bluejacky

it's your tomorrow

Attack of the Show: Dr. Michio Kaku Interview

Hi, guys. I have received some very kind comments and messages since I got busy on this blog over the last month, and I wanted to say THANK YOU , and I guess it would be cool of me to give you a little more depth. Some of you know me from other blogs, most of you don't, and I daresay very few of you have a clue what really goes on my life.

I am what I call a 'slow terminal'. I have no prognosis and might live another 20 or 30 years as long as I really take care of myself, but that could all change any time. I am immuno-compromised (it's not AIDS, please don't confuse that with lupus) and get sick very easily, my nervous system is involved so it's quite painful, my liver and spleen have swollen a couple of times which is scary, and I get sun poisoning just walking across parking lots no matter what precautions I take so I'm stuck indoors all the time. I can't even begin to tell you how fun chronic fatigue is.

I have lived 20 years beyond initial diagnosis, sometimes through some very terrible pain, and have survived some scary med reactions, including a very rare gadolinium contrast reaction during an MRI. My biggest fear is infection from injury or illness, and the sun. I have been able to sort of control flaring up for about a decade without a lot of major medical intervention, although I'm pretty sure I would not be here now if I hadn't received medical intervention in my 20's. I have confirmation that the disease is still progressing, as my soft tissues thicken and lose elasticity, which kinda sux because soft tissues are what hold the skeleton together properly. I have experienced inflammation in the protective tissues around my lungs and heart, throughout my lymph system, and in my nervous system. My brain was affected 4 years ago during a severe viral illness in my nervous system.

I was told by one doctor I'd be blind by 40, and so far I'm not. When I was first diagnosed I was nearly crippled and extremely ill and couldn't even imagine making it to 40, and another doctor concurred, indicating I would probably wind up in a nursing home at a young age. When you google for prognosis on lupus and see it broken down into percentages and quick summaries on symptoms, you are seeing estimates from poor record-keeping. It almost comes across as a *fun* little disease to have because some of the sites try so hard to make it a non-terminal illness. I've learned from experience that medical facilities no longer keep lifetime records on patients or follow their progress *unless* they are part of a special study. I personally know several people with lupus, some severe, some mild, some have passed on at a younger age than I am now. I believe I have managed to walk a tightrope through a more severe onset using my wits as much as anything. I have managed to avoid surgeries, long term steroid use, and other nasty high risk interventions.

When you live every day of your adult life with something that could quickly turn into death (all it takes is a med reaction, bad kidney infection, exposure to illness that others get over in a week), you kinda develop a quirky way of getting through it all, especially if you wind up allergic to nearly every medication you try, and believe me, there are many to try. How in the world have I come this far without falling into depression, lethargy, and self pity?

I believe my autism has a LOT to do with surviving 20 years of severe illness in a fairly emotionally healthy way. Unlike some mental illnesses that might continually focus on what a self is feeling all the time, autism lends to a sort of lack of self involvement that allows me to disengage 'me' from what is going on in my body. I'll be the first to admit that I've gone through some very interesting depressions and mood swings, some of which lasted awhile, but I was born with this ability to 'step back' and assess myself objectively. Let me correct. I was born with a complete lack of self awareness that my mother felt had to be pumped into me so I'd learn to self monitor, but I did not truly learn to integrate self monitoring with public interaction until I was much older. What I'm saying is, I was born with an ability to see myself in the third person and learned to apply that to problem solving. I learned many things the hard way, of course, and may not have always been consciously aware that I was learning them, but I think I have saved my own life more than once because I can objectively notice behavioral patterns that indicate oncoming chemical response, so instead of running to a doctor for more meds to pile on top of new symptoms, I recognized that meds can ~cause~ acute depression, lethargy, and self pity.

I'm way too wordy, but I think the point I'm making is that my weirdness is what keeps me going, no matter how black the world looks, no matter how bad the pain gets. I can always count on myself to distract me out of the murky depths, even when I plunge pretty deep. I think it's common for undiagnosed aspies to feel 'schizophrenic', not realizing that our two brain halves take themselves literally, along with the trillions of cells in our neural networks feeling rather autonomous themselves. I really can count on me to be there for me. I am never alone. If you can imagine Mr. Spock being thoughtful in one side of my head, and Spongebob humming along in the other, I think you can understand where I'm coming from.

