Exactly two weeks ago yesterday—Monday, August 23rd to be exact—I woke up (or perhaps I should say came to) at 6:30 in the morning to discover my room was filled with strangers, my bed was soaked, and my tongue hurt like hell.
The strangers were paramedics, my bed was soaked because I had pissed in it, and my tongue hurt like hell because I had chewed it all to fuck.
In short, I had my first seizure in 8 goddamn years.
It took one month and two days off the Tegretol for me to have a fucking seizure, drop me into a pit of depression and near insanity, and make me wish I could snap the doctor’s neck like a toothpick.
And all of it was for nothing.
I’ll admit, I had wanted off the fucking meds…before I knew what it would do to me mentally. All those little side effects I had wished would go away—the difficulty in concentrating, the ability (occasionally even the tendency) to fall asleep suddenly and unexpectedly, the fact that Tegretol (also called carbamazepine—it’s also used for treating bi-polar disorder, which I suppose is why I took such a steep downward plunge after they took me off it even though I suffer from depression and NOT bi-polar disorder) supposedly somehow makes you even more prone to sunburn even though I already burn like a marshmallow on a fat kid’s stick over a campfire after about 30 seconds in the sun—I would gladly suffer for the rest of my life if I could just go back in time 3 months or so. And of course, the cruel fact of the matter is that I WILL suffer those things for the rest of my life, whether I get to use them as a bargaining chip with fate or not. I’m on the shit for the rest of my life; there’s nothing I can do about that.
But I had expected to be on the shit for the rest of my life anyway before Dr. fucking Ho Chi Minh had dangled hope in front of my face a couple of years back, telling me if I simply had a clean EEG that I would probably be able to get off the shit. I had never bought into that idea with the same certainty and enthusiasm that he had shown. None of it really added up to me. But he had seemed so certain, so sure of himself…and it’s not like I really had any say in the matter. If a doctor wants to take you off of something, hey…all he’s gotta do is stop writing the fucking prescriptions. It’s not like I’m in any kind of financial shape to seek a second opinion. The neurologist that I used to see, some now-retired nutcase I never particularly warmed to named Chahil (my uncle saw him once or twice about his Parkinson’s—he didn’t like him either) agreed that it was possible, and so did another neurologist (supposedly) that Dr. Ho Chi Minh (all right, his real name is Nguyen—like that’s any better) consulted before taking me off of it, so I suppose I can’t lay ALL the blame on him. But this fucking clown was so sure of himself that he didn’t even suggest that I stop driving for a few months, even though I fucking ASKED him about that, while I came off the drugs—it was sheer luck, for lack of a better word, that I was home and not behind the wheel when I had the seizure. And, of course, now I CAN’T drive for several months—even though I haven’t heard a thing from the fucking DMV yet, the hospital told me that they would be reporting it. If I want to leave this house, I can either (A) walk—as though there was anything within walking distance in this shitty little town of 10,000, or (B) take a bus—anybody that knows me knows THAT will never happen, or (C) beg a ride off of my mom.
So NOW what? I saw some other doctor the Saturday before I had the seizure (he apparently only works Saturdays, which is why I’d never seen him before, but I prefer HIM to Nguyen already) that put me on 40 mg of Prozac, 1 mg of Xanax, and 50 mg of Trazodone to help with the depression and to help me sleep, but I can’t stay on all that shit. Xanax and Prozac I take in the morning, but supposedly one (the Xanax) can reduce the effectiveness of Tegretol while the other can raise the levels of Tegretol in your blood to dangerous levels. And the other shit, the Trazodone (which was to help me sleep, as well as being an antidepressant), could make me just “forget” to breathe during the night, to use the doctor’s words—remember, I wasn’t taking the Tegretol when he originally prescribed all that shit, but now that I’m taking it again too he says I can’t continue taking all that shit, it’s too many drugs working on the brain all at once. So I quit taking the Xanax (haven’t had one since Saturday) and didn’t take a Trazodone Sunday night, although I broke down and took one last night because I didn’t sleep worth a shit the night before (he said I could take one if I absolutely felt it was necessary, but that I should try to get off of them and the Xanax) and went for some blood work this morning to test the Tegretol level in my blood, to see what the Prozac was doing to it. I may have to stop taking it, too. And considering the Tegretol worked fine by itself for eight years, that may not be such a bad thing. And there are other anti-depressants that they can try.
But considering what happened the last fucking time they tried taking me off of something, you can’t blame me for being a bit nervous of what may happen if they try taking me off of something else. Even now there are times when the depression comes back pretty strong, and times when I feel absolutely like shit both spiritually and physically. I don’t know if I can handle being that depressed for any period of time again.
But I see the therapist-dude one more time this Thursday, and finally see a real doctor next Friday over at the Mental Health department—one that can write prescriptions and (supposedly) knows all about this shit. So maybe he’ll know what he’s doing.
Fingers crossed.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Sunday, August 1, 2010
The Joys of Tegretol Withdrawal
This is NOT my typical style of blog—which is to say, it’s NOT really written to “entertain.” In fact, I’m not entirely certain why I’m even writing it, but one possibility stands out: that maybe I should just share a little recently gained insight. Maybe it will help other people understand a subject that most people probably don’t—depression.
I was diagnosed with depression years ago. This came as a surprise to no one—it seems to run in my old man’s side of the family. HE certainly had it, anyway—he even underwent electroshock therapy in his forties, a time of life that I myself have recently entered into, and at one point he even got rid of all of his guns just in case the depression simply became too strong to fight—and I strongly suspect that many of the other members of his family had it too, such as his little brother (whom I barely knew and he never got along with) who died from a heroin overdose when I was 20 or so. Today (as for many years now obviously) my dad is on Prozac (which he has said to me before, and again a couple of days ago, was maybe the best thing to ever happen to him) and some other drug that I can’t remember right at this minute. I myself was on Prozac for a few years, but of course when I lost my job, and thus my insurance, I lost that too—and I REALLY don’t remember it making much of a difference to my mood anyway, either when I STARTED taking it or when I STOPPED taking it. But of course, I was drinking like a fish—an ALCOHOLIC fucking fish at that—and indulging in various other “party favors” at the time, so maybe that helped to hide the changes.
I took my last Tegretol last Tuesday (the 20th). In the space of two months I went from 800 mg a day, which some (like the doctor in the emergency room) would consider a large dose although I HAVE heard of even larger ones, to zero by dropping one 200 mg tablet a day every two weeks—in other words, I started at one pill in the morning, one pill at noon, and two pills at night but dropped it to one pill at morning, noon and night, down to one at morning and one at night, down to one in the morning until...well, you get the picture. My only concern at the time was that I may have some seizures and have to go back on the shit—however, so far so good on the seizure front. HOWEVER, Tegretol has another benefit to it that was unbeknownst to me—in addition to stopping seizures it is also occasionally used as a mood stabilizer and depression aid. And my CURRENT doctor didn’t know about my depression—it was another doctor in another clinic, back when I had insurance, that made the diagnosis and prescribed the Prozac. I just kind of assumed that he (my current doctor) had all my medical records and was aware of it. So as of that moment, for the first time since I started partying at 15, I was completely free of not only any mood stabilizer-type meds but also of any alcohol or pot or speed or anything else that affects mood or releases endorphins, the chemicals that make people feel pleasure or happiness.
