GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1001: AH SHIT, IT'S THIS GUY AGAIN

 *sigh* Right. Of course I couldn't quit this. The reason I entertained the idea of ending GF was because I no longer had the time to write it at night. But I've been on medical leave, and I have a lot of time, which I'm using wisely because holy fucking shit, since the last time we met at this hour? My life has somehow--SOMEHOW!!!!!--gotten way fucking worse. I'm doing my best to unfuck this horrid mess, but I won't get too much into that.

One of the things that is causing me misery is the mystery illness. It has plagued me for three days running. I can only assume that tomorrow will be day four of this madness. Through a series of events I'd rather not go into, I discovered that if I suffer a low blood sugar incident while going through a bout of my mystery illness, the mystery illness will stop.

So for the last two days, when I got up and first started feeling the symptoms, I purposely overdosed myself on insulin. Unfortunately it doesn't work right away, so I spend the next few hours trying not to go to the bathroom to puke. I often fail at this, and it ends in either puke (glorious relief for the next fifteen minutes!) or dry heaves (cursed to another trip to the bathroom in the very near--maybe even by forty-five seconds!--future). But then the low blood sugar attack comes, and I fight back because I had the foresight to have Tang or Coke nearby. Then, after my heart beats like crazy and my body slicks over with a sheen of sweat, the low blood sugar attack goes away. And so does my mystery illness.

Until the next fucking day. This solution only delays the mystery illness.

I *do* realize how insane that sounds, by the way. Some kinda Flatliners shit, just about. But the mystery illness has *made me* insane. I would do just about anything to get this fucking thing to permanently go away.

In case you're new, the mystery illness makes me puke and dry heave every 15 minutes for 3-5 days in a row, oftentimes causing me to lose significant amounts of sleep. It causes a terrible pain in my belly. It feels like pancreatitis. I know because I've suffered from that a few times in my drinking days. It feels like someone is pushing a sword through my belly and out my back. It is the worst fucking pain I've ever experienced in my life. By the time a bout is done, I've begged for death at least a dozen-dozen times. And I'll have also lost a lot of weight. Last year, for example, I cumulatively lost nearly seventy pounds because of this goddammed motherfucking mystery illness. And, as one time proved to me, there is also the risk of rupturing my esophagus from puking too hard.

So in breaking with tradition I'm not going to bed tonight. Because the ERs down in the Joliet area suck, I'm going to drive to the Elmhurst ER. They also know me better there. I also know that, if they put an IV in, it won't just fall out like it did down here. It's Monday, so I wanted to wait until later. Give the ER crowd a chance to die down. I can't have this happen to me again tomorrow morning. I have a shit-ton of very important things to do. I hope to get the treatment needed to ensure the attack does not continue. If things go well, I'll get an hour of sleep at the ER. I'll also get a couple of hours when I get home. And then I'll be ready to knock tomorrow out of the park.

If tomorrow does *not* go well, I can expect my misery to continue for the foreseeable future. So I'm focusing everything on making it go well. If I must beat reality into a much more pleasing shape, then so be it.

Wish me luck. The good kind, I mean. The bad just sorta . . . lives wherever I do, I guess.

THE ROAD TO HELL

 Remember a little while ago when I got a cage installed on my bad foot? I remember thinking at the time, I'd better not suffer my mystery illness. If I do, I'm fucked. How am I going to get to the bathroom on time to puke when I'm dragging this thing around? (Dragging. In reality, I'm on a walker until the doc can take a look at my foot.) I feared it more than anything.

So of course it happened. I had just joined the BWA online meeting on Sunday morning when I felt my guts go south on me. I suddenly had to drop off and shuffle to the bathroom, where I puked for the first time over the next few days. I had my liquid vicodin, but for some reason it wasn't working this time. (I had a lot of time to think about it, and I suspect it was because I was on stronger pain medication for the foot. That has to be the reason. It's the only different thing in my life at the time.) I drank a whole bottle of the stuff trying to stop the illness, but it was a no-go.

I dreaded going to the ER down here because they didn't know me, and I suspected it might take a while to get the treatment I need, as it is on the unusual side. I never imagined the horrors to come.

