointment with a shrink experienced in eating disorders. I promised myself and all who would listen that I was going to do my damnedest to let him lead me and give all doctor's orders a silent but fair trial. Because clearly, I fail utterly and completely at taking charge of my own life. I was prepared to try medications that turn me into a fat-swarthed, drooling, twitching captive. I was expecting to be ordered back into therapy. I psyched myself out to be brainwashed by the 12 steps. I was expecting to be admitted to rehab or an EDU. I was hoping that he would perform some kind of magic to get me charity aid, as centers that actually treat both EDs and other addictions concurrently as few and far between, and none are covered by my state Medicaid.

Unfortunately, nobody bothered to note down that I was given an appointment today- instead they some assigned me the 30th of October. "If I make it that long," I wanted to mutter under my breath, but the reality is far too graphic and dire to diminish with a pathological passive-aggresive reply. I feel like another chunk of me dies every day and I am sick and tired and I will probably have to abruptly stop taking the anti-convulant prescribed to me because I don't have enough refills to last another month-and-a-half.

I just wish I had some goddamn ativan. And some sort of effective sleeping aid. If I could sleep until the date of that appointment, it would at least slow down the deterioration of all of me.

I wish I was a decent human being.

Sunday, September 13, 2009

In which I manage to stay out of the hospital for an entire month. . .

. . .Only to reemerge with a double-booking- admitted to the local psych floor not 2 weeks before being reunited with my much-maligned regional state hospital for the third time this summer.

I like to blame the latter on the former- I was discharged from the local ward on the second day of a total and abrupt restructuring of my crazy meds, scarcely enough time to pony up a life-threatening allergic reaction, let alone get all one's neurotransmitter receptors aligned and firing routinely on the same side. This was my first total med dump and fresh start in as long as I can remember. While I routinely discontinued my meds gradually in the days following a discharge, this d/c of my anti-depressant and anti-psychotic drugs had the unique characteristic of being thoroughly sanctioned by my prescribing physician. And please do note: I continued to take my shiny new rxes essentially as written through discharge and well back into my routine welcome-home flurry of self-destruction. I managed to spin myself into psychosis and the complementary OD on leftover anti-psychotic meds just fine on the trim new combo of oxcarbazepine and buspirone. Though I must confess that my latest delusional break was not the sharp departure from reality that customarily won me a free visit to the emergency department, and my accompanying OD was relatively trifling (a very large daily dose, really not even an overdose- though sufficient to cause partial seizures throughout my night on a heart monitor). Especially in light of the fact that I induced vomiting shortly after I began to feel the effects and called for my ride to the peanut farm not long thereafter.

I used the above as leverage for a swift and low-bullshit discharge from what turned out to be (at the time) a *remarkably* crazy bad unit of the state shithole. One night a patient decided to express his opinion regarding the shit on the unit by brandishing his colostomy bag and whipping it around the dining area and across the front desk counter. When staff denied him a replacement bag, he continued expressing himself directly onto the floor, leaving a trail as he traversed the hallways and two public TV rooms. The techs helpfully set up yellow >CAUTION! WET FLOOR!< signs around the major deposits and proceeded to ignore the human feces punctuating every major thoroughfare of the hall for a couple of hours, ostensibly in the hope that the patient have the shame? embarrassment? dignity? pity? to pick up his own shit after experiencing zero discomfort spreading it around to begin with. Such flights of fancy on staff's behalf only cost an evening's worth of major health code violation- not long enough for it to have any repercussions. And honestly, most of us sympathized with guy enough to tolerate the shitty protest for a couple of hours.
He possessed the intestinal fortitude to literalize what all of us coherent patients had mistaken for a only figurative retaliation against the unfairness of being confined to Monroe Hall. The colostomy patient shat for all of us that night.

It was particularly oppressive being female at a time when the patient population, for whatever reason, was 75% male.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

'Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.'

O'Brien, 1984

In the nutshell

So the state hospital was an objectively awful experience. There really was no point at which I abandoned myself to a reappropriation of my careless youth, there were no moments when laughter or love took over and successfully obscured the institutional walls in the background. There was no "learning to live again" that was not sublimated by the noxious smell of stale piss, and even the stench did not curb hunger left by the state's subsistence meal trays. It was impossible to forget that I had found myself locked up behind two steel doors amidst an army of wailing, cackling, incontinent/violent social throwaways and that- apparently- I belonged there.

I think that was the worst part. Not endless unsatisfying starchy dinners or being denied medical care, nor the knowledge that this was an alternative to prison for some and homelessness for most others, not even the fear of being held there month after month, year after year, forgotten and with no chance for appeal. . . No, the most horrific thing about living in this nightmare was the constant consciousness of the fact that it was real and I wasn't going to wake up.

