Way back in 2019 ... it sure seems way back ... around Christmas time, things were as they usually are on my own end. Kind of a downer, a bit of a spiral, and more or less an endurance test for those of us who have a hard time with that season, namely Depression and Anxiety patients. It's hard to escape memories for some of us. I'm constantly battling with things I miss from days gone by to dealing with guilt for all I've done wrong that I'd love a second chance at. The trick is to look ahead. But wait... 2020 is just gonna up the ante, ain't it??
Really, Christmas wasn't too bad. As is every year, though, there's a deft loneliness that lingers, because so many people are missing year to year due to passing away, leaving for other places, or just plain split apart. You have to make the best of what you've got. I've got my wife and daughter to get me through the holidays. Without them, I'd be utterly, completely lost.
Working in retail as a receiver at a drug store, October and November are the toughest months to get through, as that's when the most product arrives at the store. And seeing as I'm a receiver, I'm the guy that takes it in and records it all, mostly, in the store computers before it has to be merchandised. A lot of interaction happens on the main floor of the store, so that's a bit of a nightmare for a guy like me. I have no problem helping someone or dealing with pleasant folks. It's just the ratio of rude people accelerates during those busy times. And that I have a hard time dealing with. So, I rejoice at the thought of January. I often say that January is my Christmas month, because things notably slow down after a hectic season. Well, January saw its share of challenges, with me working hard and non-stop, through my breaks and lunches and into overtime, but I got a sense of accomplishment through it all. I was feeling good. The wife and me cleared a substantial debt at the bank, we were going to the gym on a regular basis, and generally feeling good. The new year looked promising!
2020: "Hold my beer..."
In January, I had my MRI on my right knee which was really acting up, and subsequently saw my ortho doctor about what could be done. The short answer is, nothing. My knee frequently gives out and sends searing shots of pain through my leg that causes it to buckle a lot. I thought there was more ligament or tendon damage that needed repair, or whatever, or maybe it's arthritis. The doc said, yep, lots of arthritis in there, another tear in the miniscus, but the tear was horizontal not vertical, which apparently makes a difference in urgency. Repairing it would produce scar tissue, he said. Also I had a Baker's Cyst on the back of that same knee which made squatting excruciating. I do that a lot at work as part of my job, which is really physical, so these things are piling up, you know? Ultimately, according to the doc, no course of action is to be taken. In other words, I have to live with the searing pain when it happens, which is a lot at work, and the doc recommended I change the way I work. I can't. Anyone who knows me knows I can't work 'easy' or 'slowly'. So, I roll the dice every day and take extra care to avoid the worst. I mean, geez, I'm 54, not 84. Still, the month was going pretty good. Things looked promising. Tax time was coming, which we get a decent refund for every year to help fix up the house because of our disability claims. There's stuff we need to do to keep this building respectable. We were psyched at how the future was shaping up.
In early February, while receiving one of the big orders that I do on Tuesdays and Fridays at 5am, I slipped while pulling a very heavy pallet of stock and fell backwards, landing on my left arm. It hurt, but I dusted myself off and kept going. The truck driver seemed concerned and helped me with unloading the rest. He's a really nice guy, a big, fit fella with this deep voice that reminds me of the Brawny paper towel guy that used to be on commercials on TV. I worked through the next three hours alone, with my left wrist hurting, and got myself a brace to support it until staff showed up around 8am-ish. I proceeded to unload product from the pallets with considerable pain; not only was my wrist hurting, but my knee was acting up too. I wanted to stay until my boss arrived so I could give him a rundown on what happened before I headed to the hospital to have my wrist looked at. After I briefed him on the situation, he offered his support, and off to the hospital I went.