I first tried St. Joe's, which is easily the worst ER I've ever been to. They had zero wheelchairs on hand even though there was no one else in the waiting room. When they got me to triage, I was surprised to learn that this would be my ER room. They gave me an EKG sitting shirtless in the triage room. That's a bad sign. They also tried to get 5 IVs on me. One of them worked long enough to give blood before it blew. By the fifth attempt I noticed, while puking in the bathroom, that the IV just sort of fell off. That was the last straw for me. I did something I tell everyone to never do: I pulled my own (the third one that might still be useful) IV out like a TV character. I suffered zero blood loss from it.

Then I tried Silvercross. They're bad, too, but only because they insist on the mystery. They had to poke, scan and prod me even though they could have just called Elmhurst for my records. I told them to do this, to talk to someone over there, so they don't cover the same territory. My reason was, they wouldn't give me morphine until they were certain I had a problem. I wanted them to know that they wouldn't find anything on my CT scan or anything else.

After eight hours I got an ER room, and then they said they'd hold on to me overnight, and they admitted me. However, they left me down in the ER. And kept me there. And kept me there. They did give me Zofran and morphine, and it did stop the sickness, but they wanted to run more tests. They told me there's a GI doc who wants to see me. When? To be determined. My sickness was coming back because I hadn't been allowed to go home and recover on my own.

I told them I was leaving before things got worse. They advised me that wasn't possible, and I checked myself out AMA.

I swear to fuck, if this happens again, I'm making the miserable drive to Elmhurst's ER. My family thinks of my experiences at Elmhurst and thinks they suck. Compared to these other ERs? Elmhurst is top notch, and they at least know me there. They can actually help me.

So I got home, and the sickness was ramping up again. I had nothing more to puke up. I'd been dry-heaving all day at that point. It got so bad that I wrote a note, put my IN THE EVENT OF MY DEATH envelope underneath it, and I stared at my insulin pen a while in the dark. It's never fully dark in the basement in Joliet, so I could see that I'd turned the pen up to 40 units. These incidents always drive my blood sugar up through sheer stress alone, as I'm incapable of eating anything when I'm having an attack. I realized that 40 might not kill me, so I notched it up to 50. That should do the trick.

I thought about how scary low blood sugar is, and I decided that it was worth it to never have to be this sick again. One hurdle to jump, and the fight would be over. I thought about the chorus for Ensiferum's "One with the Sea":

No more fighting
Just the abyss
Soon I'll be
One with the sea

No more pretending
Only the bliss
Soon I'll be
One with the sea

That bliss sounded amazing. But as with my last suicide attempt my survival instinct kicked in, disgusted with what I'd been thinking about.  I gave myself 25 instead (because the hospital said I was up to 380) and tried to sleep.

For a marvel, I did. And when I woke up the next day I felt normal. I was able to eat, which was a miracle on its own. This morning I took a shit, and that's usually the indication that the episode is over.  I might even take a shower today.

Sometimes waiting is the best option. Action demands instantaneity and is always full of confusing emotion. I'm glad I waited because I feel things are about to turn around for me. I really hope so.

Here's something that always cheers me up. I'm glad I'm alive to listen to it this afternoon. It feels like I'm constantly walking the road to hell, thinking I'm making my way through the worst of it at any given time, and that the rest of the walk will be easy. My flesh is scorched and blackened, my eyes blinded by the flames, cognizant only of the pain, kept alive by the hope that my endless walk into the flames is almost over. It never is, though.

Live for the Kittyman.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #987: THE BIG MOVE, PART 2

 I woke up super early yesterday morning so I could move the last of my shit out of the hotel. I begrudgingly got dressed and went downstairs to get a handcart from the lobby. Except there were none. FUCK. I had to carry this shit out by hand, and my back was giving me troubles. It took me a while, but I got everything down. I had enough time to give myself a half an hour to rest before I got ready for work and to leave the hotel for good.

[Not for nothing, but there were other people humping their shit out to their cars by hand. I'm not the only one the handcart thieves put through hell.]

Something told me not to return both keys. I'm glad I didn't.

On the way to work I started feeling weird, like maybe I was about to get another bout of my mystery illness, except I didn't have any liquid vicodin. I'd used the last of it two days previous to stave off another attack. Not that I had a bed to retreat to, now that the hotel was gone.

I got to work, and before I could punch in, I felt the illness come upon me. I begged to leave work, and I barely made it back to the hotel in time to puke my guts out. Horrible. Horrible shit. But it happened, and I knew it would continue. I tried to ride it out in the hotel bed for the two hours I had left before checkout time, but I couldn't do it. I gave up and went to the ER.

