Once again, I spent the better part of the morning trying to stay awake and hoping to hear back from the doctor's office. I did. They finally gave me a heads up on what I can and can't eat. (SIDEBAR: After a lengthy back and forth with the nurse, trying to figure out what I should do in the dietary department, the nurse calls back to inform me that the doctor says he told me what I should eat right after my procedure and diagnosis. WHAT??? Lemmegetthisstraight. I've not eaten in over 24 hours, I've just come out of anesthesia, I've just been told that I have a serious infection in my colon, and I'm supposed to remember what he told me to eat??? They gave me a damned packet of instructions when I left, why didn't they include a single sheet telling me what the f*&# to eat? Really. END OF SIDEBAR.) They've also decided not to prescribe pain medication and are instead giving me a higher dose of Prednisone in the hopes of decreasing the inflammation and the pain.
So here I sit.
Waiting.
Waiting for a little relief.
Knowing that if I go to the hospital and ask for help and relief from this pain, I could contract a secondary infection and end up in worse shape than I'm already in.
No thanks. I'll just suffer a little while longer.
Here's a picture for you to enjoy. It's a self-portrait. I call it Martyr with a Candle.
Actually, that's a bit off topic, but after I wrote the infamous cry of the self-pitying ("I'll just suffer a little while longer") I was reminded of an inside joke between my wife and I. We often come up with band names and album titles just for fun, and this is one of our all-time favorites. Y'know, the old joke, How many ___________ does it take to change a lightbulb?
The punchline for this particular version of the joke is "Never mind me, I'll just sit here in the dark." Hence the album cover photograph of black on black on black. It's a martyr with a candle.
Get it?
Ok.
Whatever.
Maybe it's one of those "ya had to be there" kinda things. I dunno.
So in 1998, I was sitting at home, doing a whole bunch of nothing (and by nothing, I mean drinking and smoking copious amounts of marijuana) when my wife left me. I can't say I blame her. Heck, I'd have left me too if I could have. Anyway, I get on the Internet and start talking to people online in a chatroom for Deadheads (Deadheads are people who really like the Grateful Dead, to the point of eerie obsession, of which I am one). I was on this thing all night every night, talking to the same group of people, and to one girl in particular. We're chatting and when we get done chatting, we call each other on the phone. (This was back in the dark ages when dial-up was the only Internet connection around, and having a second phone line just for Internet access was unthinkable. Okay, it wasn't unthinkable, but it was unthinkable to me because, as I previously mentioned, my moneys were devoted to the procurement of alcohol and herbal remedies, and I had no money to go spending on an extra phone line) These conversations would last into the wee hours of the morning, and (this was also back when they actually charged you to make a "long distance" phone call) often found ourselves quite sleep deprived the following day. Of course, being the good alcoholic that I was, I never really noticed how sleep-deprived I was because I was too busy being hung over, but that's another story entirely. (Actually, this story within a story is another story entirely too isn't it??? Maybe I should start doing the David Foster Wallace thing and use footnotes instead of these perpetual parenthetical interruptions... meh. whatever.)
And now I forgot what I was talking about, but fear not. I'll pick up the story later on. This is the important stuff that I've been meaning to write down for quite some time.
Say hello to Prednisone.
I'm not writing this for you. I'm writing it for me. I need to do this and save this and publish it to the web for my own self and sanity. I need to be able to look back at all of this when I'm not so out of my head, (and believe me.... It's gonna get worse before it gets better) so I can see what this madness looked like from the inside and from the outside.
It's funny. One of the "rules" of this experiment is that I can't delete anything. I can re-read it, but I can't go back and edit or delete any portion once it's been written. I made the horrible mistake of re-reading what I just spent the last 10 minute writing... all of it, and I'm wondering if perhaps this shouldn't be a publicly visible journal.
Something to consider.
For now, I'll stop writing because this is getting scary.
No. I won't.
I'll actually continue writing because this is getting scary.
Who the hell am I kidding? Nobody is gonna read this anyway, and if they do, surely they'll understand what's going on, and why I'm doing it. These aren't the musings of a madman. They're simply words composed under the influence of sickness, written out of fear.
So let's talk about the dosage information for a minute. I mentioned before that they've put me on Prednisone. I've taken it before, and it made me really nutty. I expect this time won't be any different.
I'm on 40mg of Prednisone for the next 4 days. After that, I scale down to 30mg for a week, then 20mg for a week, then 10mg for a week, then I'm done. I'm cured. I'm finally free from disease. The day after I get off the medication for good is my wife's birthday. I love that woman. She puts up with a lot from me sometimes.
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