I fucked up big time and had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that I needed my freedom taken from me lest I use it to hurt myself. There was nobody there to help me confront this stunning fact. So I, like all the other patients not fully occupied by their delusions, pressed through the days seeking to drown in sleep whenever we could grab 20 uninterrupted minutes. The line for night meds was always the longest and most quickly formed. Nevermind the sunset, all that mattered was obtaining 8 or 9 hours of oblivion and putting another day in "treatment" behind us.

My much anticipated return

Well, I finally excavated the password reset on this blog, after many months of bitching and moaning about being locked out 4-ever. The anticipation was much like foreplay and I, in my classic style, turn out to be frigid once the "main event" culminates.

Hopefully I'll manage to post a successful entry or two (or 3000) before I inevitably re-fuck myself back into the state insane asylum. Here's to dreaming!

Friday, May 8, 2009

It aint easy being clean

I have to get better. I can't stand living this way. If there still exists beauty in ordinary life, I'm blind to it. My mother offered to take me home with her when she picked me up from the hospital and all I could think of was must-get-to-binge-food. And I was so very dissappointed to arrive and find my regulation food stash niches empty.

Later, I found them in a little-used cupboard , but by then it was too little, too late. Baking gardenburgers (poo-burgers) now and perhaps that will make up for the ant manifestation that appears to have taken over my bedroom? during my furlough in the hospital. They seem particularly taken with my dirty laundry; I can only imagine it's the food-stained sheets that draw them.

I have got to get help. Soon. Help.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Just an ordinary day in the ICU

I don't know why I did it. I wasn't trying to kill myself, although thanks to this little lesson I've learned that I actually have the capacity. (I'd overdosed on various pills so many times before, only to wake up the next morning or, at worst- face a quick trip to the ER for gastric lavage.) I don't intend to kill myself, and I guess it's a bit awe-making ("awesome" doesn't seem to fit the context here) to learn that the very simple, painless (for me, certainly not for my parents) relatively quick method was in my grasp all the time.

But why? Why? Why? Why? It certainly wasn't one of those accidental ods where you party a little too hard and wake up in a bed with gates and wheels, tubes in every conceivable orifice. What I took was not a "fun" drug. I'll say it was prescribed as an anti-psychotic and no more, because I don't want to issue any lessons on How To Put Yourself Into A Coma the Miss Delusional way*as seen on TV.

I can only guess it was me playing a classic borderline personality headtrip on my dad, who was down visiting, took me out shopping (ATTN: I am now the proud owner of a wall clock!) Because I took the pills while he was waiting for me in the car,; I guess I told him I needed to stop off and get something. Once I realized what I'd done, I tried to induce vomitting, but I clearly didn't do a very good job. I walked out of the apartment, and asked him to take me to (name of private local looney bin) for an assessment. Which he did. I can't tell you how it went, though- apparently I lost consciousness shortly thereafter.

So I spent I think 2 nights in ICU before they moved me to the general floor.

I need to apologize to my father. He drives almost 3 hours to see me and at least every other visit involves the hospital.

And I have goddamned oral thrush.

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Something I meant to "publish" in January

Dead Tour:
April 12 Greensboro NC Greensboro Coliseum
April 14 Washington DC Verizon Center
April 15 Charlottesville VA John Paul Jones Arena
April 17 Albany NY Times Union Center
April 18 Worcester MA DCU Center
April 19 Worcester MA DCU Center
April 21 Buffalo NY HSBC Arena
April 22 Wilkes-Barre PA Wachovia Arena @
Casey Plaza
April 24 Uniondale NY Nassau Coliseum
April 25 New York NY Madison Square Garden
April 26 Hartford CT XL Center
April 28 E. Rutherford NJ IZOD Center
April 29 E. Rutherford NJ IZOD Center
May 1 Philadelphia PA Wachovia Spectrum
May 2 Philadelphia PA Wachovia Spectrum
May 5 Chicago IL All State Arena
May 7 Denver CO Pepsi Center
May 9 Los Angeles CA The Forum
May 10 Mountain View CA Shoreline Amphitheater

Phish Tour:
6.04.09 Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh, NY
6.05.09 Nikon at Jones Beach Theater, Wantagh, NY
6.06.09 Comcast Center, Mansfield, MA
6.07.09 Susquehanna Bank Center, Camden, NJ
6.09.09 Asheville Civic Center, Asheville, NC
6.16.09 Fox Theatre, St. Louis, MO
6.18.09 Post Gazette Pavilion, Burgettstown, PA
6.19.09 Verizon Wireless Music Center, Noblesville, IN
6.20.09 Alpine Valley Music Theater, East Troy, WI
6.21.09 Alpine Valley Music Theater, East Troy, WI

Fuck this. I did a really short "Phish tour", from FW or Austin (whichever is wester) to NOLA primarily for company on the drive home to FL in 95. And yeah, I vended. But I didn't go around asking for free tickets, I honestly couldn't (still can't) name a single song of there's. Here is the sum total of my knowledge of the band Phish:Trey Anastasio

So maybe I'll find a renfest to crash for a month orhmmmmmm maybe I could go visit a friend who lives in California but of course I couldn't be so forward as to straight out and say it. So she'll clearly have to learn of my plans through this blog.