After I had gotten down to taking 1 pill a day for a few days I began to feel pretty lousy: I had no energy nor desire to do anything but lay around, plus my stomach was always hurting, or at least I ASSUMED it was my stomach—it also felt reminiscent of when I would get hepatitis during my drinking days, just a deep, throbbing, unending pain in the center-right side of my abdominal area (which is where the liver, as well as the gall bladder, is located). However, I didn’t really think it was liver-related, since the doctor has run zillions of liver panels on me (to check the Tegretol level and a couple of other things) in the years since I quit drinking and they never showed any problems. Also, I would get hungry and eating would make my stomach feel somewhat better, although I had no appetite—even though I KNEW I was hungry and COULD force myself to eat I had no desire to. Nothing seemed to taste right, including the shit I generally loved to eat or even drink like iced tea and Sierra Mist, and anything I put into my mouth I just wanted to spit right back out. However, like I said I could still make myself eat—when I had the hepatitis I couldn’t really even FORCE myself to eat, other than a few small Ritz crackers here and there throughout the day; I would simply have to wait a few days for my liver to stop throbbing and the swelling to go down before I could really eat normally again. I almost saw the doctor at that point, but I began to feel a little bit better and already had an appointment to see him on this coming Monday (Aug. 2) so I figured maybe I was being a little premature about things.
However, by last Friday or so things had gotten MUCH worse. The pain was not only getting worse again, but I was completely depressed in ways that I had NEVER really known. Some people are better than others at moving on, I suppose—better at realizing that they’ve fucked up in the past, may have thrown away YEARS of their lives or blown chances that may NEVER come again but also at realizing that each new day brings new chances and new opportunities, if you know where to look or who to ask for help and are willing to put in the work because you also have to realize that almost NOTHING GOOD EVER COMES EASY. I myself have never been one of those people, particularly. I have always wondered why I couldn’t have buckled down in school, at least enough to have graduated at 18 rather than 32. I have always wondered why I can’t seem to figure out my “place” in the world, why SOME people at 18 have a laser-like focus on getting a business degree or becoming a doctor or architect or engineer or something as though they KNOW that is what they were born to be while I flounder about just trying to figure out WHAT will make me NOT miserable while providing at least enough of a salary to not have to worry about rent and eating and having a proper and reliable car that doesn’t break down at every other fucking stop sign and all those other things that so many people take for granted. These are thoughts that occur to me almost EVERY DAY at some point—basically, both my past AND my future haunt me. However, I was always able to balance it out somewhat by simply realizing that, no matter HOW bad things may seem to be in my life, there ARE people in this world who have been through far worse and survived, and some of them have even gone on to flourish. There are people who are FAR, FAR bigger idiots and assholes than I am who have pulled it off—maybe I can too. And there are people in this world—family, friends, instructors at COS—who care about me, who never miss the opportunity to tell me how smart I am and that I WILL, one day, figure all this shit out if I keep trying.
Suicide has always held a kind of cold fascination to me. I have known people who’ve killed themselves. I have known others that, while they didn’t directly kill themselves, I do believe they more or less intentionally took the slower way, just like Ozzy’s song “Suicide Solution” says—“Wine is fine but whiskey’s quicker/Suicide is slow with liquor.” I sometimes wonder if it didn’t play a role in my uncle’s OD all those years ago. Mainly I have wondered what made people like Kurt Cobain—a guy with money, a secure legacy as a musical icon/genius, a wife and young daughter and millions of fans—feel so badly that he could blast his skull to dust with a shotgun (assuming it wasn’t murder like the conspiracy theorist-types allege). Or a guy like Owen Wilson—maybe not the best-looking guy but who doesn’t love Owen Wilson? With his money and personality who cares if he’s got a nose that’s slightly fucked up, he could still get any woman he wanted in all likelihood, you feel like he’d be a really great buddy and all-around fun guy to hang out with, he doesn’t have to worry about his future…what makes a guy like that even dream of attempting suicide?
But I don’t know if I can say I’d ever TRULY considered it before. In a detached, feel-sorry-for-yourself kind of way, maybe—I suspect that MOST people have. But considered it to the point where it just scares the living fuck out of you, I’m not so sure. There ARE considerations that have always, to ME at least, made suicide far too radical an act to actually commit…such as God. Assuming he exists, the Christian belief obviously is that God doesn’t accept suicides—that if you “reject his gift of life” you’re denied entry into the “Kingdom of Heaven” and instead spend eternity BBQ’ing your nuts in Hades. And how does one do that to their loved ones? If you cared about them AT ALL how could you possibly put your spouse/children/parents/best friends or whatever through the sheer life-shattering horror of walking into a room to discover brains and blood blown all over the walls and your lifeless corpse lying on the bed or swinging from a curtain rod, or make them have to go down to the morgue to identify the splattered remains you left behind when you leapt out of a tenth-story window? That seems rather selfish, doesn’t it? Does ANYONE deserve that? These thoughts, in my normal state, make suicide absolutely unthinkable to me, no matter HOW badly I may think my life sucks from time to time.
By last weekend, however, none of those things helped. I hated seeing the morning come, assuming I was even lucky enough to have gotten to sleep at all, because it meant I was going to be hounded by those thoughts all day long. I didn’t enjoy listening to music, playing video games, running around town…nothing. Quite basically, I was becoming suicidal myself. The thought was simply omnipresent in the back of my mind, and nothing could chase it away for long. My debts, my inability to figure out just who I am in this life or what I should pursue for a living, the thought that NOBODY can find work these days on top of the thought that nobody would want to take a chance hiring my ass anyway because of the decade-plus gap since my LAST job, and all the other failures of my life to date…all those things were just swarming through my mind constantly. And all those things I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago that I used to think about, to re-assure myself that I was just being a big drama queen who just needed to stop feeling sorry for himself, no longer chased those black thoughts away, at least not for more than a few seconds, before they were back at full force. I simply felt sheer, black-as-night terror and dread all day long. NOTHING scared me more than being alone, I needed to be around people at all times because…well, who knew? The sheer, cold, logical answer to everything seemed more and more like—just get it over with. While I can’t say that I “heard voices” I could understand how SOME people in a similar situation could interpret it that way, because the idea just HOUNDS YOU—“Come on, you KNOW nothing’s ever gonna get any better, do you REALLY want to feel like this anymore? There’s an easy way out, y’know…and it doesn’t even have to HURT.” By Monday night I had simply had it; I asked my mom to drive me to the emergency room to find out if there was anything wrong with my stomach or liver or any of my other internals, and also told them about the depression. I simply felt like I had to try SOMETHING, because without a doubt I felt like I was truly losing it and that if I DIDN’T try something I wasn’t going to make it much longer.
So I spent the next 7 hours sitting in the hospital. They pumped me full of Dilaudid and Ativan, a painkiller and a tranquilizer, while they ran a shitload of tests and called a social worker (something they have to do when someone suicidal comes in). Fortunately, I can say that I’m in perfect physical health aside from the 4 or 5 spare tires I wear around my waist: my liver is completely normal (after 8 alcohol-free fucking years you’d certainly hope so), no gall bladder problems or gall stones, EKG was normal, etc. They (the doctors and the social worker) told me that, in all likelihood, my physical pain was simply linked to the depression and that both were almost 100% due to coming off the Tegretol. They also told me to come into the Department of Mental Health the next morning and get signed up for benefits. At 1:30 Tuesday morning (we got there at 6:30 pm) they finally released me.
