Art’s bloggetyblog-blog-blog

I was reading at lunch over at Tropics, enjoying some yellow curry that I had a terrible taste for. I read the following and had to fight back tears.

On one occasion I was sick with what was probably malaria, lying in my hut, feverish and wretched. I had received medicine from a monastery elder, but it was slow in taking effect. Ajahn Chah came to visit me. "Sick and feverish, huh?" he asked. "Yes," I replied weakly. "It's painful all over, isn't it?" I nodded. "Makes you feel sorry for yourself, doesn't it?" I smiled a bit. "Makes you want to go home to see your mother." He smiled, and then nodded. "Yes, it's suffering, alright. Almost all the forest monks have had it. At least now we have good medicine." He paused. "Here. This is where we have to practice. Not just sitting in the meditation hall. It's hard. All the body torment and mind states. You learn a lot." He waited for a while, then he looked at me with the warmth of a kind grandfather. "You can bear it, you know. You can do it." And I felt that he was fully there with me, that he knew my pain from his own hard struggles. It took another day for the medicine to kick in, but his simple kindness made the situation bearable. His compassion gave me courage and helped me find my own freedom in the midst of hardship.

- From The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology by Jack Kornfield

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Soma back in the hizzy. My MRI came back, messy. Degenerative disk disease like everyone else and a few bulges but nothing worth operating on. Which is a good thing but so much for the quick fix. Back to the horse tranquilizers for the pain. The effexor is out of the way, wasn't that. Nothing to operate on. I'm placing all my chips on the double zero - I need to lose weight. I'm going to take this plane straight down with a medical liquid supervised diet.

That's all that's left my good friends, all that's left between me and painkillers until my sanity flickers out to darkness.

God, each Soma is like a six pack sans calories and piss.

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This was the first I'd heard about it. I was like, dude:

Then this came up. They hadn't even called me yet. I got distracted for awhile pondering the whole Billy Mays thing. If it hadn't been for Billy I doubt I'd have this beard or the Honduran Presidency. I made sure my ringer was on:

And then they got ahold of my photo somehow and added a few quotes. At this point I realized I had probably put more time into this than I should have:

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Buck Rogers isn't encumbered by any silly Prime Directive during his stay on Vistula, the planet of the slave girls. It took me awhile to figure out that it is called Vistula and not Fistula.

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I called my doc and left the third message in 24 hours. I let him know that I've found my 2/2008 MRI images and notes if he'd like to see them. I also said I'd like to get in either today or tomorrow for an MRI. Let's see how well this whole take control thing goes...

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I went through so much trouble trying to find a suitable doctor photo on google image search.

You'll receive +10 bonus points if you can tell me who that doctor is.

Anyway, I gulped down a fist-full of pills and went to my team's teambuilding event yesterday. Whirlyball. The cars were slower than the ones back in Chicago and they had more silly rules than I remember. We had two people who had to insist on being THE BEST which was kind of embarrassing.

On the way home I got a call from the on-call doctor returning my call. He said my doc would be glad to order an MRI if I wanted one, also gave me the nod to take another soma at bedtime. Then there was that issue about that thing going on downstairs... I asked the doc about it, said I was going to be straightforward and frank about what was going on and he said he could take it and I told him the deal and, man, he said, "Yeah... that's called 'soiling'."

And I mean really when I think of that word I think of something pretty full on, because you know "soil" means like dirt. I mean I don't need an excavator to tidy up the basement or anything. What is happening to me is super light and there's only a whisper enough there to have me ask what the fuck. He said that there's many degrees of soiling and it sounded like this was a very light degree. But still.

Really now that's two terms that I can think of that I've heard ascribed to myself. Way back as a kid I was overweight and I used to have to buy pants sized "husky." "Husky." I hate that term. "Husky." Oh no I'm not fat, I'm husky... here, look, the tag says husky. And now "soiling."

I mean when I think of the term I think of like crazy folks on the tweek running down the street, collapsing in the gutter and sure as hell, them pants be soiled. I think of really old fo [...]

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Long ago when this whole back thing started, I told someone that surgery would be the last resort, that it'd be the last thing I'd try after I tried everything else. And all the doctors that I've seen have agreed that'd be a good idea, and three years later I've tried everything and I'm in complete agony.

The last week has been pretty bad. I had a sleepless night a week ago, called my new doc in the morning and got new fancy muscle relaxants and an NSAID, which kind of work. I take both in the morning, drive to work drunk, take a Soma in the afternoon, then the NSAID and the Soma again in the evening. Only thing is the pain is so bad that I have to find a place to sit half way between my car and my office. And each night around 4am the pain blows up and I writhe in agony. And then in the morning I get up all twisted and in pain and pray for the stuff to kick in what little relief it's going to give.

Then there's the red flag. It's the one thing that all of my doctors - the smart ones, the idiots, and the quacks - have agreed on. I've been told that if I lose control of stuff in the basement I'm to go straight to the emergency room. The condition is called cauda equina syndrome and basically means it's all over but the shouting, raise the flag, the ship is sinking. The problem is I'm not exactly sure what's going on down there is what they're referring to. There's varying degrees of things that can happen down there and the most polite way I can describe it is that something untoward is happening, and has been happening for about two weeks now, so.

I'm about to make the call to my doc, the "look dude, I'm fucking dying over here and either it's surgery or I'm putting a bullet in my fucking head," call. The "Because I don't care about how old I am or I'm too young for surgery or your politics save this sort of thing for the end case because I'm in agony, agony, agony, agony and I cannot, cannot [...]

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This one looks most promising as it shortens the url back to my blog.

Artsblog officially lives here: http://www.totesfawes.com

Last one didn't work, trying again

Artsblog officially lives here: http://www.totesfawes.com

That supposedly twitters the posts somehow. Kind of just testing it out here.

Artsblog officially lives here: http://www.totesfawes.com