Slow illness sux, as anyone can attest who goes through it. That doesn't mean I want to speed it up, ack no. But I know I'm not alone. I look around and notice that some of the most creative things I find on the internet are made by people who live their lives dragging through long term conditions, no matter whether it's mentally based or physical. Some have both. Or a multiplex of conditions, as a main illness can cascade into more complications. I'm noticing that the more bogged down we feel, the more creative we can become, and although I feel sorry that we have to go through such rough stuff, I think it's wonderful that I'm finding so many cool things created by people stuck in their homes or heads for a variety of reasons.

My role model the first ten years from diagnosis was Stephen Hawking. You have to understand I had such severe occipital neuralgia that I did everything I could to learn what caused it. In my research I found out that the highest suicide rates due to illness come from people with severe cranial neuralgias. ~Whee~. I had to find a way around this. I saw a guy losing everything he had to illness and gaining the world with his brain, and I thought, *I* can do that, too. I learned to super focus my mind, and trained my brain to navigate around the pain sensations and concentrate on thinking Thoughts. The harder the thoughts were to focus on, the more thrilled I became. I didn't realize that I was creating ways to make more endorphins, because, like muscles, when you use your brain really hard, you can get kind of a runner's high.

Along the way, I accidentally discovered the power of positive thinking. That is not actually intuitive, but we see it so much on tv now, or hear it as a phrase, that we take it for granted. I remember when it was a new movement in the psychology field, and recognized it as something I was already doing. Basically, I can be whoever I want to be in my head. I can be smart, cool, successful, pretty. Your self image really doesn't have to be part of it. If I were to pay attention to my *actual* self image, I would be sad. I would bemoan the fact that I can't be active and have fun like my peers. I would be a real drag, steeped in a black world of depression. I don't like me like that. I like the me in my head, the me I can make into whoever I want to be. And ~that~ is really the real me. That is the me who is my full potential. What people see with their eyes has changed over the years. When I am the real me that is in my head, it shows in the way I laugh and talk, in the way I express my body language. I am unaware this is happening. If I think about it, I still feel really shy about being stuck in a body that doesn't work or look right, especially on a rougher day when I hurt real bad, but when I am being the me in my head, something magical happens. People start to see me that way. They say, "But you don't *look* sick." And I say "Thank you, I'm working on that."

I have been called everything from retard to savant in my 46 years on this earth, and although most of it has been amusingly confusing (some tongue in cheek there), I've gained quite a lot of experience and feel fairly comfortable sharing my thoughts about the world around me. I loathe getting into political and religious debates, having been immersed in such enthusiasm by adults around me since I was a toddler, but that doesn't mean I don't have opinions or don't care. It simply means I don't take sides. There are some things that I think are definitely right and wrong, and some things others feel are equally right and wrong, but I've come to the conclusion that no matter what is in our heads, the people in front of us are more important than any ideas we have. If ideas destroy friendships and families when there is no other reason to 'fall out', then the idea is destructive, no matter how 'right' it is. For example, refusing to forgive someone being different than you are when your belief system hinges around the concept of forgiveness kind of looks silly.

Is there God? Sure, why not. I suspect that the human mind isn't quite sure how to deal with the world without automatically plugging something 'bigger than me' into the picture, and this seems to go back to the dawn of human time around the world without exception, so maybe that's just an inbuilt part of living in this universe. I'm not sure that the conscious effort to either believe or disbelieve proves any points, but maybe the important thing is more about how our actions kill our beliefs when they don't synchronize. I've noticed that respect and courtesy go a long way in this world, no matter what one believes is behind it. I've also noticed that hostility is pretty unsexy. There was once a young man on my campus who was beaten to a bloody pulp by a church youth group for wearing a Batman t-shirt. Sorta makes you proud to be an American, doesn't it? We must look like idiots.