So I signed up at 8 am Tuesday morning just like they told me: I see a doctor at 10 am next Thursday. However, I also moved up my other appointment with my regular doctor—I saw him Wednesday morning. He was rather upset that he had never known about my depression, and also apologetic. He instantly wrote a prescription for Prozac, as well as a week’s worth of alprazolam (which everyone knows as Xanax) to help out until the Prozac kicks in. He started me out with a very low dose—20 mg a day (I believe I was taking 50 back when I was originally on it)—but I understand that they ALWAYS start you out that way. I’m happy to say that, physically speaking, I’m basically back to normal, or at least 99%. I’m not ENTIRELY back to my old self yet psychologically speaking—after all, like I said I’ve only been taking a very low dose of Prozac for 4 days now (plus .5 mg of Xanax twice a day, which will run out Tuesday) and those 3 or 4 days before I went into the hospital were incredibly unsettling. However, I will make sure the doctor increases my dosage. The guy I see Thursday will probably (hopefully) do it. And I AM probably 50-75% back to my old self. I think that, as much as anything, I’m rather frightened and a bit haunted by how low I NOW KNOW I can sink without any antidepressants in my system. And it’s VERY unsettling to realize that all it takes is one bean-counter asshole, or maybe even just a paperwork mistake, at some insurance company or government agency to cut me off and put me right back into the hell, the utter despair and hopelessness, that I felt last weekend.
But like I said, for now things are lookin’ up.
And to be clear, I DON’T want anybody to be worried about me or anything else. This is NOT a “sympathy blog.” However, if you know anybody who suffers from depression—be it a family member, a friend, a cashier at the local SaveMart that you’re friendly with or someone else you care about—then be there for those people if you think they’re struggling, because I can assure you—NOBODY deserves to feel that kind of torment.
And now I have to go and think up something light-hearted and filthy and funny to write about, to put everybody’s minds back at ease…see ya!
I was diagnosed with depression years ago. This came as a surprise to no one—it seems to run in my old man’s side of the family. HE certainly had it, anyway—he even underwent electroshock therapy in his forties, a time of life that I myself have recently entered into, and at one point he even got rid of all of his guns just in case the depression simply became too strong to fight—and I strongly suspect that many of the other members of his family had it too, such as his little brother (whom I barely knew and he never got along with) who died from a heroin overdose when I was 20 or so. Today (as for many years now obviously) my dad is on Prozac (which he has said to me before, and again a couple of days ago, was maybe the best thing to ever happen to him) and some other drug that I can’t remember right at this minute. I myself was on Prozac for a few years, but of course when I lost my job, and thus my insurance, I lost that too—and I REALLY don’t remember it making much of a difference to my mood anyway, either when I STARTED taking it or when I STOPPED taking it. But of course, I was drinking like a fish—an ALCOHOLIC fucking fish at that—and indulging in various other “party favors” at the time, so maybe that helped to hide the changes.
I took my last Tegretol last Tuesday (the 20th). In the space of two months I went from 800 mg a day, which some (like the doctor in the emergency room) would consider a large dose although I HAVE heard of even larger ones, to zero by dropping one 200 mg tablet a day every two weeks—in other words, I started at one pill in the morning, one pill at noon, and two pills at night but dropped it to one pill at morning, noon and night, down to one at morning and one at night, down to one in the morning until...well, you get the picture. My only concern at the time was that I may have some seizures and have to go back on the shit—however, so far so good on the seizure front. HOWEVER, Tegretol has another benefit to it that was unbeknownst to me—in addition to stopping seizures it is also occasionally used as a mood stabilizer and depression aid. And my CURRENT doctor didn’t know about my depression—it was another doctor in another clinic, back when I had insurance, that made the diagnosis and prescribed the Prozac. I just kind of assumed that he (my current doctor) had all my medical records and was aware of it. So as of that moment, for the first time since I started partying at 15, I was completely free of not only any mood stabilizer-type meds but also of any alcohol or pot or speed or anything else that affects mood or releases endorphins, the chemicals that make people feel pleasure or happiness.
After I had gotten down to taking 1 pill a day for a few days I began to feel pretty lousy: I had no energy nor desire to do anything but lay around, plus my stomach was always hurting, or at least I ASSUMED it was my stomach—it also felt reminiscent of when I would get hepatitis during my drinking days, just a deep, throbbing, unending pain in the center-right side of my abdominal area (which is where the liver, as well as the gall bladder, is located). However, I didn’t really think it was liver-related, since the doctor has run zillions of liver panels on me (to check the Tegretol level and a couple of other things) in the years since I quit drinking and they never showed any problems. Also, I would get hungry and eating would make my stomach feel somewhat better, although I had no appetite—even though I KNEW I was hungry and COULD force myself to eat I had no desire to. Nothing seemed to taste right, including the shit I generally loved to eat or even drink like iced tea and Sierra Mist, and anything I put into my mouth I just wanted to spit right back out. However, like I said I could still make myself eat—when I had the hepatitis I couldn’t really even FORCE myself to eat, other than a few small Ritz crackers here and there throughout the day; I would simply have to wait a few days for my liver to stop throbbing and the swelling to go down before I could really eat normally again. I almost saw the doctor at that point, but I began to feel a little bit better and already had an appointment to see him on this coming Monday (Aug. 2) so I figured maybe I was being a little premature about things.
However, by last Friday or so things had gotten MUCH worse. The pain was not only getting worse again, but I was completely depressed in ways that I had NEVER really known. Some people are better than others at moving on, I suppose—better at realizing that they’ve fucked up in the past, may have thrown away YEARS of their lives or blown chances that may NEVER come again but also at realizing that each new day brings new chances and new opportunities, if you know where to look or who to ask for help and are willing to put in the work because you also have to realize that almost NOTHING GOOD EVER COMES EASY. I myself have never been one of those people, particularly. I have always wondered why I couldn’t have buckled down in school, at least enough to have graduated at 18 rather than 32. I have always wondered why I can’t seem to figure out my “place” in the world, why SOME people at 18 have a laser-like focus on getting a business degree or becoming a doctor or architect or engineer or something as though they KNOW that is what they were born to be while I flounder about just trying to figure out WHAT will make me NOT miserable while providing at least enough of a salary to not have to worry about rent and eating and having a proper and reliable car that doesn’t break down at every other fucking stop sign and all those other things that so many people take for granted. These are thoughts that occur to me almost EVERY DAY at some point—basically, both my past AND my future haunt me. However, I was always able to balance it out somewhat by simply realizing that, no matter HOW bad things may seem to be in my life, there ARE people in this world who have been through far worse and survived, and some of them have even gone on to flourish. There are people who are FAR, FAR bigger idiots and assholes than I am who have pulled it off—maybe I can too. And there are people in this world—family, friends, instructors at COS—who care about me, who never miss the opportunity to tell me how smart I am and that I WILL, one day, figure all this shit out if I keep trying.
Suicide has always held a kind of cold fascination to me. I have known people who’ve killed themselves. I have known others that, while they didn’t directly kill themselves, I do believe they more or less intentionally took the slower way, just like Ozzy’s song “Suicide Solution” says—“Wine is fine but whiskey’s quicker/Suicide is slow with liquor.” I sometimes wonder if it didn’t play a role in my uncle’s OD all those years ago. Mainly I have wondered what made people like Kurt Cobain—a guy with money, a secure legacy as a musical icon/genius, a wife and young daughter and millions of fans—feel so badly that he could blast his skull to dust with a shotgun (assuming it wasn’t murder like the conspiracy theorist-types allege). Or a guy like Owen Wilson—maybe not the best-looking guy but who doesn’t love Owen Wilson? With his money and personality who cares if he’s got a nose that’s slightly fucked up, he could still get any woman he wanted in all likelihood, you feel like he’d be a really great buddy and all-around fun guy to hang out with, he doesn’t have to worry about his future…what makes a guy like that even dream of attempting suicide?
