Watching the world yap away on FB, twitter, G+, skype, and texts. Stuck in a deep dark hole where my words don't slide into convos without tangling them up. The lurk is strong tonight.
Today felt 96 hours long. Stayed focused outward on chopping trees, mining ore, cooking sand blocks into glass, shearing stray sheep wandering by. Anything to keep my mind off it sucking to breathe. I've got the slightest control over it now, every move I make still precariously setting that tickle off again. It's been maddening in every sense of the word. Having to take a phone call to schedule my next round of therapy in May nearly undid me for awhile. If it's this bad in my house doing nothing, what will tomorrow be like going back into town? How will I talk with my psychologist tomorrow? This is triggering all kinds of memories of people I know who've spent their lives feeling this way because cystic fibrosis, or older people I know living with chronic COPD or emphysema. A pulmonologist told me a few years ago I'm heading that way one day, not necessarily from smoking 3 packs a day for a year and a half 20 years ago, but because my lungs are scarred up from a fungal infection common to this area. People get it from the soil when they garden and usually never even know it. It's a very specific kind of scarring and the pulmonologist recognized it instantly. He said my scarring is pretty bad.
Soil-Related Bacterial and Fungal Infections
Funny thing was, my chiropractor was the first person who alerted me to my scarred up lungs, was very concerned about it. All the chest x-rays I've had through the years, no one ever mentioned it. After I saw the pulmonologist I was able to go back and let the chiropractor know it's old scarring that I've lived with most of my life, probably acquired it as a teenager after we moved to this area. But it's interesting, isn't it? The chiro takes lots of x-rays, and so does the pulmonologist. They were both fairly disturbed about what they saw. The pulmonologist was floored that I'd never been to a doctor about breathing problems until I saw him later in midlife.
Every time I hear people talking about getting back to nature and living the healthy lifestyle, I just laugh. I'm positive for so many horrible afflictions, not the least being lyme (ticks), epstein-barr (mice), bartonella (farm cats), and apparently scarred up lungs from digging around in the dirt raising our own food. I made it through some pretty outrageous fevers in my childhood. My sister made it through a kidney infection without medical intervention. Yeah, we have great memories of back to nature and organic and the healthy lifestyle. Pretty sure I've been through listeria (raw milk) and salmonella (chickens) more than once. Sick. as. a. dog.
Oh, and by the way, rheumatic fever is real. Back to nature means getting through ridiculously high fevers without antibiotics, so I was ripe to be the lucky kid who went on to develop an arrhythmia during a nasty bout of measles in high school that I lived with for years and eventually had to be surgically corrected. General consensus is I'd have croaked from heart failure in my 40s without it. Just a thought. Strep and measles are no joke.
You can see why I am understandably pissy when I don't feel well. I haven't felt well most of my life, and although I'm the last person to whine that life isn't fair (I know so many people who've gone through much worse), I do tend to take being 'sick' a little personally. My backwards parents dragged me through everything without the medical assistance I desperately needed at times, and I became so calloused to pain that I didn't learn compassion for many years. Throw all of this into an autism spectrum head and you've got a perfect Mr. Glass scenario. He was a whiner too, actually. At least he had some sympathy from his mom.
I have felt this conflict my entire life. I've been obsessed with evil villains since I was a small child. Everything that drove me on goes back to anger, social isolation, and especially feeling emotionally abandoned and neglected by my parents. (Longer version here, embedding was disabled.) Spoiler warning- this is the end of the movie if you haven't seen Unbreakable.
Nowadays, medical neglect of children is looked upon as criminal. My parents weren't bad people. But I was for awhile. It's hard to pick up on the sympathy for others thing when you don't know what it feels like to personally receive it. I learned not to cry and just hold everything in, but it took awhile. I've met young adults who emancipated themselves from parents as teenagers just so they could get medical help. Unfortunately, their conditions were far worse than mine, but my first thoughts meeting people like that are 1- how incredibly brave they had to be (desperation can make the weakest among us very brave), and 2- why did I not ever think of that??? I have an independent stubborn streak that makes people crazy, but it never dawned on me to just leave home and go do what I want. Perhaps that is what saved me from becoming Mr. Glass, I dunno. I'm sure being autism spectrum had a lot to do with not picking up on a few things about the freedom I actually could have gotten for myself. As it was, I fought tooth and nail to get a driver's license after I graduated high school, and then get a job. I took a lot of crap for missing church to work in a pizza place, or coming home after midnight on late shifts. Most parents would probably be thrilled the grown kid was working, but noooo. Everything I did was taboo.
Yep, in a solid funk. Not exactly wallowing, maybe pissily stewing after a long day of distracting myself. At least I wasn't out there starting fights and inciting riots. I used to use other people for sport as distraction. That's why my very first post coming back out public had an apology in it, lol.
I confess I set those bombs under all those bridges. But I have a psychologist now. I've been practicing, like this: *ahem* "I'm sorry I ate your pets and used their skins for pillow cases. I hope you can forgive the misunderstandings and gloss over the awkwardness this has created."
I did this edit.
In case you missed it.
Ok, where was I? Back to evil. I can't tell you how often I've studied this guy. I wanna be just like him when I grow up, but I'm afraid I'm only quasi-evil. I'm just not as dedicated as I used to be.
I've about blogged myself into a stupor. Maybe I'll be able to sleep.
