My own personal hell(and why you shouldn’t read this)

I’m writing this header after completing the story below. You probably shouldn’t read any of this. It’s certainly not going to make your day any brighter, but maybe you enjoy wrestling in the mud with me. Your choice.

I have really not been well for the past three and half weeks. I had a wonderful massage from my friend Ellen on Monday, May 19th. It will be my last for quite a while because she is having hip replacement surgery and doesn’t plan on coming back to work at least until September or October. But on Tuesday morning at about 1 AM I awoke with a horrible pain that I was pretty sure was my appendicitis ready to burst. I drove myself to the emergency room at the East Side UW hospital where I was treated absolutely horribly because they thought I was unresponsive to their questions when all I was trying to do was talk between the pain spasms. I guess when you are committed to living in the world Trump has built, you really don’t give a fuck about the person on the other side of the desk, especially if you can cause more pain just doing your job.

Anyway, after getting into a room and having a CT scan, it was determined that I had a kidney stone, my first in 73 years. They tried to alleviate my pain, and I told them immediately that the “oxy’s” do nothing for my pain, just constipate me. They tried dilaudid, then something else, then something else, until finally they landed on fentanyl and that calmed the pain. Unfortunately that was when they told me that they were transferring me to another hospital because they didn’t have an available urologist on staff. Off in an ambulance for a ride across town to Meriter hospital where everyone treated me with respect and care for which I will love them forever.

It took a while to actually get in a room, but soon enough a urologist arrived and said he had been doing surgery most of the day, but I had the choice of being his next surgery, or waiting until the morning. Either way they were going to have to blast the stone into tiny pieces, because there was no way something that big was going to pass on its own. I said go for it now if he was willing to operate. He did at 3 PM and I was out and home by 7 PM. Unfortunately, one usually goes home with a stent between the kidney and the bladder that facilitates the draining of the stone fragments out of the body. Usually this is removed about a week later, but mine was in for a week and a half. Ten days of a throbbing dull pain in my right back. In the mean time, I had picked up a respiratory infection in the hospital that is still not resolved. After two trips to the doctor, antibiotics and other drugs, I’m told that at my age, the best I can hope for is another two weeks of coughing and nearly passing out after every coughing fit.

So, about a week after the surgery, with the stent still in place, I spent Memorial Day saddened as always about the lives lost in defending our way of life, while the AssHole in Chief flushes our country down the sewer he should by all accounts be flushed down himself. It was in this sorry state of mind that I began planning my memorial service, specifically the songs I thought might be appropriate for the background music as I shuffle off this mortal coil.

Some I’ve picked out.

Can’t find my way home by Blind Faith

Into the mystic by Van Morrison

Vincent by Don McLean

Sundown by Gordon Lightfoot

Ain’t wasting time no more and Sweet

Melissa by the Allman Brothers Band

Blame it on the moon by Bob Seger

Perfect Day by Lou Reed

All perfect songs to be played as one is leaving or contemplating leaving this world.

You might want to stop reading at this point because it’s going to go deep into the darkness in my soul. I honestly didn’t expect this story to come out like this but once my mind starts to leak stuff, I’m basically just along for the ride. Please, if reading about suicide bothers you, stop now.

I really thought that by this point in my life I’d be living in Amsterdam. Well not living exactly, more like dying exactly. Heavily medicated against pain, or just against life’s aggressions. Plus legalization of drugs and prostitution, I mean could you ask for a better end of life story?

If you’ve read much of what I posted in the past, you have read about the many ways I have abused my body; either through physical abuse, alcohol, or just plain stupidity. I never expected to live this long. I didn’t even want to live this long.  I had planned many exits over my lifetime. Using the word lifetime makes me think of using the word deathtime. Not really a word, but descriptive in context. I don’t think most people think about their death on a regular basis. Certainly not about how soon they will die, or about under what conditions they might choose the time for them to bring their life to an end.

I spent many years earlier in my life waking up in the morning to my first thought being about suicide. I was severely mentally ill. My life wasn’t really that bad compared to the majority of the world, but again I was not mentally stable enough to have a grasp on where I was and the help I needed at the time. It wasn’t very long into my third marriage that my wife confided that she wasn’t at all sure that she would see me alive the next day. I made a promise to her that I would not take my life without first having a discussion with her about why I would do it. That promise saved my life many times, because back then, I loved and respected my wife.

I also think that one of reasons why it became easier to just keep on going, was a dream I had about my sister who also suffers with depression. In the dream, I make a phone call to her and explain that I intend to commit suicide and the reasons why. She was very supportive of my thoughts and desires to die, as she had dealt with the same feelings in her own life. As we’re talking, I begin to feel all the weight of my despair being lifted off of me. Catharsis is too small a concept to describe what was happening. The experience was at once freeing, enlightening, and world view changing. Maybe someone could explain what happened to me in psychological terms, but I don’t want you to do that. It was an experience that changed my life, and I don’t want to rescind any of help I received from a dream. I truly believe that this help came from the universal consciousness that surrounds us all, and is there for our benefit, if we just let it help us.

Some of the wonderful writers on Substack have shared stories lately. Writers like @katespeer, Eleanor Jones @writeherewritenow and so many others, have made things much clearer for navigating the hellscape that is in my mind. Please read them. They will help you, and help you to deal with people in your life that suffer in this way.

Being sick and exhausted from a kidney stone and respiratory infection is not a good thing to mix in with chronic depression. I feel like I’m on a muddy slog down a thick forest path to I’m not sure where. I can’t see the end of forest, but I’m still getting up each day hoping to make some progress. At least until I see Amsterdam in the distance.