This Internet Life

I just saw a blurb on the morning news about a website where you can send out e-cards (yes, like those irritating dancing/singing frogs and shit that you send out as a last minute "oops, I forgot today is your birthday/anniversary/jerk off day! Here's a last minute card!" to notify your past sexual partners that you have recently been diagnosed with a sexually transmitted disease.  Having recently had a treatable by 'cillin STD in the last year I will say it's horrible to have to face your partner to tell them (especially when you know it is their fault).  How funny though, to send a card to their inbox so nonchalantly like, hey! here's a picture of a really hunky guy's muscular back, have a great day!  Oh, and by the way, I have the gunk down there, you might want to get checked.  Imagine the weird build up and let down of getting that in your inbox.  The series of realization, anger, panic, etcetera.  

inSPOT.com  "Tell Them" - Interestingly all the cards I can find are really homo-centric.  I am especially amused that they are so gay.  I'm surprised they don't have different cards for different diseases.  Hey! I've got crabs! Shave that shit and call a doctor 'cuz you probably got it too, sucka! 

Support and struggles

I have been putting together my living will and a list of phone numbers and emails for my mom to contact when I pass away.  Have no fear, I'm not that urgent.  In fact I am better than I was earlier this year, and between you and me, I thought I was a goner then.  There are little things we mutants tell ourselves that represent worsening health.  For example, needing a port or needing O2 twenty four hours a day.  For me it's always been having visible changes on my x-rays.  Earlier this year it was grotesquely massive lumps of pneumonia all over my left side, causing severe pain and shortness of breath.  It was scary, I was needing more oxygen during the day then ever and just a few short steps were sending me into a breathless panic.

Here I am now, feeling awful yet better than I was from March on.  My x-rays are still changing, negatively, I've still got the nose hose and I'm still in lots of pain.  The morphine before treatments of routine vicodin seem to be helping physically but I'm worried about the power struggle I will have if I need to go home with oral pain medications.  Part of my addiction issues absolutely include pain medications and sleeping pills.  I can run through a months supply in a few short days.  I have no self control.  A big part of my sobriety is trying to control those urges as well.  It isn't realistic to think I'll leave here able to vest or have coughing fits without the need of such medications.  I'm going to face it when it happens.  I'm scared, yet feel hopeful that I will do the right thing for my body by not abusing them.

Rhi and Kevin left a beautiful comment on my last blog.  They visited me a while back and Rhi hit a very scary roadblock of sickness.  She found herself hundreds of miles from home sicker than she'd ever been before.  And yes, for once, I was not the sickest girl in the room.  And it was strange-- advocating for someone else, carry someone else's O2, holding the arm of someone with the familiar struggle for breath.  It was a beautiful lesson for me, somewhat humbling.  And Rhi made it through like a champion like many of us do over and over again.  She was graceful and kind, polite to the healthcare workers at my hospital that I wanted to strangle for their ignorance or attitude.  She talked about how my hospital was so much nicer than hers and it brought me to an understanding that where I am now is not a bad place.  It's familiar and full of loving staff members who know me.

Upon admission I entered my hospital room to a freshly made bed with a small bowl of cinnamon bears on it.  My nurses, or should I say my friends, remembered them to be my favorite candy.  They left a small clusterfuck of these tiny little bears for me to ingest as a warm get well gesture.

I feel thankful for what I have.  My lungs and heart and kidneys and pancreas and all those little fuckers of organs in my body are doing an incredible job despite everything.  They haven't given me much but they've given me everything they can and for that I am truly thankful.  

Honesty

I am in the hospital, very ill.  Awaiting a miraculous recovery.  

Just wanted to let all three of my avid readers know. 

Rope burns traced with devil's fingerbones

It's funny how so easily I can trade one vice for another.  I am in bed under a warm down comforter nursing a bottle of cough syrup.  Funny for a few reasons.  For one, and as the far most important point, I don't particularly enjoy cough syrup or the hazy fog is gives me but I've been fighting a terrible cold for two weeks that has now dropped into my lungs.  For second, and also important to note, at this time I would generally be nursing a hot toddy or more likely a straight glass of whiskey on my more usual sick nights.  Perhaps sobriety has done some good.  My body is definitely thanking me, my kidneys have not failed and I'm having less pains in my stomach.  My memory has been shit in these twenty-some-odd days but it's been worth it.  I carry around a small pad of Hello Kitty paper that I've kept notes, some elaborate, some of no more importance than what I would like for lunch that day.  Nonetheless it's been a great help.  And everyone I've spoken to with any amount of sobriety under their belts have said the first couple of months are particularly difficult.  