But I don’t know if I can say I’d ever TRULY considered it before. In a detached, feel-sorry-for-yourself kind of way, maybe—I suspect that MOST people have. But considered it to the point where it just scares the living fuck out of you, I’m not so sure. There ARE considerations that have always, to ME at least, made suicide far too radical an act to actually commit…such as God. Assuming he exists, the Christian belief obviously is that God doesn’t accept suicides—that if you “reject his gift of life” you’re denied entry into the “Kingdom of Heaven” and instead spend eternity BBQ’ing your nuts in Hades. And how does one do that to their loved ones? If you cared about them AT ALL how could you possibly put your spouse/children/parents/best friends or whatever through the sheer life-shattering horror of walking into a room to discover brains and blood blown all over the walls and your lifeless corpse lying on the bed or swinging from a curtain rod, or make them have to go down to the morgue to identify the splattered remains you left behind when you leapt out of a tenth-story window? That seems rather selfish, doesn’t it? Does ANYONE deserve that? These thoughts, in my normal state, make suicide absolutely unthinkable to me, no matter HOW badly I may think my life sucks from time to time.
By last weekend, however, none of those things helped. I hated seeing the morning come, assuming I was even lucky enough to have gotten to sleep at all, because it meant I was going to be hounded by those thoughts all day long. I didn’t enjoy listening to music, playing video games, running around town…nothing. Quite basically, I was becoming suicidal myself. The thought was simply omnipresent in the back of my mind, and nothing could chase it away for long. My debts, my inability to figure out just who I am in this life or what I should pursue for a living, the thought that NOBODY can find work these days on top of the thought that nobody would want to take a chance hiring my ass anyway because of the decade-plus gap since my LAST job, and all the other failures of my life to date…all those things were just swarming through my mind constantly. And all those things I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago that I used to think about, to re-assure myself that I was just being a big drama queen who just needed to stop feeling sorry for himself, no longer chased those black thoughts away, at least not for more than a few seconds, before they were back at full force. I simply felt sheer, black-as-night terror and dread all day long. NOTHING scared me more than being alone, I needed to be around people at all times because…well, who knew? The sheer, cold, logical answer to everything seemed more and more like—just get it over with. While I can’t say that I “heard voices” I could understand how SOME people in a similar situation could interpret it that way, because the idea just HOUNDS YOU—“Come on, you KNOW nothing’s ever gonna get any better, do you REALLY want to feel like this anymore? There’s an easy way out, y’know…and it doesn’t even have to HURT.” By Monday night I had simply had it; I asked my mom to drive me to the emergency room to find out if there was anything wrong with my stomach or liver or any of my other internals, and also told them about the depression. I simply felt like I had to try SOMETHING, because without a doubt I felt like I was truly losing it and that if I DIDN’T try something I wasn’t going to make it much longer.
So I spent the next 7 hours sitting in the hospital. They pumped me full of Dilaudid and Ativan, a painkiller and a tranquilizer, while they ran a shitload of tests and called a social worker (something they have to do when someone suicidal comes in). Fortunately, I can say that I’m in perfect physical health aside from the 4 or 5 spare tires I wear around my waist: my liver is completely normal (after 8 alcohol-free fucking years you’d certainly hope so), no gall bladder problems or gall stones, EKG was normal, etc. They (the doctors and the social worker) told me that, in all likelihood, my physical pain was simply linked to the depression and that both were almost 100% due to coming off the Tegretol. They also told me to come into the Department of Mental Health the next morning and get signed up for benefits. At 1:30 Tuesday morning (we got there at 6:30 pm) they finally released me.
So I signed up at 8 am Tuesday morning just like they told me: I see a doctor at 10 am next Thursday. However, I also moved up my other appointment with my regular doctor—I saw him Wednesday morning. He was rather upset that he had never known about my depression, and also apologetic. He instantly wrote a prescription for Prozac, as well as a week’s worth of alprazolam (which everyone knows as Xanax) to help out until the Prozac kicks in. He started me out with a very low dose—20 mg a day (I believe I was taking 50 back when I was originally on it)—but I understand that they ALWAYS start you out that way. I’m happy to say that, physically speaking, I’m basically back to normal, or at least 99%. I’m not ENTIRELY back to my old self yet psychologically speaking—after all, like I said I’ve only been taking a very low dose of Prozac for 4 days now (plus .5 mg of Xanax twice a day, which will run out Tuesday) and those 3 or 4 days before I went into the hospital were incredibly unsettling. However, I will make sure the doctor increases my dosage. The guy I see Thursday will probably (hopefully) do it. And I AM probably 50-75% back to my old self. I think that, as much as anything, I’m rather frightened and a bit haunted by how low I NOW KNOW I can sink without any antidepressants in my system. And it’s VERY unsettling to realize that all it takes is one bean-counter asshole, or maybe even just a paperwork mistake, at some insurance company or government agency to cut me off and put me right back into the hell, the utter despair and hopelessness, that I felt last weekend.
But like I said, for now things are lookin’ up.
And to be clear, I DON’T want anybody to be worried about me or anything else. This is NOT a “sympathy blog.” However, if you know anybody who suffers from depression—be it a family member, a friend, a cashier at the local SaveMart that you’re friendly with or someone else you care about—then be there for those people if you think they’re struggling, because I can assure you—NOBODY deserves to feel that kind of torment.
And now I have to go and think up something light-hearted and filthy and funny to write about, to put everybody’s minds back at ease…see ya!
Sunday, June 27, 2010
The Blog That Does Not Exist
Sorry, but to spare certain people's feelings this blog is no more...if you ever want to read it, however, just e-mail me your address and I'll send it to you. See ya!
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
The Yo Smite Blog
Well, I can actually scratch one of the names off my longer-than-fuck list of “places in my own goddamn backyard that I’ve never been to before in my 4 decade long miserable boring fucking life” (long lists deserve long names, so eat me). With a motley crew of individuals, representing the various other fringe elements of society (hereafter we shall refer to them by their code names, DaniGirl and LaLa), I finally got to visit Yosemite, or “yo smite” as we used to call it when we were young and drunk and stupid. And I was instantly branded as the record keeper of our little sojourn. So away we go…
Despite the fact that it took approximately 87 hours of driving thru crazy-assed mountain roads after leaving Chukchansi casino to reach our first destination, Yosemite didn’t seem particularly BIG upon first impression. Probably because of the reverential way in which most people speak of Yosemite, my mental image had always been of a huge wilderness where, if you were standing at dead center of the park, then the nearest human help if you, say, “accidentally” shot your ditzy-assed traveling companions in a fit of rage was like 3 days away by fucking helicopter or something. But in fact, you can see the whole damn thing from our first stop, Glacier Point; El Capitan, Half-Dome, about a thousand (give or take) waterfalls, the Ahwanee Hotel, etc. Of course, I’m probably exaggerating just a tad, and you can’t see the areas where the trails will take you, but basically you get a pretty good overview. I shot something like thirty-seven million pictures (again, give or take) from here because I figured my Jurassic-era camera would definitely fuck up half of them like the little 4 megapixel bitch it is, but actually I must commend my camera; some of the shit I took is actually pretty cool. I must have shot more of Half-Dome than anything else in the park, from a million different stops and at different times of day. I also got several of each waterfall, some because they were flowing so lightly that they weren’t all that easy to see. Here, I went and left my brains in the fucking toilet again: just like at KISS, I left my goddamned binoculars in the car. And even more annoying, my old man has a binoculars/digital camera combo that would have been spectacular, but I had to go and fucking forget it, too. Some old man and his wife offered to take our picture here, but his wife tried the first two shots and managed to cut DaniGirl out of the scene altogether. Finally, he stepped in and got the job done right, like men are always having to do for women…
I’m really not too precise on our trips chronological order (I also supplied the “party favors”, and they were truly high-quality, know what I mean?), but I believe our next stop was Tunnel View. I’m always thinking “Isn’t it Tunnel Vision? It sounds so much cooler!” But it’s Tunnel View; I even Googled it to be certain, and there’s a ton of pictures on the Internet taken at a time of year when the waterfall was REALLY raging, which just makes me all the more jealous. Someday, I’ll go back when it’s SPRING, and check these waterfalls out again, because I really feel like I missed out in that aspect. It’s still an excellent view and an excellent picture (the one I took), however, and is now in fact the desktop I use for my computer. Cool.