July- Kick back in Wyoming with several thousand of my closest pals see how long we can survive both a) living on dried pulses, and b) the comingling of general Eau de 2 week Ripe Hippie with the natural conclusion of massive bean ingestion by thousands of humans.

Magically liquidize all my books and other bulky, pseudo-valuable crap in a single flash of brilliance, so that I don't manage to while away the money that I've saved/earned the previous few months by not paying and selling Handmade Fairtrade 100% Bolivian Sticky Dank Nothing on a Stick.

Renew my passport.
Move back to Moscow and teach Yoga and English.

Maybe I should leave a space for yoga lessons in there somwhere? Maybe I can move in with some nice asexual diggers who will tolerate my lack of money and the red x lit up on my vagina as long as I fed them well. I have found historically (from a youth spent as "her ugly friend")that that ability to hold your cool/liquor/ "non-liquor"/ tears, etc. while at once serving homemade lasagna from a casserole nestled between 15 y. o. hips and DD breads while exclaming that you're "so glad you finally got to make this- you've been on the rag all week and craving it" generally leaves them too dumbfounded to do anything but pass you the bong.

Then again, who knows- maybe I'll want to have sex with a 67 y.o. geezer perpetually adorned in a loincloth on the packed-earth floor of his gedesic home. Such things are prone to happen when I quit my frigidity happy/sleepy/crazy/nervy/spazzy pills.


Good god I've got so much beading and macrame and patchwork to be done.

Thursday, April 16, 2009

That I might sleep

Seroquel. That's put an end to this madness, for the night and perhaps even tomorrow if my vasculature gets lucky. Maybe not as effectively as Zyprexa- I still can't believe how efficiently my neglected "regular" 15mg dose knocked me out when I unwittingly signed myself in to the psych ward last Wednesday. And how immediate and unrelenting the hunger was!

Thank fuck I'm off of that. Seroquel might not hit as hard and, sure, there's those lovely extra=pyramidal symtptoms if I accidentlyonpurpose take more than 400 mg within 24 hours, but if I don't take it every night, and top if off with some hydroxizine and the bioequivalence of 20 mg diazepam, it does the trick.

Eep, I hope.

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Sharps bin made of a peanut butter jar

I hit an artery tonight. I didn't realize it immediately, cause the aassembly of terumos is so loose that a bit of the red flag generally pushes its way in the moment one pops through the vein wall, but .15cc of blood with a (what I realized was not the rhythm of my shaky hands but) pulsing gush (fortunately?) signalled "too good to have hit true" even to my addled brain. ANd my addled brain yanked it out and proceeded to spend the next several minutes ruminating over possible loss of limb while the drugs hemodialyzed. We hate it when they do that.

Too bad there's no 800 number for junkies in crisis. We are hesitant to seek out medical attention, for reasons sampled below. I tried calling all the exhange program hotlines in my state as I am generally reluctant to bother the local guy outside of business hours unless I'm off my gourd. Finally I settled on texting him. Hopefully my foot won't fall off. I'm going to try to meet him on Monday and I'm betting he'd feel bad if I lost a limb all because the exchange ran out of 29 gauge needles (forcing me to perform surgery elsewhere.)

I swore I was going to bed hours ago, swore I would put the sword down and yield the anti-psychotic and go-to-sleep. But something (tender, beckoning veins that dissappear under attack? the SIX fucking pounds I seem to have accrued since I was in the hospital three nights ago? insufficient xanax stores?) (I vote the latter) drew me to the pharmacy like some kind of really jittery bug to one of those electric zappers and the countdown has begun again.

Fortunately, the pharmacy with the cheapo needles nearby is closed tomorrow. (Something about nailing a Jew to a tree and then reciting the necronomicon?) And I absolutely will not drive on 3 days without sleep, so this silliness has a natural-if postponed- pausing point.

Oh, my bus pass?

Friday, April 10, 2009

This is How I am Going to Die

I am a bipolar iv drug addict and a bulimic and I am dying, but not from either of these things. I am dying of ignorance. I am dying of the pervasive, erroneous belief in the healthcare field that symptoms of mental illness are just desserts, an appropriate punishment for our failure to take care of ourselves properly.

Independent of (and prior to) my real downward spiral into lowlife junkie loserhood, I was denied medical referrals for various symptoms, which were brushed off as "probably a side effect of my weight (loss)," despite a clearly documented history of external pathologies to explain various nerve and joint issues.