My mentor for making websites and blogging was a young lady with cystic fibrosis. She created *fun*. No one who visited her pages knew she was stuck in a chair having a succession of very bad days. I'm not as good at it as she was, because I interject my illness into my creations in one way or another. But through my own experiences of miserable nights up late surfing the internet for distraction, I know it's wonderful to find the fun and beautiful things that people create. It's fun to find games and surveys and artwork and youtubes, and it all helps me get through the hard parts. I don't know that I can ever give back what I've gotten out of the internet, and out of people like Stephen Hawking and Michio Kaku working so hard to give me things to think about. But the least I can do is say THANK YOU.

So to everyone who has been so cool about letting me be myself here without provocation even when I feel ornery, for the moral support and kind words-

THANK YOU.

REVENGE OF THE SITH MUSIC VIDEO
- 3:06 pm
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Mother's Day

Waynes World-Bohemian Rhapsody

It's 20 years this year.

Every year around this time I remember. I remember dragging through my classes, so ill I could barely sit up straight, scraping through finals.

It was one of those magical years. I don't believe in love at first sight, or soul mates, probably because I'm aspie. But I think that was the closest I ever came to actually being in love. I didn't know it at the time, because it takes too long for me to process these things. But I knew the second I saw him our destinies were tied, and I'm not even that kind of believer.

I had come back from Phoenix in bad shape. I had survived hanging around a real drug lord, survived near liver failure when I got back home, and now I was back in college, first day of classes. Even though I still felt exhausted and achy, I was enthusiastic to get back into the mind grind, and Learn Everything. Because that's always been my ultimate goal, to learn as much as possible while I have the time. I have no idea why, it's just a drive I was born with.

Then the teacher walked into the room and I felt my future and totally caved. I put my head down on the desk and didn't want to lift it back up. I was so unprepared for this it was all I could do to make eye contact at all, or respond verbally. And I was on the front row. Dang it. What was it about him? Somewhere inside him, he had answers to *me*. I knew I would eventually get those answers.

I have run into other aspies who say they can feel people. At the time, I was still struggling with disentangling myself from the things I didn't understand, and hadn't yet learned the dynamics of verbalizing my own feelings. I had come rather fresh from a vision warning me to never cut my feelings off again, and man did I feel things, very strongly, like winds whipping up and blowing my mind around. It was really hard to tell what was me and what wasn't.

I spent the semester working hard for a grade I was having difficulties with. The language of math doesn't come intuitively for me, although I can skate around theory with my eyes shut. I was still having a hard time relating symbols to words, and this guy opened the most wonderful door for me. He taught the class how to express math in words. To this day, although I can proudly say I was one of the very top ever entrants on a math exam in nursing school, I have to convert a math problem into English before I'm able to construct a math sentence and solve it. I totally get math until I see it on paper and have to construct it. Then it's a foreign language and I have to navigate around a bunch of barriers. I'm jealous that some aspies are savant in mathematics, but I guess any little autistic kid on tv can write out some big fancy equation, eh? It may be correct, but it has no meaning for 99% of the viewing audience. If someone said it in English, I'd actually be able to discuss the theory with you, but again, it has no meaning for 99% of the viewing audience.

Later on, after this story ends, I discovered I'm actually *very* good at functions, matrices, slopes, and relativity. I think it would be cool to name a chicken f(x), or "F of X". And truth be told, f(x) is how I came to understand the dynamics of communication and make my leap into a more savant verbalization capability. I was also able to plug it into my sociology degree. To see any person or group as an irreversible function helped me understand how we affect each other as humans. And to notice that every sentence in a conversation was also an irreversible function that turned into part of the next function and so on helped me figure out how conversations build and interact. I know that's really weird, but in my mind, I almost had to see communication mapped out.

But this story happened before I got all that, sadly.

After the semester was over, some of us became friends with the teacher, and we hung out. We had mild arguments over the validity of sociology actually being a science, which was fun and challenging. I got a taste for topology problems, little did my teacher realize while he worked on his PhD, and later in my life plunged headlong into cosmology and quantum theory in my spare time in part because of that exposure. But in the meantime, it was all new and sorta confusing and something to do while time passed. I had no other friends, and I was trying to ignore how ill I really was becoming.