Where the fuck did we go after that…I’ll never figure that, so let’s just go to the first waterfall since that was probably the right answer anyway. Here we came to our first obstacle; you have to climb over thirty or forty yards worth of rocks, ranging in size from “slingshot ammo” to “Cadillac Escalade”, to reach the small pool at the base of the waterfall. And of course, these are rocks polished by running water until they are all slick and slippery even when dry as they were now. But after safely traversing this field of rock, somehow without splattering my brains all over a chunk of granite or breaking my camera, we finally reached the base where several other people already gallivanted about like…well, tourists. Giddy tourists who had done something brave and tough and cool: they had conquered that field of fucking rock, yeah (hey, not everybody can climb El Cap, and we know our limitations)!! Some people were stupid enough to just let their kids keep on climbing; I saw at least one kid who seemed to think it was a magical beanstalk with money or chocolate or naked chicks or something at top. He definitely seemed determined, anyway, and was probably 20 or 30 feet higher than I was; his dad just said “Naaaahhhh, he’s all right” when someone mentioned to him that he might want to tell his kid to stop climbing before he reached outer fucking space. I just love parents like that. Hell, my mom won’t let me use anything sharper than a fucking butter knife to this day for fear I’ll sever a limb, but this fucking kid just climbs to Mars and his folks could give a shit. Fan-fucking-tastic. He’s probably a future David Blaine, and while we all know what a dick David Blaine is he has got to nail some really top-shelf Hollywood nookie in his time. And gotten rich, too.
Sometime during our adventures—several times, actually—we parked and just went into a store. It’s kind of surprising, to me anyway, that a place that people fight so hard to protect has got so many stores in it. I would have figured they just had one big village somewhere in the middle of the valley, but stores seemed to be around every fucking tree selling shirts and stuffed animals and coffee mugs and souvenir medallion makers (you put a penny + fifty cents into a machine, and it grinds the penny into a new oval-shaped design; I got four of the fucking things, thanks to DaniGirl’s considerable largesse with her pennies), calendars, etc. Also, lots of camping equipment, and the shit you’d find in any convenience store: bottled water, corndogs, candy bars, beer, ice, extra large condoms (for when Harlem goes camping, I guess?), blah blah blah. All of these places were crowded as shit, and this was just a Monday, too. The animals are just about as tame as possible without becoming completely domesticated: I don’t know that they’d actually come up to you, eat out of your hand or anything (which, despite a total lack of signs saying so, had to have been against the rules anyway, I would think), but deer didn’t mind being only 3 or 5 feet away from people at all. A mother and her fawn walked thru the parking lot not long after we got to one of these places; the fawn probably only came up to a little higher than my kneecaps. Just sashayed right on thru. And squirrels would practically fucking mug people sitting at tables and eating. I saw one dude about have a heart attack after a feisty bastard jumped onto his table right next to him.
Aside from the deer and squirrels, however, wildlife (aside from our group, anyway) was basically non-existent. That’s another thing you kind of expect, but don’t really know for sure: that you’ll see fucking mobs of black bears roaming the parking lots and pissing on car tires like goddamned dogs or something, or lots and lots of hawks and/or eagles. My own buddies told me about a bear that fucked up their camp site, ate the butter or some shit that was in their ice chest, during the night while they were in their tents. Didn’t see shit--NADA. Supposedly, on the way out, one was out wandering about in the street or a meadow, and there was about a zillion cars slowing down or just stopping in the middle of the road try to see it and get a pic. I never did see it, don’t know about DaniGirl, but I certainly fucking didn’t, while LaLa says she did. And not one goddamn bird that I wouldn’t have seen in the valley, either. But again, although I’m sure everybody thinks I sound highly pissed right now (come on, when fucking DON’T I?), I can’t say that ruined the trip. YOU HEAR ME, LALA??? IT WAS FUN!!! THANKS!!! I WOULD GO BACK AND ALL THAT SHIT! LIKE, CAMP OUT A NIGHT OR TWO EVEN???
We didn’t really see much in terms of meadows. We stopped at a church that was, in real-world terms, dull as shit. But IT WAS AN OLD YOSEMITE CHURCH! So, in that odd way, it took on some interest and significance. Plus, there was a fair-sized meadow next to it, so it was like double score!!! We HAVE to stop!! So we got out and walked up to the church, only to discover that God does indeed take vacations too, apparently, because it was locked up tight. Afterward we frolicked in a very hippy-like manner in the meadow for a short while. I figured that just walking into the goddamned meadow would be enough to guarantee I’d catch Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or ebola or some other fucked-up flea or tick-borne disease, but DaniGirl and LaLa just romped around all over the fucking place like lesbian Sumo wrestlers or something. I eventually got down low enough to take a few pictures myself and to have my picture taken with the rest of my…party.
LaLa’s insistence that we clamber to the base of the last waterfall, and last stop of the day, was enough of a pain in the ass to begin with, but then she had to climb to the top of a big fucking rock to grab a hit or two from my pipe first, and coming back down from that bastard I jammed my right little toe up good. Like she gave a shit: “I’m going!!! I’m going!!!” It was like Spock and pon farr; she had to see that little puddle of water at the bottom of the waterfall, or else she would DIE. I went most of the way, but eventually figured “Fuck this, I’ve got 200 fucking pictures of this park and been to the base of one waterfall already and my fucking toe hurts like FUCK, so I’m kicking it here and then heading back!” Which is what I did. Me and my hobbled, fucked, blistered foot limped back to the car. As it would turn out, the little toe improved quickly, while the blisters under my big toes did not. I lived anyway.
There was actually some tour or something, I thought LaLa called it the Dragon or something of the sort, that rode around the park in these big, open air coaches that were pulled behind a bus or truck or something. It looked like it would have been pretty cool, actually, but apparently it was not a free option. They had other coaches, trams, shuttles, whatever the fuck you want to call them, that also went thru the park and were free, but they were just busses, maybe not as dirty as your average municipal bus but nothing particularly nice, either. I was just as glad we drove, so we could take our ice chests and burn a bowl occasionally and all that shit.
What you then discover is that, just as it takes fucking forever to get into Yosemite, it takes fucking forever to get OUT, too. In fact, out is worse; it’s just sequoias for an hour or more, which is rather dull and repetitive, especially when you’re ready for something more to eat than the chocolate chip cookies and peanuts you took up with you. So we scrounged at the Chukchansi casino mega-buffet. It looked like they probably had more to choose from if you were there earlier (we got there about fucking NINE’O’CLOCK!), but it was still pretty decent, and better than shitty-as-hell Home Town Buffet in Visalia. There was an Oriental counter, an Italian counter, a Spanish counter, and a counter with generally American-style shit: biscuits’n’gravy, fried chicken, roast beef, etc. And, of course, there was a desert island, which I skipped: I wanted to check out the casino a little after getting a little nourishment in my gut. The casino was, actually, pretty dull; ten, eleven’o’clock on a Monday night was slow and relatively quiet. It blew me away to actually see people SMOKING INDOORS again, not that I missed the annoying fucking people who actually engage in the activity. It was just weird to smell the shit and see some fat-assed hick spread out across two seats in front of the slots with his ashtray and cigs, putting money into the machines like it was a job or something. Anyway, we all spent something like $10 or $20 on the slots, and decided to call it a night.