Janice was working, so I was there by myself, but certainly not alone. The waiting room was loaded, which meant a long wait, so I passed time by... well, waiting. It was a long six hours. Janice joined me when she was done work. They finally called me in and I got an x-ray, which revealed fractures in two places in my left wrist. A splint was put on, I was referred to an ortho guy at the other hospital, and the waiting game began. It's not easy sleeping with one of those things on your arm, as most people who dealt with it would know. The guy who put the splint on told me all the wrong things to do with my broken wrist, which were refuted days later when my cast got put on. I was given pain meds, a nice red fiberglass cast, and a note saying I was off work for six weeks. Six friggin' weeks! To some that might sound like a vacation. I say, I'll take a vacation on my own terms, or else it's not a vacation at all. I couldn't work out or run, lest I sweat and make a balloon out of my cast arm, so I generally had to loaf around for a month and a half. This sucks more than it reads. Keeping in mind I have D&A, non-productive thoughts began creeping into my head. I was having bad dreams. My diet went to hell. But wait... there's more!
In the midst of my six weeks off, the Coronavirus crisis hit. Businesses began shutting down, people retreated indoors by law, toilet paper suddenly was a hot commodity, and panic was setting in with the general public. People were getting sick and dying, but it seemed at first that this might just be a variation of a flu virus. A lot of us thought that. Then more and more people got infected, the death rate took off, quarantines took effect, and racism was rearing its ugly head against Asians because the virus originated in Wuhan, China. Conspiracy theories ran rampant. The increasingly inept American president Trump told people how to treat themselves if they got sick, subsequently having to be corrected by the "fake news", as he calls it, which is everything in the general media that doesn't cheer with bright red pom poms for him. If Trump calls it "fake news", chances are overwhelming it's very credible information, as opposed to Fox News and their ilk. Let's be very honest, friends. Trump is in power because of two things... his support for the pro-life crowd, which is very disingenuous to most of us, and his backing by the fanatical religious right. Those are two tools that he uses to coerce his minions to continue to support the cult of personality that is Trump and his administration of fools. His lack of action and degradation of his own intelligence organizations has plunged the U.S., and economically the world, into an epidemic of dangerous proportions and what will most likely be the next Great Depression. Canada's Trudeau is throwing crazy amounts of cash at anything and everything to try to bury the problem, so we're not a lot better off, but Canada for the most part is relatively safe, at least until parliamentary budgets are released in the coming years for the rest of our lives to try to fix this giant monetary mess. Oil is virtually free on the markets, which seems to have promptly shut up the likes of Alberta's Jason Kenny and his relentless push for pipelines. The Green Party has never looked more relevant.
But I digress....
Two weeks in with my six week recovery, I was up late at night one night trying to sleep, which I had great difficulty with during my entire time off. I had my cannabis THC oil, which almost always helps me sleep, but it didn't seem to work enough this time. At 4 in the morning, in our dark bedroom, I got up and went to Janice's side of the bed and administered some oil into a glass to mix with pop and wait for it to take effect and finally sleep. As some time passed, I got really, really thirsty, and really 'out of it'. My mouth felt like it was full of sand. I sat up in bed with crazy dizziness and my ridiculously dry mouth, getting worried, and tried to summon Janice awake, but I couldn't put words together. I wondered if I was having a stroke! I shook her awake and told her I was in trouble of some sort. She got up and rushed to my side of the bed, and not long after that, my head spun like a Tilt-a-Whirl and I headed to the bathroom, crashing into walls and falling, and barely made it before I puked anything and everything that was in my gut, heaving violently for over half an hour continuously. My head was spinning with a "wow" effect, with things zooming in and out, and I was freaking out. It occurred to me I might have taken too much cannabis oil. I stumbled, barely, back to bed with Janice's help, who held my hair back while I was hugging the toilet, only to have to get up again after a few minutes to stumble and crash into the walls again and nearly falling into the bathtub in my rush to make it to the toilet in time. It was even rougher this round, because there was nothing in me to vomit. Another half an hour of retching ensued. Our beloved cat Marbles was freaked out, as he stood in the doorway of the bathroom letting out what sounded like a crying version of meows. The sweet little guy was worried. When I was done, I fell to the floor, and it took me at least a half hour to crawl eight feet from the bathroom to the bed, only barely making it. Janice was beside herself with concern. I surmised, eventually, that I suffered a perfect storm of ailments... I had a severe anxiety attack, combined with too much oil -- as much as 4 mls, where 1 is sufficient (in my defense, it was dark, but I should have been far more careful) ... and acquired what seemed to be a bad stomach virus that was going around at the time. It was probably the scariest round of stomach illness I've ever experienced. Add to that I had this damned cast on and I had to be careful with everything where I was so spaced out. After it was all over, it took weeks to recover from it. Weeks! I've normally bounced back from stomach viruses after a few days, but this seemed to take forever. It made getting back to work even more challenging.
