The Bloody Doors Off

One pill makes you larger
And one pill makes you small,
And the ones that mother gives you
Don’t do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
When she’s ten feet tall.

White Rabbit, Jefferson Airplane

I’m stuck.

I’m searching for a way to frame it, so it’ll make sense.

No luck so far.

It’s a feeling, not a physical impediment.

There’s no outward cause, no trigger.

And a sense of déjà vu.

I’ve been here. Wherever here is.

Okay I’ve spent too much time debating whether ‘here’ or ‘is’ should be emphasized.

Don’t think I identified the cause then, either.

Just like I can’t pinpoint the reason for this post.

Despite my threats yesterday, I took a lithium this morning.

Same issues.

Spoke with my psychiatrist just now, and he’s agreed I can stop taking them effective immediately. “Some experiments fail,” he said. We’re not going to replace it right now; instead we’ll see how I fare in the short-term on just Wellbutrin with a Prozac chaser.

I’m relieved.

Now if I could do something about my dentures.

They don’t feel a part of me. Like they don’t belong. But without them, I look and sound like a meth addict.

Okay. That’s mean to meth heads.

But you get my point.

Which is. I’m vain as hell.

Doc Sugarman says the final dentures will be a vast improvement.

But I won’t get those until summer 2022 at the earliest.

It’s frustrating. I went out last night to see Eddie Izzard perform, and had dinner with friends beforehand. It took me three times as long to eat my meal. (It didn’t help I’m dealing with a sore on my tongue from all the stress of late.) The entire time I panicked, worried I was holding everything up. I’d contemplated skipping the dinner. Hell, I fought against my instincts to stay home as well, I was feeling so disconnected. But I’m glad I went; she was hilarious, and this may be her last tour before she runs for UK Parliament.

TLDR: I get to stop taking lithium, my dentures bug me, and I saw a show last night.

You know what? I don’t give a fuck about waiting to talk to my psychiatrist. I’m going off the lithium.

The mental and physical paralysis is too much to take.

I think it went wanderin’ off down yonder
And stumbled onto Jeff VanVonderen
‘Cause I need an interventionist
To intervene between me and this monster
And save me from myself and all this conflict
‘Cause the very thing that I love’s killing me
And I can’t conquer it
My OCD is conkin’ me in the head, keep knockin’
Nobody’s home, I’m sleepwalkin’
I’m just relayin’ what the voice in my head’s sayin’
Don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just friends with the

I’m friends with the monster that’s under my bed
Get along with the voices inside of my head
You’re tryin’ to save me, stop holdin’ your breath
And you think I’m crazy, yeah, you think I’m crazy

The Monster, Eminem

I was having a good day.

Even went out to see The Eternals. Spoiler-free review: it’s uneven, but overall I enjoyed it.

Got home, had a conversation with the wife.

Then.

Wham.

It hits.

The feeling is indescribable. For me.

Sometimes it’s like someone took a knife baby edgy and dull
And cut a six inch valley through the middle of my skull

At night I wake up with the sheets soaking wet
And a freight train running through the middle of my head

I’m on Fire, Bruce Springsteen

And I’m totally freaking out and I need to talk about this to Marlo but there’s that little voice that says ‘you shouldn’t burden her’ and that quickly deteriorates into mental fisticuffs. The pit in my stomach is growing and I am repeating my mantra ‘this will pass’ and.

It.

Does.

Thank whatever deity you worship — or not, I don’t judge — the malaise dissipates.

Well, not entirely. I can feel it on the edges.

I won the fight.

But I’m worried a war is brewing.

Last night got kinda dark.

Harold came for a visit.

Normally when he drops by, I get a very strong feeling of despair. Last night I felt. Nothing.

Which I’m gonna say is worse.

Obviously, it didn’t last. Never does. And I’m able to recognize it, even when I’m dancing on the serrated edge.

This morning fared better than earlier in the week.

Harold was gone, for one. And I wasn’t stuck. The past few days, I’ve had moments where I’ve felt paralyzed, standing/sitting in place, desperately willing myself to move.

I’m beginning to think it’s the lithium.

There’s one way to be sure. But I can’t just stop taking the medication.

Gotta consult with my psychiatrist first.

It’s after-hours on Friday.

Which means I wait until Monday.

And keep track of any further episodes.

My mind and body are rebelling. Restless leg is flaring up earlier in the evening, sometimes so severe I have no choice but to kick out for momentary relief. Used to affect me only when I slept. Now I have to take my pills by nightfall just to get relief. My dentures feel alien tonight. Mornings are a write off. It takes me twice or three times as long to do simple tasks.

I can’t even articulate this properly.

Mornings are proving difficult. Normally I’m up at 6:30am, taking a little me time before waking the household and getting the boy’s lunch prepared before he heads off to school. But this week I’ve struggled to get out of bed, usually taking between 30 and 60 minutes to get moving. Today is a school-from-home day so I slept until 8am.

Which is rare.