So, to wrap up, I got home eventually, about 1 in the morning or something around that. In true Steve luck, the first store I stopped at didn’t have any fucking coffee; I was about halfway home before I finally found a place that still had some.
As a lesson to all guys out there, I offer up this: NEVER TAKE A FUCKING TRIP WITH TWO WOMEN IF YOU’RE THE ONLY GUY GOING!!! You will be poked, prodded, cajoled, examined, and generally treated like a subject…plus you’ll never win an argument, not fucking one. Save yourselves and your sanity…TAKE AN EXTRA GUY ALONG!!!
And it was nice to meet you as well, DaniGirl, and see LaLa for the first time since she made my stint in Geography One a living hell all those years ago. Til the next adventure…
Despite the fact that it took approximately 87 hours of driving thru crazy-assed mountain roads after leaving Chukchansi casino to reach our first destination, Yosemite didn’t seem particularly BIG upon first impression. Probably because of the reverential way in which most people speak of Yosemite, my mental image had always been of a huge wilderness where, if you were standing at dead center of the park, then the nearest human help if you, say, “accidentally” shot your ditzy-assed traveling companions in a fit of rage was like 3 days away by fucking helicopter or something. But in fact, you can see the whole damn thing from our first stop, Glacier Point; El Capitan, Half-Dome, about a thousand (give or take) waterfalls, the Ahwanee Hotel, etc. Of course, I’m probably exaggerating just a tad, and you can’t see the areas where the trails will take you, but basically you get a pretty good overview. I shot something like thirty-seven million pictures (again, give or take) from here because I figured my Jurassic-era camera would definitely fuck up half of them like the little 4 megapixel bitch it is, but actually I must commend my camera; some of the shit I took is actually pretty cool. I must have shot more of Half-Dome than anything else in the park, from a million different stops and at different times of day. I also got several of each waterfall, some because they were flowing so lightly that they weren’t all that easy to see. Here, I went and left my brains in the fucking toilet again: just like at KISS, I left my goddamned binoculars in the car. And even more annoying, my old man has a binoculars/digital camera combo that would have been spectacular, but I had to go and fucking forget it, too. Some old man and his wife offered to take our picture here, but his wife tried the first two shots and managed to cut DaniGirl out of the scene altogether. Finally, he stepped in and got the job done right, like men are always having to do for women…
I’m really not too precise on our trips chronological order (I also supplied the “party favors”, and they were truly high-quality, know what I mean?), but I believe our next stop was Tunnel View. I’m always thinking “Isn’t it Tunnel Vision? It sounds so much cooler!” But it’s Tunnel View; I even Googled it to be certain, and there’s a ton of pictures on the Internet taken at a time of year when the waterfall was REALLY raging, which just makes me all the more jealous. Someday, I’ll go back when it’s SPRING, and check these waterfalls out again, because I really feel like I missed out in that aspect. It’s still an excellent view and an excellent picture (the one I took), however, and is now in fact the desktop I use for my computer. Cool.
Where the fuck did we go after that…I’ll never figure that, so let’s just go to the first waterfall since that was probably the right answer anyway. Here we came to our first obstacle; you have to climb over thirty or forty yards worth of rocks, ranging in size from “slingshot ammo” to “Cadillac Escalade”, to reach the small pool at the base of the waterfall. And of course, these are rocks polished by running water until they are all slick and slippery even when dry as they were now. But after safely traversing this field of rock, somehow without splattering my brains all over a chunk of granite or breaking my camera, we finally reached the base where several other people already gallivanted about like…well, tourists. Giddy tourists who had done something brave and tough and cool: they had conquered that field of fucking rock, yeah (hey, not everybody can climb El Cap, and we know our limitations)!! Some people were stupid enough to just let their kids keep on climbing; I saw at least one kid who seemed to think it was a magical beanstalk with money or chocolate or naked chicks or something at top. He definitely seemed determined, anyway, and was probably 20 or 30 feet higher than I was; his dad just said “Naaaahhhh, he’s all right” when someone mentioned to him that he might want to tell his kid to stop climbing before he reached outer fucking space. I just love parents like that. Hell, my mom won’t let me use anything sharper than a fucking butter knife to this day for fear I’ll sever a limb, but this fucking kid just climbs to Mars and his folks could give a shit. Fan-fucking-tastic. He’s probably a future David Blaine, and while we all know what a dick David Blaine is he has got to nail some really top-shelf Hollywood nookie in his time. And gotten rich, too.
Sometime during our adventures—several times, actually—we parked and just went into a store. It’s kind of surprising, to me anyway, that a place that people fight so hard to protect has got so many stores in it. I would have figured they just had one big village somewhere in the middle of the valley, but stores seemed to be around every fucking tree selling shirts and stuffed animals and coffee mugs and souvenir medallion makers (you put a penny + fifty cents into a machine, and it grinds the penny into a new oval-shaped design; I got four of the fucking things, thanks to DaniGirl’s considerable largesse with her pennies), calendars, etc. Also, lots of camping equipment, and the shit you’d find in any convenience store: bottled water, corndogs, candy bars, beer, ice, extra large condoms (for when Harlem goes camping, I guess?), blah blah blah. All of these places were crowded as shit, and this was just a Monday, too. The animals are just about as tame as possible without becoming completely domesticated: I don’t know that they’d actually come up to you, eat out of your hand or anything (which, despite a total lack of signs saying so, had to have been against the rules anyway, I would think), but deer didn’t mind being only 3 or 5 feet away from people at all. A mother and her fawn walked thru the parking lot not long after we got to one of these places; the fawn probably only came up to a little higher than my kneecaps. Just sashayed right on thru. And squirrels would practically fucking mug people sitting at tables and eating. I saw one dude about have a heart attack after a feisty bastard jumped onto his table right next to him.
Aside from the deer and squirrels, however, wildlife (aside from our group, anyway) was basically non-existent. That’s another thing you kind of expect, but don’t really know for sure: that you’ll see fucking mobs of black bears roaming the parking lots and pissing on car tires like goddamned dogs or something, or lots and lots of hawks and/or eagles. My own buddies told me about a bear that fucked up their camp site, ate the butter or some shit that was in their ice chest, during the night while they were in their tents. Didn’t see shit--NADA. Supposedly, on the way out, one was out wandering about in the street or a meadow, and there was about a zillion cars slowing down or just stopping in the middle of the road try to see it and get a pic. I never did see it, don’t know about DaniGirl, but I certainly fucking didn’t, while LaLa says she did. And not one goddamn bird that I wouldn’t have seen in the valley, either. But again, although I’m sure everybody thinks I sound highly pissed right now (come on, when fucking DON’T I?), I can’t say that ruined the trip. YOU HEAR ME, LALA??? IT WAS FUN!!! THANKS!!! I WOULD GO BACK AND ALL THAT SHIT! LIKE, CAMP OUT A NIGHT OR TWO EVEN???