Once the six weeks were over, I promptly did go back to work, and after just a day or two was so sore and decrepit I felt like a tired old man. I popped a lot of muscle meds and Gravol in the first week upon returning, but I knew that was just a conditioning thing, my body getting back in shape. But now I'm battling what I call Coronablubber. A lot of us are, I think. With gyms closed, and being outside having been frowned upon, combined with a lot of emotional eating, we're all at war with this monster that seems to be fattening us up like turkeys for harvest next Christmas. The wrist is still sore, but improving, despite me falling off a ladder at work the other day and landing on it again and badly bruising my hip (I did not report this). Thankfully I had my brace on, so I only bent it to the point of straining it and not breaking it again. The knee is another story. It's getting worse seemingly by the day, and I don't really have anyone to go to for help, as I was basically told to suck it up and move on, in a nutshell. The good part is, I've had no self-harm incidents yet this year, which is huge for me.
2020: sighs "...hold my beer again."
Last week I took an unnerving anxiety attack at work. I'd rather not discuss what brought it on, because I feel like I'm actually the one to blame, pretty much all the time. In summary, I got thoughts in my head how stupid, useless and ugly I am, and proceeded again to cut and scratch myself in an effort to distract from the pain in my mind. It's not something that works, but when I descend into that state of mind, there seem to be no other options. Crying spells pop up out of nowhere. Here's the thing... I have a doctor and a psychiatrist I go to from time to time to try to keep this in check. The last time I saw my shrink was nearly a year ago. He never made a follow-up appointment or checked in on me. As for my doctor, I get moderate results from him only if Janice accompanies me, which she insists on because she also sees my lack of results from medical professionals. Essentially, I'm hung out to dry here as far as my mental health goes, and keeping it under control... which I haven't had a lot of success with lately... is pretty much completely left up to me. In short, there is no help for my D&A. A couple of prescribed meds are issued to me and I'm sent on my way. Self-inflicted cuts, scratches and bruises be damned.
Add to that, our lovely Liberal government has taken away our disability eligibility, for both of us, leaving us with no funds to get some much needed repairs done around here. We've appealed numerous times, to no avail. The irony being, the notoriously stingy Conservative government didn't give us any problems at all with our claims. Now it's worse than pulling teeth.
It doesn't look like this Coronavirus thing is going away anytime soon, despite my home province of New Brunswick weathering it quite well, so we're planning on making the best of this situation by having lots of backyard barbecues, maybe some washer-tossing, getting some mileage in from running if my knee permits; I did run an 11k not long ago, but my knee took a sharp downturn a few days ago, so it's a day by day thing. Ultimately, I'm extremely fortunate to have a wife that couldn't be more supportive, and a job that's steadily paying the bills in a time where a lot of people have lost their own employment. Things could have been a lot worse. But 2020 is throwing curveball after curveball to all of us.
I just wish the healthcare system we have was as attentive to mental illness as it is with the Coronavirus. Or even a fraction of it. That being said, I urge anyone who might be reading this who's suffering from the same issues as I am to get help. Kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.
Friends, thank you for reading. I am very blessed indeed to have earned your interest.
