You can probably imagine that what with me losing another toe, my grandma dying and the real possibility of homelessness looming over me that I haven't been up to writing these things lately. I went back to work today, so I'm feeling a bit livelier, so let's give this a shot.
Back in 2020, after watching the world fall apart worse with every year, I got an odd sensation. Earlier that year I'd been hospitalized due to alcohol withdrawals and went on adventures in my head for a couple of weeks. That was in January. If I remember right, I went to the psych ward in June. Around that time I started getting the sensation that I was dead. I'd died when I was going through withdrawals. This was the afterlife, and it was super fucked up. Everything was a figment of my dead imagination, even the people I talked to. And if they tried to deny being figments of my dead imagination, I would think, "That's exactly what a figment of my dead imagination would say."
It turns out there is a disorder for that. It's called Cotard's Syndrome, except people suffering from that usually think they're rotting corpses. I didn't think that. But I'm pretty sure I'm alive now.
Something similar happened when I got out of the hospital for the toe amputation. The world seemed a bit off. I'd only been in the hospital about a week or so. Could they have built this brand new house that wasn't there before in that time? I noticed the names of stores and restaurants had changed. An odd sensation came over me that I had accidentally slipped into a parallel universe. Perhaps the one just next door.
Had all these gyms been around before? I swear to Christ, independent fitness centers have sprouted up everywhere. Fucking everywhere. Some of them seem to have sprouted up overnight. Are we being invaded by gyms? Are these gyms from outer space? Because there is no way there are enough people going to these gyms to keep them financially afloat. No fuckin' way.
That sensation has faded, but it felt strange going through life like that. The first time I went outside after I got home from the hospital, everything had a dreamy quality to it. Odd. Different. I swear it wasn't the Oxy the hospitalist gave me.
There isn't a disorder for that. Probably not. A cursory glance at Google didn't turn anything up. At least I'm not the only one wondering this. There is a Reddit thread on the subject, but no one had any answers.
Bruni's Syndrome. There it is. I shall write this up for the New England Journal of Medicine and await my Nobel Prize with Christ-like restraint.
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