Surprisingly the ER didn't have much of a wait time. I got to my room pretty quickly. The doctor took a little while, but when I finally saw him he agreed to give me my Zofran and morphine. I felt the morphine take hold, and the pain went away.

But not the vomiting, which was unusual. I kept getting up and puking more and more until I had to ask for help. I asked for anything stronger. They gave me another dose of each. That seemed to put off the puking, at least a little bit. Because the ER rush had begun, they had to get me out of there. Except . . . where could I recover? The hotel was done for real this time. I couldn't drive to my new home in Joliet. I wouldn't have lasted very long on that hour-plus trip.

One good thing: when they discharged me, my primary doctor must have seen I was in the ER. My liquid vicodin was ready.

I could only go back to my old house. So far no one had changed the locks or cleared out the stuff we abandoned, and I hoped that would continue. Because I was puking again.

I went home and saw that thankfully I still had access. The place was cold as fuck and smelled like the bathroom, but I went straight to the couch we abandoned--an uncomfortable affair, I assure you--where I found a couple of throw pillows and took my liquid vicodin.

I passed out for a while, but when I woke up I still felt pukey. I drank more of it and tried to sleep again. I repeated this dance until about 10 am this morning. I was feeling a little hungry, which was the first sign of the horror passing.

So I brought all my stuff down to Joliet, where I'm typing this in the basement. I live down here with a cat and two ferrets. I'll be sleeping on my air mattress. But most importantly, it's a weed-friendly house, so I don't have to go outside to smoke.

I'm glad to be out of the hotel, but my mystery illness is a prick, and it struck at the worst possible moment. But I have the cure for now. I don't expect to feel this bad for another two months at least.

Also, my three minute commute is gone. My new commute is going to be an hour and ten, possibly thirty, minutes. Maybe not on Saturday, but still, that blows. At least my regular day off is tomorrow. I only have two doctors appointments, and the rest of my day is mine to unpack the rest of my crap. I just have the essentials out now.

To quote a great man, "OK for now." I'm going to bed.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #218: FLU SHOTS

I got my first flu shot today. It's making me nervous as all hell. I used to joke about worrying what the government was putting in these things, but in reality I had a very different fear. They say that once you get your first flu shot you have to get them for the rest of your life. Kind of like shaving your body hair. Once you do it, it will grow back twice as tough, and you'll have to keep on doing it forever if you want to be rid of it.


You may remember that earlier this year I was stricken with a ghastly mystery illness that started with a horrible, filthy child in an urgent care waiting room. That little fucker coughed and sneezed all over everything. I saw him sneeze in his mother's face. No admonishment to cover his mouth. I suspect that he'll grow up to become the next Donald Trump.


I only get sick once a year, and that piece of shit caught me at that exact time of year. But it kept getting worse to the point where my doctor thought I had pneumonia. It wasn't that, but whatever it was triggered the mystery illness that had me laid up for two months. I'm certain that the mystery illness wouldn't have happened without that asshole kid's virus, whatever it was.


While trying to figure it out, my doctor asked me if I'd gotten the flu shot that year. I told him I never get them. He said that because I'm diabetic I should get them every year. He was certain that this horrible period of my life was caused by me not getting my flu shot.


So yeah. Not wanting to go through that bullshit again, I got the flu shot at work today. I guess I'll be doing that for the rest of my life. Fuck.


It was an all right experience. I hate needles. I never liked them, but I've been around a lot of them these past few years for various ailments. I got used to them, but at the same time I hate them even more. The nurse was pretty good with this one, though. I barely felt it. Better yet, she seemed interested in my reading material. JF Gonzalez's SURVIVOR. On my morning commute someone on the train noticed the book and recoiled in horror at it. It was good to see this nurse balancing out the universe.


But the thing that really freaked me out was when I admitted this was my first flu shot. Everyone was very concerned, afraid that I would have an allergic reaction. I'm allergic to nothing (except, possibly, religion), but all the same it gave me The Fear. They made me wait a while before sending me back to work. My head filled with visions of my arm puffing out like an overstuffed sausage. It didn't help that the nurse asked me if I was right handed or left handed. When I said I was a righty, she said she would inject my left arm.


But it all went good. I swear to fuck, if I get sick this winter I'll be pissed. Fuck what my doctor says, I'm not getting the shot next year. But if all goes well? I guess I can shoulder that burden.