We didn’t really see much in terms of meadows. We stopped at a church that was, in real-world terms, dull as shit. But IT WAS AN OLD YOSEMITE CHURCH! So, in that odd way, it took on some interest and significance. Plus, there was a fair-sized meadow next to it, so it was like double score!!! We HAVE to stop!! So we got out and walked up to the church, only to discover that God does indeed take vacations too, apparently, because it was locked up tight. Afterward we frolicked in a very hippy-like manner in the meadow for a short while. I figured that just walking into the goddamned meadow would be enough to guarantee I’d catch Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever or ebola or some other fucked-up flea or tick-borne disease, but DaniGirl and LaLa just romped around all over the fucking place like lesbian Sumo wrestlers or something. I eventually got down low enough to take a few pictures myself and to have my picture taken with the rest of my…party.
LaLa’s insistence that we clamber to the base of the last waterfall, and last stop of the day, was enough of a pain in the ass to begin with, but then she had to climb to the top of a big fucking rock to grab a hit or two from my pipe first, and coming back down from that bastard I jammed my right little toe up good. Like she gave a shit: “I’m going!!! I’m going!!!” It was like Spock and pon farr; she had to see that little puddle of water at the bottom of the waterfall, or else she would DIE. I went most of the way, but eventually figured “Fuck this, I’ve got 200 fucking pictures of this park and been to the base of one waterfall already and my fucking toe hurts like FUCK, so I’m kicking it here and then heading back!” Which is what I did. Me and my hobbled, fucked, blistered foot limped back to the car. As it would turn out, the little toe improved quickly, while the blisters under my big toes did not. I lived anyway.
There was actually some tour or something, I thought LaLa called it the Dragon or something of the sort, that rode around the park in these big, open air coaches that were pulled behind a bus or truck or something. It looked like it would have been pretty cool, actually, but apparently it was not a free option. They had other coaches, trams, shuttles, whatever the fuck you want to call them, that also went thru the park and were free, but they were just busses, maybe not as dirty as your average municipal bus but nothing particularly nice, either. I was just as glad we drove, so we could take our ice chests and burn a bowl occasionally and all that shit.
What you then discover is that, just as it takes fucking forever to get into Yosemite, it takes fucking forever to get OUT, too. In fact, out is worse; it’s just sequoias for an hour or more, which is rather dull and repetitive, especially when you’re ready for something more to eat than the chocolate chip cookies and peanuts you took up with you. So we scrounged at the Chukchansi casino mega-buffet. It looked like they probably had more to choose from if you were there earlier (we got there about fucking NINE’O’CLOCK!), but it was still pretty decent, and better than shitty-as-hell Home Town Buffet in Visalia. There was an Oriental counter, an Italian counter, a Spanish counter, and a counter with generally American-style shit: biscuits’n’gravy, fried chicken, roast beef, etc. And, of course, there was a desert island, which I skipped: I wanted to check out the casino a little after getting a little nourishment in my gut. The casino was, actually, pretty dull; ten, eleven’o’clock on a Monday night was slow and relatively quiet. It blew me away to actually see people SMOKING INDOORS again, not that I missed the annoying fucking people who actually engage in the activity. It was just weird to smell the shit and see some fat-assed hick spread out across two seats in front of the slots with his ashtray and cigs, putting money into the machines like it was a job or something. Anyway, we all spent something like $10 or $20 on the slots, and decided to call it a night.
So, to wrap up, I got home eventually, about 1 in the morning or something around that. In true Steve luck, the first store I stopped at didn’t have any fucking coffee; I was about halfway home before I finally found a place that still had some.
As a lesson to all guys out there, I offer up this: NEVER TAKE A FUCKING TRIP WITH TWO WOMEN IF YOU’RE THE ONLY GUY GOING!!! You will be poked, prodded, cajoled, examined, and generally treated like a subject…plus you’ll never win an argument, not fucking one. Save yourselves and your sanity…TAKE AN EXTRA GUY ALONG!!!
And it was nice to meet you as well, DaniGirl, and see LaLa for the first time since she made my stint in Geography One a living hell all those years ago. Til the next adventure…
Monday, April 12, 2010
Death By Cholesterol (which is not a bad name for a band, when you think about it...)
Someone in rock’n’roll should write a song about cholesterol. It sounds boring as fuck—trust me, I realize that. But why not? It’s killing people all over the country, all over the world even (although nowhere nearly as much as the United States, home of such fabulous delicacies as the “Cow On A Bun” cheeseburger at Royal Burger or whatever). Rockers LOVE to write about shit that kills people—war, disease, all that good stuff, but dope and/or alcohol seems to be the real favorite. Everybody from the Velvet Underground to Neil Young has written songs about heroin, or songs about legends like Bon Scott and Hank Williams that drank themselves to death—actually, I’m not even sure you ARE a legend in rock or country music until your death certificate says “choked on vomit due to extreme alcohol intoxication” on it, seeing as how it also killed, or played a part in the deaths of, Jimi and Janis and Zep’s Bonzo and the Dead’s Pigpen and the Lizard King and Christ knows who all else. Metallica covered coke addiction with “Master of Puppets,” as did Sabbath with “Snowblind”. The Stones have written brilliantly about every drug known in this quadrant of the universe I think, including some that are probably only known to Keith Richards (Keith’s smart, he knows that if nobody else knows about it then he gets it all to himself). So why NOT cholesterol? I suppose the words “chicken leg” don’t look nearly as cool in a song title as the word “needle” does, as in Young’s bleak classic “The Needle and the Damage Done” but still…
It just made me ponder, that’s all…Long story short, I finally get an EEG tomorrow, which my dildo slope doctor has been telling me for MONTHS hadn’t been approved by the county yet and promising he’d check into what was taking so long. However, when I saw him last Monday he told me that it had been approved since SEPTEMBER—in fact, the little Khmer Rouge prick actually asked me why it hadn’t been done yet. It about took all the restraint I could muster to NOT whip out my pocket knife and start practicing my tracheotomy skills on the asshole. If the EEG comes back negative, which it PROBABLY will—the first AND last one I had, about 8 years ago, was—then I get to choose whether or not I want to try stopping my Tegretol. I say “choose” because, clean EEG or not, there’s always a chance that I could have seizures anyway. If I chose not to risk it, I could just keep on taking the fucking things for the rest of my life, it’s not like they’re going to kill me. But they DO have side effects (like inability to concentrate and falling asleep in the middle of taking a piss and other fun things), and I would hope that they would disappear after a while off the shit. Not to mention 4 less pills a day I have to swallow.
But it still leaves me with 4 OTHER prescriptions to fill every month, and EVERY FUCKING ONE OF THEM is related to diet, really. And that shit sucks. I could get off of one or maybe two of them pretty easily, I suspect: there’s Altace (I ain’t even sure what the fuck it does, all I know is they call it an “ace inhibitor” or “a.c.e. inhibitor” or what the fuck ever), then there’s Adalat, the only one that they said is DIRECTLY meant to lower blood pressure, and it wasn’t too high anyway—ONE number was 5 too high or something, meaning like 130 over 90 was acceptable, if borderline, but I was 135 over 90 or some bullshit (taking all these pills, it’s consistently like 120 over 80 or 85 now, excellent according to Dr. Pol Pot). There’s Lipitor for cholesterol, and starting last week I’ve got Niaspan as well, which is to help block digestion or absorption of fat from your food (or something). And that last one SUCKS, too: the pharmacists I got it from said that a common side effect was a prickly, tingly feeling on the skin and that was all he mentioned. But when my mom learned that I was taking it she said, “Oh, I take that too, my pharmacists said that it could cause prickly skin and flushing (or hot flashes) and if you took an aspirin with it (you’re supposed to take this prescription at bedtime) and ate a low- or no-fat snack with it that would help. And don’t eat anything fatty for a couple of hours before bed.” The first couple of nights I didn’t really bother listening to her, because the pharmacist I talked to is actually a pretty good guy, seems to know his shit and whatnot, and since he didn’t mention either of those things I wasn’t too concerned about it. However, on the second night I woke up about 90 minutes after taking it and felt like I was on fucking fire, as if you could light a cigarette off my bare skin the same way you would off a car cigarette lighter. And just as bad was the prickly, tingly shit—it felt like somebody had taken the world’s most powerful alarm clock, one of those old-timey wind-up bastards with the bells on top you see in TOM AND JERRY cartoons, and shoved it up my ass just as it was going off. Fortunately, it didn’t last too long, maybe 30 minutes, before it died down enough to let me get back to sleep. I’ve been following her pharmacists advice every night since and had no repeat problems, however.