Which brings me to a very crucial thing I must state, and please believe this is not a statement made in vain or self denial, this is a discovery I made about twelve minutes into my first AA meeting:  I AM NOT AN ALCOHOLIC.  I'm simply not, I can go many stretches without drinking, I can have one drink, I don't have any situation of significance involving drunken lunacy in public (privately is a different matter).  No one in my life believes I need AA, which is making the commitment that much more of a challenge.  My mother continues to get completely shit-faced in my presence not truly understanding the struggle I am dealing with.  I just simply felt the drinking was out of control, I felt the wake-up-take-a-swig-of-whiskey-to-numb-the-aching-throat-from-cough was a bit unmanageable.  It just all felt wrong and I can't pinpoint an exact second I realized I had a problem but I will be the first to admit my addiction issues are far less severe than 9 out of 10 people in Alcoholics Anonymous. 

Sobriety is in some senses quite refreshing.  I handled beers all day at work one weekend and didn't drink.  I wanted to, but I held off despite the crack of the cans opening all around me.  I watched bands play that night, amazing musicians filled with rock'n'roll fury barely witnessed once a year, and I was free of toxins.  Seeing a band I love play with no booze, no weed, no hallucinogens or any of that in my system was incredible.  I couldn't believe the jolt I got from the music alone.

And so be it.  I would like to think one day I can switch to a social drinker in full control living life gracefully and undertaking a night of drinking with caution and care but more than that I hope that I will always remember what it's like to feel this way.  What it's like to know that I'm not destroying my body from the inside out.

Sobriety check: Day 12

Close to a fortnight without substances or drink, I'm feel disoriented and heartsick.  I've taken more sober falls in the last two weeks than I have in my life.  My knees are black and blue.  My elbows and palms are skinned.  I tripped on the sidewalk outside a bar tonight as I was walking by and everyone in line laughed about how drunk I was.  Yeah.  Sure.

AA sure puts it's participants through the fucking ringer.  I went in expecting to find distractions to drinking-- eating lollipops, chewing gum, avoiding the liquor store (although I swear several times my car has tried to drive me there on my own), cutting off from non-supportive friends.  But no.  None of that has ever been suggested (well, my newly found sponsor, Angel, told me that since alcohol is something like 80% sugar eating lots of candy helped her during her first several months). 

Their mission is clear, it is a program for those willing to do the work to quit drinking, and they adhere to that promise.  This is a somewhat ambiguous promise until you begin to submerge yourself into the steps and you realize that not only am I going to be depressed because for once in whatever amount of time I can't drink whiskey in the tub, but also because after you accomplish step one (simple! I have admitted I am powerless over alcohol and unable to manage my life on my own), you start to step two and three and so on and it seems like the deeper I am getting the more I am regretting entering the program.  It's not that I am even having that difficult a time not drinking, it's just this shit I have to sludge through.  I have to map out my resentments and realize that I don't drink to drink, I drink to cope.  I never drank to have a good time, I always drank to tolerate my body.  The heaving lungs get lighter with every swig and I fondly remember my days of trekking San Francisco just how fucking fast I would fly up Lombard with a half a bottle of bourbon in my system.  It is little moments of forgetting the pain of getting out of bed in the morning, forgetting that my kidneys don't understand their function, forgetting that my lungs are filling faster than I can manually clear them...  forgetting that I am real, that I exist, that I am alive and mostly, that I am dying.

A slow death, I can say for certain.  So many people in these meetings have said that they were waking up in the morning during their darkest days as addicts and alcoholics and they would curse their higher power for allowing them to wake up that morning.  I thought after hearing that several times it was positive I haven't often felt that way until I realize my reaction to waking up every morning is often, Of course I'm alive.  Of course I'm waking up.  I'm destined to live the life of a fucking vampire.  I'm going to live with this shit for-ev-er.  Somehow I think that's not much healthier than wishing death.

Back to this whole step four, mapping out resentment.  AA treats the drink by making you dig so deep into the soul you'll end up wanting to die before you make it through.  I think that's the deal, at the very least I have spent the last three days laying on my couch all day wondering why the fuck I am who I am and why in the fuck I've been such a selfish cunt for so many years.

