I guess I shall venture in here for a bit. I just need to do this ala Callahan's Crosstime Saloon.
Pay at the Bar for a bit of mead.
Walk over to the chalk line facing the fireplace.
Toast: "To my health"
Take my gulp
Pitch the glass into the fireplace.
take my change from the cigar box and slump into a plush chair in a well lit corner with my drawing tablet and pencils.
reasons. I've been fighting the good fight for almost a decade against crohn's disease. I've learned to handle it and manage it, but doing so changes your life. You tend to it and are tethered to it all your days and night, every choice you make comes with the qualifier "if I can work it out with my crohn's". Holiday meals have you showing up with a jar of your own food and likely eating out of synch with everyone else. Gatherings at restraunts have you always the one who doesn't order anything and has to leave early to go home and eat. Your daily plans always starts with "Get up, get clean, eat something, wait to see how sick I get and then plan my day from there." Long car rides have to have planned stops for an hour and a half to eat and potentially get sick every 2-4 hours, and you require a cooler to keep your specially prepared food safe from spoilage.
Even after all that, sometimes you just have to write off a day or three.
But like I said I manage. That I can handle.
But after months of fighting with a doctor for medical explainations to my employer and getting nowhere I thought I'd managed to resolve employment problems... until budget cuts came along and they needed to let somebody go and seeing as I had no confirmed excuse through medical proof...
Not that big a deal really, if that had been it I could cope well enough.
But the day I got let go was when I started to get symptoms of a cold or flu that hung around for weeks.
I had to go through an application process for a new doctor and the time frame on all of this was a bit of a bother, in the mean time I'd done a switch up with one of the twelve food I can eat. I noticed I was starting to feel better, until a few days later I switched back to the old foods again. Suspecting a reaction I switched away again. By this point the doctor arranged to see me and we eventually did some baseline blood tests and mostly looking healthy went in for a chest x-ray. The results showed hints of pnuemonia. So the doctor perscribed an antibiotic.
Well the antibiotic caused mild nerve damage, uncontrolled muscle clenching, ringing in my ears, panic attacks, depressive episodes and tendon pain... with the first dose. We stopped that and it was days before I was functional enough to get out again. I still get tendon pain and rining in my ears and minor muscle and nerve glitches.
Follow up x-ray says pneumonia is gone. Got some allergy testing and consult with GI specialist. Allergy test came back negative. So a week later I change my diet back to the same as has worked for years... and by the end of that night I was shivering and sweating, gulping air through my mouth as my nose was closed, my face and chest and hands felt like a bad sunburn and it just seemed to get worse as the night progressed. I got four hours sleep with the tingling burning and sense of nervous energy built up.
Another trip to the doctors, who said that since I didn't have hives and my lungs sound clear that I was likely safe to just take antihistamine and avoid the food.
So Antihistamine taken my body just crashed for 14 hours. I'm still dealing with lingering symptoms of flushed and itchy and I'm worried I might be allergic to all the foods, though I know I had no issues with the rest before I switched back.
And now I'm due back for a scoping and given the way things are going I half expect to be given a month to live, but that is my inner pessemist talking. He's also asking questions about what will I do if another allergy develops like this one and the one I seem to develop two years ago. What if every year or two I lose another food I can keep down? What if this last one opened the floodgates and I just start losing then over the coming weeks? What if they do find cancer? What if the situation requires drug treatment and all the horrible side effect those drugs cause (those are pretty much a given, these drugs mess people up, but they can shut down the digestive problems so they are seen as worth the compromise)?
So here I am, jobless, poor, barely able to eat enough to survive nutritionally, with food allergies developing unexpectedly, bad reactions to medecines, and an upcoming medical proceedure to look for death sentences, or at least problems. I'm scared, I'm alone, and I'm just plain tired.
I'm tired of the fight to hold it together. I'm tired of fighting for every inch of ground I make in my life. I'm tired of the struggle...
and all I see when I look forward is more struggle heaped upon me with time, greater and greater physical pain, further disability. I'm afraid that my future is me, wired and tubed up in a bed or motorized chair in pain and drugged being tended by my eldering mother for several years as she and my family watch me die. And the real bitch of it is I will fight that whole way to hold on because I am that stubborn, but I'll pay for that with years of suffering, and whatever little part of my mind lingers through it all will know that I used to be able to tinker and design amazing things and that I had such awesome plans.
I think I need to see a councilor.