I suspect I could alter the diet a bit, could DEFINITELY stand to exercise (a work-out partner, or personal trainer, would help me IMMENSELY with this one), but I don’t know what else I can do. The unavoidable fact of the matter is, I have a shitty, bordering on unfit-for-human-life kind of diet, and I CAN’T REALLY HELP IT. I HATE 99% of what’s healthy for you, food-wise, and it’s not like I CHOSE to be this way. I would absolutely LOVE to be able to call myself a vegetarian, which surprises me to no end since I find most vegetarians to be unbearable, self-righteous, communist-sympathizing, Satan worshipping pricks (and those are their good qualities, too—don’t get me started on what really makes them insufferable assholes). But basically ALL vegetables are totally unpalatable to me. I like corn fine, particularly on the cob, with a thick juicy steak and garlic bread and all that stuff. But every other vegetable that springs to mind, to me, tastes like dog shit rolled in cat shit and garnished with bird shit. Lettuce, onions, etc…yecch. And the weirdest thing is, everybody tells me that I couldn’t get enough of that shit when I was a baby. My folks tell me that I used to inhale peas like Corey Haim used to inhale OxyContin, to cite just one example. No more; if it ain’t meat and potatoes then I ain’t interested.
And people think you’re just a big, spoiled baby for it, too. You hear shit like, “Boy, I wish I could live on pizza and cheeseburgers and Taco Bell like you do.” But trust me, it ain’t that great—no matter how great something is or how delicious it may be, if you eat it often enough you will get bored sick with it. If you ate lobster for dinner every day starting on Monday, by Friday you’d rather see every fucking lobster on Earth wiped out then eat it again that night.
But who knows? Like I said, I think I could change my diet enough to, at the very least, get off the Niaspan fairly easily. And I guess I’ll just have to work on the other prescriptions after that. If I could get off even 30 pounds (doc would rather I lost 50 to 70) I could probably get off the Adalat, too.
All I can do is try, I suppose…
It just made me ponder, that’s all…Long story short, I finally get an EEG tomorrow, which my dildo slope doctor has been telling me for MONTHS hadn’t been approved by the county yet and promising he’d check into what was taking so long. However, when I saw him last Monday he told me that it had been approved since SEPTEMBER—in fact, the little Khmer Rouge prick actually asked me why it hadn’t been done yet. It about took all the restraint I could muster to NOT whip out my pocket knife and start practicing my tracheotomy skills on the asshole. If the EEG comes back negative, which it PROBABLY will—the first AND last one I had, about 8 years ago, was—then I get to choose whether or not I want to try stopping my Tegretol. I say “choose” because, clean EEG or not, there’s always a chance that I could have seizures anyway. If I chose not to risk it, I could just keep on taking the fucking things for the rest of my life, it’s not like they’re going to kill me. But they DO have side effects (like inability to concentrate and falling asleep in the middle of taking a piss and other fun things), and I would hope that they would disappear after a while off the shit. Not to mention 4 less pills a day I have to swallow.
But it still leaves me with 4 OTHER prescriptions to fill every month, and EVERY FUCKING ONE OF THEM is related to diet, really. And that shit sucks. I could get off of one or maybe two of them pretty easily, I suspect: there’s Altace (I ain’t even sure what the fuck it does, all I know is they call it an “ace inhibitor” or “a.c.e. inhibitor” or what the fuck ever), then there’s Adalat, the only one that they said is DIRECTLY meant to lower blood pressure, and it wasn’t too high anyway—ONE number was 5 too high or something, meaning like 130 over 90 was acceptable, if borderline, but I was 135 over 90 or some bullshit (taking all these pills, it’s consistently like 120 over 80 or 85 now, excellent according to Dr. Pol Pot). There’s Lipitor for cholesterol, and starting last week I’ve got Niaspan as well, which is to help block digestion or absorption of fat from your food (or something). And that last one SUCKS, too: the pharmacists I got it from said that a common side effect was a prickly, tingly feeling on the skin and that was all he mentioned. But when my mom learned that I was taking it she said, “Oh, I take that too, my pharmacists said that it could cause prickly skin and flushing (or hot flashes) and if you took an aspirin with it (you’re supposed to take this prescription at bedtime) and ate a low- or no-fat snack with it that would help. And don’t eat anything fatty for a couple of hours before bed.” The first couple of nights I didn’t really bother listening to her, because the pharmacist I talked to is actually a pretty good guy, seems to know his shit and whatnot, and since he didn’t mention either of those things I wasn’t too concerned about it. However, on the second night I woke up about 90 minutes after taking it and felt like I was on fucking fire, as if you could light a cigarette off my bare skin the same way you would off a car cigarette lighter. And just as bad was the prickly, tingly shit—it felt like somebody had taken the world’s most powerful alarm clock, one of those old-timey wind-up bastards with the bells on top you see in TOM AND JERRY cartoons, and shoved it up my ass just as it was going off. Fortunately, it didn’t last too long, maybe 30 minutes, before it died down enough to let me get back to sleep. I’ve been following her pharmacists advice every night since and had no repeat problems, however.
I suspect I could alter the diet a bit, could DEFINITELY stand to exercise (a work-out partner, or personal trainer, would help me IMMENSELY with this one), but I don’t know what else I can do. The unavoidable fact of the matter is, I have a shitty, bordering on unfit-for-human-life kind of diet, and I CAN’T REALLY HELP IT. I HATE 99% of what’s healthy for you, food-wise, and it’s not like I CHOSE to be this way. I would absolutely LOVE to be able to call myself a vegetarian, which surprises me to no end since I find most vegetarians to be unbearable, self-righteous, communist-sympathizing, Satan worshipping pricks (and those are their good qualities, too—don’t get me started on what really makes them insufferable assholes). But basically ALL vegetables are totally unpalatable to me. I like corn fine, particularly on the cob, with a thick juicy steak and garlic bread and all that stuff. But every other vegetable that springs to mind, to me, tastes like dog shit rolled in cat shit and garnished with bird shit. Lettuce, onions, etc…yecch. And the weirdest thing is, everybody tells me that I couldn’t get enough of that shit when I was a baby. My folks tell me that I used to inhale peas like Corey Haim used to inhale OxyContin, to cite just one example. No more; if it ain’t meat and potatoes then I ain’t interested.
And people think you’re just a big, spoiled baby for it, too. You hear shit like, “Boy, I wish I could live on pizza and cheeseburgers and Taco Bell like you do.” But trust me, it ain’t that great—no matter how great something is or how delicious it may be, if you eat it often enough you will get bored sick with it. If you ate lobster for dinner every day starting on Monday, by Friday you’d rather see every fucking lobster on Earth wiped out then eat it again that night.
But who knows? Like I said, I think I could change my diet enough to, at the very least, get off the Niaspan fairly easily. And I guess I’ll just have to work on the other prescriptions after that. If I could get off even 30 pounds (doc would rather I lost 50 to 70) I could probably get off the Adalat, too.
All I can do is try, I suppose…
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