As a bulimic, I should have regular labwork done to monitor my serum potassium levels. I should always have a current prescription for potassium caplets.

As an IV drug user, I fear phlebotomists. Especially trainees, who populate the lab at the clinic I used to go to. But I wasn't sure how justified I was in my fear and loathing until I wound up in the ER a couple of nights ago, after a hard couple of days with more hits than misses which resulted in me looking even more of a loser than usual.

They wouldn't listen to my advice. They wouldn't let me have any water- dehydration is awful for venipuncture and the color of my urine specimin made it clear that I was dehydrated. They refused to try veins I knew would work and left me with a nice 5 inch long hematoma on the inside of my forearm. 8th time's a charm?

Apparently, my potassium was 2.7. This is actually a record low for me. The psych floor apparently waffled about taking me but I suppose they remembered how charming I was from a few weeks prior. At any rate, I had faith that whoever was sent up from the lab to redraw me the next day would be better. The last time I'd been on this floor, I'd had labs done by a magician.

No such luck, though. It was a repeat of the night before. This woman refused to draw from my hand, saying literally "because we're supposed to draw from here" (she points to the crook of the elbow, the first veins to be blown by every needle jockey.) Then she tied my arm off until it turned purple, dug around with her needle with no luck, paused for a minute to go out for a smoke break, continued to gouge me until she finally hit a minor vein. She proceded to literally suction the blood out of me for a good minute.

Then she finally released the tourniquet.

This is an excellent way to create a falsely elevated serum potassium reading.


So, at any rate- I'm not going in for regular bloodwork. The odds of getting an angels are pretty damn slim. The odds of getting an asshole who thinks the abusing me is going to anything other than send me after something to block out the pain are pretty high.

And the odds of me being admitted to rehab with hypokalemia? Well, now. That's just downright funny.

Saturday, March 7, 2009

What a Dreary Planet

Here's the thing about stimulants: the line between function and frenzy is drawn in the sand far out on the beach and, apparently, it's only a matter of time before the tide comes in. These chemicals have the uncanny characteristic of making everything just a bit more interesting. All objects become shinier, all people younger and better looking. And without them, suddenly- nothing holds the attention. One finds oneself suddenly, inexplicably, back in an ordinary world where everyone has to make their own fun. Worse than that, everybody has to devote large portions of their lives to the Profoundly Unfun and Drab.

Why would you ever consciously choose to live in the ordinary world?

Friday, March 6, 2009

The co-morbidity thread.

Anorexia is "worse" (better?) (superior, but with a darker prognosis) than bulimia. However, binging-purging anorexia has the highest mortality rate of all eating disorders. Er, of "both" eating disorders, neglected as compulsive over-eating is in the realm of research, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that COE is the deadliest of them all.

Bulimics of whatever weight, however, are more likely to present with/ acquire at taste for reality-adjustment. Is this taken into consideration when figuring morbidity/mortality rates of the messy binge/purgers vs. the pure ethereal restrictive anorexics? And what is the prognosis for those displaying symptoms of both eating disorders and substance abuse disorders?

Not too good, duh.

But doesn't one compulsion temper the other? Compulsion requires singular dedication to perfect. If one's attention is divided between spanking the monkey and gorging the gorilla, one can only slither so far down a particular rabbit hole before self-preservation ( of a sort) retrieves the self and sets it back down in the alternate whirlpool of self-destructive cerebral onanism.

Right?

Poll!

Please participate. I don't think I can make leaving feedback any easier than clicking a radio button. (Feel free to complicate it yourself, though, by clearing your cache to vote multiple times.)
. . . Something about how drugs that act on the dopamine receptors physiologically diminish willpower (as in the power to abstain when indulging is easier/more pleasurable)

Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Junkie Jews for Jesus

I've discovered an even stupider game than Race the Train. It's called something like Slamming Leftovers and has nothing to do with closing shift at the diner. I've done cottons a million times- that's something of a fact of life, of this life. It's low, but acceptable because everyone knows what it's like to be low with a lift in sight. Cottons are always in sight. But emptying out that big red box and checking to make sure you've squeezed every last drop of evil out of each barrel, collecting a murky orangey-brown pot of fools gold from the last 3 units of 6 or 8 pins, and tying off like it's just another taste--- that's just plain disgusting. It's one thing to bang a drop or so of fresh blood on your second or third try after missing. It's altogether another level of Purgatory (pardon the pun, if you catch it) to recook and inject a day and a half's worth of one's own elixir of life.

And on the title topic, I'm giving up for Lent. That's right. Just plain giving up. (I figure that as a heathen I have nowhere to be cast out of should I slip and catch hold of a ray of hope.)

Thursday, January 8, 2009

News of the Stoopit

My lord, did I really play race the train tonight?

I wonder it it had anything to do with 54 hours without sleep. (The first 24 all natural.)