Normally I wake up at 5:30 and go back to sleep. Dunno why. My CPAP mask is leaking air out the sides and that has me waking several times a night to fix it. I’ve tried readjusting the straps to no avail. I think it’s time for a replacement mask, which they say you should be replacing every few months anyway. Not like I have that kind of money.

As I said, this week has been a tug-of-war. And after waking, I’m filled with a sense of helplessness. I can’t concentrate for long periods of time. It takes me roughly three hours just to shake it and get on with my day. It’s affecting my eating habits, as well. At most I have a blueberry muffin for breakfast, with copious amounts of coffee. I’m lucky if I eat a bagel sandwich for lunch.

I don’t know if this is a side-effect of starting the lithium, but it’s not impressing me at the moment. Yes, its tamping down my more aggressive impulses, but if this continues I’m gonna reassess with my psychiatrist.

Whom I haven’t spoken to in a month. We have scheduled appointments and he’s missed the last two. I need to follow up with him. He’s close to retirement and sometimes I worry he’s had an accident. But he put in my new scrip for sleeping pills so I know nothing has befallen him.

It’s depression, I know. It’s a chemical imbalance in the brain. But these moments of lucidity are infrequent, and the haze that envelopes me is strong.

What I don’t know, is how to change this.

I don’t want to ride it out. This feels like a roller coaster ride where you go backwards. Which I’ve been on, and refuse to do ever again. (Thank you, Canada’s Wonderland The Bat.) If I’m gonna dip and turn, and do loops, I prefer to be facing front.

My annual CT lung scan is coming up next month. There’s a tiny spot, benign, been there for years. Despite the truly stressful moments where I consider lighting up a cigarette, I’m glad I quit eight years ago. Here’s hoping there’s been no growth over the past 12 months. In the meantime, I get to play the waiting game. And I’ve got no patience for it.

A bit of recent good news: my bloodwork came back mostly on target. My AIC is 6.4, the lowest it’s ever been. That puts me in the pre-diabetes column and if I can get it below 6.0, I may be able to come off of some of my medications. I’ve got a phone appointment with my endocrinologist this afternoon, so we’ll see what he says.

The dental work continues, unabated.

Four fillings to take care of later this month. Then a six month reprieve, aside from cleanings, before one final tooth gets pulled and a new top mould is taken. Which means I’ll be rocking these temporary dentures for half a year, at least. I’m okay with that.

Hopefully work will pick up enough to defray the cost next year, if/when I get the finals (which she said would be way easier to do things like chew food; I’m still struggling with that). You know what would be better? If I could land full-time with benefits. That would rock, and help out my family immensely.

I can’t write.

It just won’t come out.

There are fleeting thoughts that I linger over, wondering what station that train of thought would deposit me.

Jeebus. That last sentence started innocently, and got corrupted real fast.

Am I trying too hard?

In this moment, maybe.

But this is a good exercise. Don’t discard the crap that comes out, because the next shit may include a diamond.

Unh. That one physically hurt.

I’m liking Star Trek: Lower Decks? It’s faithful to the universe, but it’s also bitingly funny.And because it’s animated, they can go anywhere with the concept, and rope in some welcome Guest Voices.

Trying not to spoil it. I’m bad at that.

And it’s almost always intentional. I don’t set out to ruin a plot twist, or surprise appearance. But it happens. No matter how innocuous I think the post is, someone smarter than me will get the reference.

For example. The Sixth Sense. Everyone’s seen that, yeah?

If not, stop reading.

No, I mean it. I’m going to spoil the surprise twist.

When I first saw it, I had no clue that Bruce Willis was dead the entire movie.

See, I told you I was going to spoil the movie.

Anyway, I think I posted something along the lines of “Great use of the colour red throughout”, which you would think is a cinematic choice if you didn’t know it’s true significance. Yet people smarter than me pointed out that the red accents were integral to the plot.

Didn’t mean to spoil it, but I definitely ruined it for someone.

So yeah. Lower Decks. Worth your valuable time.

Trading cards.

I remember collecting trading cards. But not baseball, no that was my brother Wayne’s pastime. I was into comics and comic book movies. You believed a man could fly. And a lone figure who struck fear in the underworld by dressing as a bat.

I was into the 1989 Batman movie starring Michael Keaton. I collected their trading cards. If you got them all and flipped them over, it made one large picture. I even had a full, sealed box of the trading cards. I was convinced it was a good investment, that it would appreciate in time.

I think I made $50. Which, it turns out, was the right call.

But those baseball cards my brother collected. There might’ve been a few gems hidden in those binders.

I’ve been having these vivid memory recalls lately.

Not exactly reliving them. But these are thoughts going back three, four decades. I have to remind myself sometimes what I had for lunch that day. Or, like today, didn’t have.

My grandmother developed Alzheimer’s in her mid-90s.

My mum died in her 70s but was sharp as a tack.

I wonder. If things had been different, if she survived the heart attack. Would the disease have been passed down? And would it be harder to lose a piece of her each day, or the more immediate, massive coronary in a laundromat.

My wife reminded me recently that we need to talk burial plots and wills.

I’m feeling my mortality today. Can you tell?