Cleaning.
There it is. A whole list of things I don’t like to do. Or is just a list of the easiest thing in the world to put off? Either way, something seems to have changed just a bit, and I have a feeling it has something to do with the absence of cannabis. In any case, it was change for the better and my home now looks so much better. Three days with no pot and each day I’ve cleaned the kitchen, yet I wake up and it still looks dirty, so I clean it more. I think it’s done now, like done done. Well, I have a feeling I’ll hit it one more time tomorrow, that will be the polish.
This headache, it’s gone in and out all day, yet right now it is just ripping through my head like a bad high. I wanted to think I’d get used to it, yet really I have no idea how long that might take, as really this is the first time I’ve tried to tolerate it without drugs. The first week or two in the hospital was non-stop opioids, then cannabis as soon as I could get some brought in.
For the record, I did consult my doctor before I took that step, as I did not want to interfere with my treatments. With the stomach and eating issue I was have, I simply asked him if cannabis could help. Rather than answer, he responded that although Florida is a medical cannabis state, he was not able to prescribe it for me. Okay, I said, I didn’t ask if you could prescribe it, I asked if it might help and not interfere with any of my other medications.
He paused, turned to the computer to look at my pharmaceutical diet, scrolling with the mouse then turned back to me and said “Cannabis should have no cross reactions with anything you’re taking.” Going on, “Though, I can’t say that it would help and I can’t say it would hurt.” and repeated that it wasn’t something he could help me with. I seem to think I asked him a third time for perfect clarity, yet phrased in a way that gave him plausible deniability, and also made it obvious that I was asking his permission. At the end a shoulder shrug and smirk was all I got. Okay, thank you doctor.
It helped, a lot. After a week of THC, I was able to eat full meals and with my focus on other parts of my recovery, cannabis has kept it’s spot in my medicine cabinet (so to speak,) since. Well, until a few days ago. I wasn’t able to eat much yesterday at all, and today I woke up at seven and very hungry. Yesterday, I thought I might try the walk to Loomis park everyday, and before I made it out of my bedroom door, I knew that was not going to happen.
Downstairs right away, I devoured a bowl of cereal, sat back down for a second, then helped myself to a second bowl. Right afterwards, the headache rolled. I tried to get up and do some things, yet it was like I just couldn’t stand other than with momentum moving me somewhere. All my stabilization muscles were toast and I was all wobbly. I couldn’t stand still without pain. Between that and the headache, I went back to bed.
Which, pretty much means I would have had to call in sick for my first day of work, had my new job actually been a real job. Yes, it’s real work I’ll do as an author I guess, editing, formatting, etc. I don’t really consider the writing/typing itself to really be work, yet I guess it kinda is, creative work. Really though, especially now I really see this as gift. Yes, I could type before, I’ve got long history with the typewriter angel. Yet never had I had this rate of flow.
Of course, part of that is likely my newfound “who gives a fuck” attitude towards the amount of my soul I’m willing to put online. Depending on the day and the post, I feel like I’ve torn down the walls that blocked the words that I could never let out before. It feels good, so good. It makes me wonder the point of the secrets in the first place. Especially now as I look back, it seems each thing in my life that I didn’t call out as wrong the moment I saw it, latched onto me in an attempt to drag me to hell.
Worse, some things I didn’t even see. The sexual promiscuity of my youth, from my emancipation until I met my older son’s mother, didn’t even register as wrong. Treating women as if they were not people, merely playthings and toys to keep myself entertained and ahead in the score for the competition with my buddies. The guilt I feel now, to have been treated the same by one or two women, yet the return damage that I did to the collective human psyche was magnitudes greater by volume, even if not near the same depth of destruction.
This might be a curse. Oh, I wish I didn’t know better. Sometimes God’s love feels like a curse, when really it’s just His bright light shining into the depths of your soul, resonating and burning out the impurities. The same way your cavities react if you’re on top of a microwave radio tower. It does not feel good. Some might yell out “God, why would you do this to me!”, rather I thank Him profusely.
See, before my incident, I was a math guy, numbers by the dozens- which base would you like to use? Formulas and excel spreadsheets as far as the eye could see. With my 42″ computer monitor, I have more than a few spreadsheets that would fill it edge to edge. One I remember for the City water rates, a spreadsheet of water usage for 13,000 customer. I could scroll and just… just see the numbers. Yes I like charts too, yet I didn’t really need them. Just scroll the sheet, properly sorted, with my eyes wide open and I could feel the ebb and flow, the trends of the numbers.
With YouTube over the last decade or two since I’ve been out of school, I’ve learned to visualize, to do my math with my imagination rather than a calculator. Well, at least for the first go through. Once ready to present, I’d always pull out some charts for other people to see. Now though, even just my budget spreadsheet is too much to ‘see’ at once. I can still try, and if I try hard enough, yes I can still do math and Excel. Except now the flow I had, the ability to suck in data from my screen, is gone.
What I really wonder, is if this vocabulary skill was alway there, hidden under the math genius (tested fact, see resume) and now with that now gone, I can finally access and use this literary power. Or, if it was deeper than that- actually, that is what I think it was. I hit my head pretty hard and I know I shook it up. I already knew about the concept of plasticity, and somehow I think I forced my brain to go in this direction when I had a chance to make it move. Even in the depth of my coma, from the first sights I remember past my tumbling field of green, I knew I had a few things to say.
It makes me wonder too, perhaps this is nothing special at all. Maybe just the natural result of an honest solo conversation. Perhaps you’ve heard stories of training coon dogs, it’s pretty easy (according to one book I read,) just put the dog and the raccoon in a barrel. Your dog will come out a killer with the taste and smell permanently ingrained, or it won’t come out at all. How does one lock themselves in a barrel with their own soul? Yes, it’s there with you everywhere- yet, when have you spent the time to get to know it? To get to know yourself?
I’ve always been.. well, introspective? One that prefers deep thought, hard questions… something to think about? Given a topic, I could research, learn and give my (qualified?) opinion at will.. Yet never, never had I thought of making myself that topic.
Okay, back to the day, where was I?
Ahh, laying in bed for most the morning, just feeling the pain in my legs and in my brain; tossing, turning, rolling, stretching just trying to find any relief. Eventually I napped an hour and I felt much better when I woke up. Cleaned the kitchen, more thoroughly, more dishes, the last of the pots and pans (even my camping pan set that had been sitting there since I first came back to Michigan.)
And I got the floor swept too (never realized the ab workout included with that task!)
Tired now (I just jumped over and made a large comment on the US Fun Jumper post… lets move on the important detail.
I haven’t been taking my muscle relaxers (Robo, roto- something, I don’t want to go look for the bottle,) for the last four weeks or so, it just wasn’t doing anything and I didn’t notice if I had taken it or now, so preferring less drugs, I stopped. Today my abs were killing me, the left side of my body pulled so tight I was leaning that way. So I though I’d try my previous prescription, Baclofen, which is a muscle relaxer specifically for Spasticity.
When I took it before, it did nothing for my leg at all really, and back then I didn’t notice my back/ab pain as much in comparison to the worse problems at the time. So I tried it this afternoon and OMG, praise God, it did sooth my abs- also, my foot- the ankle a bit, and mostly I can feel the difference inside the metatarsal, both that it moves more loosely and also holds more firmly when I’m not moving it. So, back on the list of daily drugs.
Okay, I’m exhausted, I’m not even going to read back over what I’ve written.
Time to rest.