I don't resent people.  Well.  That's not entirely true.  I do resent my ex, J.  Not for who he is or even what he did but how his actions changed my view of my disease.  I thought I was over being angry about my disease when I happily left my teens for my twenties.  That shit, I thought, was buried in dust along with Sta-Prest Levi's and hipster moddy square toed shoes.  I left it with the days of missing curfew and telling the world to go fuck itself.  Slowly it crept back though.  J resented my disease.  He resented, still presently does as far as I know, what it was doing to me emotionally, what it was doing to my body, and mainly what it was doing to him.  It completely disabled him from any capable human emotional reaction.  Hospital visits were few and far between.  My vest machine would move from one end of the living room to another, far less visible and much more inconvenient spot.  My nebulizer cups would be put away faster than they could dry.  After each move my medications were always given their own neat little shelf-- hidden away behind a cabinet of some sort.  I recall once, after a particularly noncompliant couple of months, I opened the fridge to find my Tobi and Dnase missing.  He'd thrown it away for "more space".  You never used it anyway, he said.  And who was I to argue?  The expense of the medications seemed a joke because he was right-- I didn't ever use them and who am I to tell him he's wrong throwing out something I didn't ever touch?  

My cough is what bothered him most.  Eventually we stopped going on dates to movie theaters.  One particularly cold first of January we were driving to the bar to meet a few of his friends.  Looking forward to meeting them, I felt fine but was having a terrible coughing fit.  That cold air set it off and I couldn't seem to stop.  Are you going to cough like this all night?  Are you okay?, he slowed the car.  Amidst a cough, a gasp for air, another cough and a sort of laugh, I said, I'm fine, let's go! and that's when this horrible secret came to light.  He turned the car around and said that my cough made people in public uncomfortable.  He was ashamed of it and nobody knew I was sick.  Not his mother who I'd met on several occasions, not his best friend who I'd shared many stories with over beers.  Not his brother who I was growing somewhat fond of.  Nobody.  It was a shameful, secretive thing that only we were to know.

That changed everything.  I loved him deeply still and decided, despite the guilt I had knowing I'd always be his disfigurement, to move across state lines with him.

J made me resent my disease like I never thought possible.  It brought up everything I'd ever felt sad because of relating to illness.  It made me feel shameful, as if my illness were my fault and something that should be kept hidden.  I hated it.  I hated him for making me angry with the biggest problem I am ever to face especially after feeling like I had cleansed myself of any confusion or ill will regarding it.

So, Bill W., one of the founding members of AA, believed that people drink or abuse drugs because they have resentment.  Some people were molested, some were abused, some had too much too young too fast.  I have this shitcocksuckingmotherfucking disease that I can't get rid of.  It's eating me up inside and now it's eating my brains too, and my soul at a whole new level seeing as I'm supposed to battle this shit David and Goliath style until I can overcome it and lose the urge to drink.

What the fuck?  What the fuck am I doing?  I would rather drink and ignore this shit.  And if that makes me a bad person, a selfish person, a tiny person so be it.  I will be fine with being the worst piece of shit fatherfucker in the universe as long as I don't have to face this shit.

Well.  Maybe I won't be.  I'm lazy.  I'm an alcoholic.  I don't drink to numb pain, I drink to survive.  And stepping down from this will make me lazier that I've ever been in my life.  It will make me more of a coward than I thought even possible.  Stepping up and taking this challenge is going to change my life, I know it will.  It's not the drink I miss at this point, it's the beauty of the ignorance I've held in my heart, mind and soul for years passed.  

I'll attend another meeting.  And another.  And slowly I'll creep through these steps.  I just can't believe it when someone says they got through these steps in less than a month.  I have a faint grasp on the idea that I can have some sort of peace if I follow through with this.  I have a strong inkling that I'm forever the shell of a dead person walking if I don't.  

And no, I haven't found God yet.  Don't fret!  Hail Satan! 

Holy shit, Batman!

I have been sober for three days and I am attending my first AA meeting tomorrow. 

Pregnant teenagers, Alaska's foreign policies, life.

Sorry to have dropped the ball on DNC blogging.  My kidneys failed and I needed to take care of my health versus run around town.  Interestingly, most of the local people I talked to about the DNC were more excited about all the partying they did than the history that was made.  Kind of sad.

http://www.imeem.com/manifesthope

This week has been Bulleit, Michael Gira, work and slumming it.  I am attending the TriMedia Film Festival in Fort Fun this weekend to support a brilliant film-making friend.  I'm looking forward to seeing Coyote.   Anyone going to be there?  Hit me up.  Perhaps we could grab a drink.