Day 25 - (A Sort of Hiatus)

A picture of my day:

Gotta kick it like this for a few more days at least.

 My illness is getting the better of my ability to write cogently and in a timely manner. I'm going to have to take some time off and re-prioritize - focus on the goal of getting healthy soon, and without letting my grades slip.

So this is a picture of my day - I'll tell you all about it, hopefully in a week to ten days when I'm feeling better.  In the meantime, thanks for all of the get-well wishes.

By the way, if you have any questions about Sickle Cell or how it affects me, or life as a chronic hospital patient, please don't hesitate to ask, here or via email.

Day 24

A picture of something I wish I could change:

Let's face it, I probably could do more about my looks here, but I took the specific language of the prompt to imply, "A picture of something I can do little or nothing to change."

I wish I could change the treatment for a severe Sickle Cell Crisis.  I just ran some extremely underestimated numbers, and I figure that I've been hospitalized for pain crisis at least forty times since birth, for a total of well over 365 days.   This number only includes the hospitalizations I can specifically remember, and only the ones solely motivated by sheer pain - not, for example, by a sudden inexplicable limp, or sudden blurred vision.  Maybe I'd double again the number of ER visits made.  But lost time is not my lament.

I have mentioned addiction's genetic component before - not that it is automatically passed amongst families, nor that a woman who lives without any family history is "saved" and may now smoke coke to her heart's (unattainable) content.  But doctors are discovering more and more genes that increase the risk of addiction.  Examples range from Native American ancestry to a single amino-acid substitution on the dopamine-D2 receptor site.  For some reason, the predisposition breeds more truly from male to male than any other gender-pairing: sons of predisposed fathers are far more likely to be predisposed than are daughters of fathers or children of mothers.  At some point in the kid-building process, if too many of these markers are found present stacked atop one another, we say that person has a 100% addiction potential.   This is still not genetic damnation: even with 100% addiction potential, you'd have to be repeatedly exposed to an addictive substance in order to become addicted.

...Oh.  Oh shite.  Oh....pissbollocks.  (I have Scottish blood tae, don'tcha know?)

Doomed from the start.  A full genetic predisposition and a congenital chronic pain disorder - a disorder so painful and so chronic that it meets several criteria for childhood trauma.  This is what I would change if I could: I'd give myself a fair fucking chance.

The secondary damage is piling up, now.  My veins can't take the strain of the efforts asked of them; it took two specially-trained phlebotomists an hour with an ultrasound to find the IV.  Even with my body in a near-constant state of SNAFU-management, there are proactive steps I can take to improve my condition.  I was asked to confront something I only wish I could change; so I have.

Day 23

A picture of my favorite book. I ran a contest similar to what I did for Day Thirteen in my head: I visualized my way through my library, and decided that the most well-loved book would be the winner.  My poor copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany has been falling apart since our first reading over thirteen years ago.  If you could leaf through it - carefully please - you'd actually see my relationship with the text in margin notes, asterisks and underscores.  I really wish I could take that picture and show it to you.

Unfortunately a) I'm not at home, and b) when I considered the rules of the contest, I hadn't considered copies that were so well-loved I'd had to replace them.  And when I considered that lofty criterion, One Book rose to mind.  If I were given to punning I'd call it - One Book...to Rule Them All:

Day 22

A Picture of something I wish I was better at:

Over the last two years, I've discovered just how much I enjoy writing.  The occasional persuasive post  or online journal entry is blooming into a hobby - no, I'm wrong.  It is a hobby, blooming into a passion.  And when I'm passionate about something, I want to be good at it.

I wish I was better at evoking rather than describing. I wish I had the ability to cook ideas down to their essence, to burn off unnecessary language.

(No Trans...Words?  Meh.)

So "Take a Creative Writing Course" goes below "Join Martial Arts Studio" on the list entitled For My Health.

Day 21

A picture of something I wish I could forget:

12170 Ventura Blvd., Studio City, California.  January, 2000.

This Starbucks has been the scene of many Talks - you know the kind, always prefaced with "We Need to..."  Here's another one from the Sandblast List.

This time, I'm sure of it: I'm in love with her.  No more second-guessing, no more self-conscious self-recriminations about any of it.  Yes, she is my best friend; yes, those boundaries have been well-established and somewhat well-respected; yes, this would be the final insult to those boundaries.  But I'm in love with her;  friendship must take a back seat to the romantic imperative.

Knowing my ability to chicken out no matter the stakes, I have allowed news of my love for her to leak. I've closed off all possible routes of escape behind; all that remains is the terrifying, inexorable march ahead.  Onward, Sancho!

We take our seats. She decides to rip off the conversational Band-Aid: "I think you have something to tell me."

She is inscrutable; each time I'd said I could read her like a Clifford book weighs individually upon my chest, mocking me.

I blink at her.  Right now, right now, I need my God-given gift of gab more than I ever have - more than I ever will.


I want to say: I am in  love with you. I know there are things to work out, but I also know there is love in your heart for me.

I say: "Umm..."

I spent hours that night trying to salvage what was between us.  I wish I could forget everything that followed from that first sentence of hers.  The heartbreak was twofold: yes, a girl for whom I felt deeply was explaining in careful detail just why it wasn't going to happen; but more importantly, my best friend (one of the four, but I digress) was furious with me, for reasons I didn't entirely understand.  What I did manage to understand pissed me right off in return.

When the anger faded, what was left felt like a hole in my center where something vital had been crudely amputated.

Our friendship didn't survive the coffee 'date.'  Every time I encountered her after that evening - whether it was in person, on the phone, or online - I was drunk.  It was the only way I felt like I could handle the confrontation - less with her than with my feelings for her, which remained potent long they after they had soured completely.

Day Twenty

A picture of somewhere I'd love to travel:

Ireland.  I don't know why, really; I've just always felt that, if I could wander the cliffs of Ireland, I'd feel incredible peace.  They say Geminis are at their most comfortable at meeting places: crossroads, beaches...the horizon...which would certainly explain the underlying sense of impatience I've lived with most of my life.  Those cliffs are a hell of a dramatic meeting place.  Not that I completely buy into the whole astrology thing.

I was actually surprised how few pictures of Kathy Ireland appeared when I searched for this image.

Day Nineteen

A picture of me when I was little:

"I wish I was a little bit taller..."

When I think of going back to the beginning, starting the whole thing over, I think of stepping back into this picture and becoming this boy again.  I don't know what all I would have done differently, as I went through the process of re-living, but I would have started by cherishing the good times more, and wallowing less in the pain and the anger.  Maybe that alone would have changed the makeup of my entire world, by age twelve.

I would also have skipped playing Spider-Man on the stone steps in my childhood home, because you can see the results in this bonus picture!  Me in my first of two (so far) body casts.  The old house had these steps that protruded about three inches past the banister.  I climbed the steps using the outside 3", going hand-over-hand up the banister.  At the top of the stairs, I'd climb over the rail and be home free.  I don't know how many times I'd gotten busted doing this - the top of the banister was right across from the master bedroom, and I remember this was a spanking offense.  Not enough to stop me.  Even what you see below, the result of losing my balance in the wrong direction at the top of the banister, didn't stop me.  I had to do it one more time, to prove that a broken femur hadn't taught scared me.

Badass in a body cast.