Another semester went by, holidays went by, and then things got a little tense. I have never analyzed why, and my memory is pretty full of holes. We all had our own baggage, and daily challenges to meet, and I suppose some sort of sadness had built up separately inside us. I was probably overly withdrawn because of autism and continual pain I didn't want or know how to talk about, although I had finally gone to a doctor and found out things were worse than I imagined. I kept trying to 'pass'. Sociologists use that term when people hide something about their personalities and try to pass for normal. I very desperately wanted to be normal. I didn't want to have this terrible illness, I didn't want to be so confused, and I tried very hard to pretend none of it was in my way.

I guess it was February or March when the affair started. I'd never really had one before, and being aspie, you can imagine how naive I was. And I'm sure I didn't act right, because I didn't know how to act. All I knew was that I liked this guy a whole lot, maybe even loved him, can honestly say I adored him, and I was happy to have a friend. I can look back now and see he was miserable, homesick, pressured by college and other people in his life, and very lonely. Not exactly ideal for rainbows. But that all rolled off my back as I struggled through my own classes and my own stuff, because he really did try to be sweet to me in a confusing sort of way. I may have mistaken what I thought was one thing for something I had built up in my mind to distract myself from everything else with, I don't know. I can only imagine how disappointing I may have been to him, as well, although I remember he was far more forgiving about things like that than many people I've met.

I made the horrible mistake of getting pregnant. Who'd a thunk? Yes, I had just started birth control, but we all know NOW the first month doesn't count. I spent the next two semesters haunted by a flux of feelings whooshing around in me, while my poor body just lost control and I slunk around classes hiding my severe vertigo and the crumbling feeling that I was dying. I was so dumb. Why didn't I go to a doctor? Because I was afraid. The baby was like Schroedinger's cat. If I confirmed it, it would be a baby. If I ignored it, it didn't have to be.

I had nothing against babies, but I already had a child and a very scary ex-husband I was hiding from. It was clear I wouldn't be invited in to a new family with this child. I had very little income and could barely keep it together to keep walking upright in public. I never dreamed of confiding in my own family, after all those years of condemnation from my mom just for being myself. My mother was on edge, my sister was raising a baby with cystic fibrosis, my brother was hanging out with a metal band, and my dad was on the road trucking. I had no other friend to turn to. I wobbled through Mother's Day (my little girl was 5 that year) feeling too sick to care.

If I had been able to verbalize the way I can now, I would have simply done the little social dance- I'm really sick, I'm scared, I don't think I can do this alone, etc. I might have gotten some actual support and found a way to solve all my problems. But at the time it made sense that this guy very sweetly but firmly believed, without much being said, that we simply couldn't have a baby show up. Fine, I was much too ill to protest.

So I crawled from class to class, hoping not to faint, teachers asking me if I was ok, some so concerned that they insisted I go see a doctor. I didn't tell any of them the abortion was planned immediately following finals, and that I would be escorted by another teacher to make sure it was done. I didn't think beyond that at all. I just thought that would fix how sick I felt, although a little voice in my head kept pulling on me and trying to say otherwise.

I guess this was a really big deal. The teacher's brother showed up for moral support (his more than mine, I'm sure), and to make sure I got to the clinic. I don't think either one of them would have taken me there at all if they'd known how ill I was, so I certainly hold no grudges for that. But I did think it was a little strange this guy got a compliment from the receptionist for showing up with me, because that apparently was unheard of. What a great guy, giving me all this moral support... Good for him. I think. Maybe. I don't know.

I sold my class ring so I could afford the drugs to knock me out. I already hurt so bad I didn't think I could take any more pain. I was told that I could tell them to stop at any time if I changed my mind, and drifted blissfully off to sleep.

I didn't know at the time that I am one of those unique individuals that can come completely awake during full anesthesia and talk coherently to people. I never connected my out of body experiences as a child to my autism until I was in my 40's. So you can imagine how surprised the doctor and nurse were when I came fully awake and spoke to them. I did that during heart surgery 8 years ago, too, after my heart was stopped and restarted. I was told it gave the surgeon quite a jolt, because I suddenly laughed and said There it is, you found it! just as he had located the irritating nerve bundle and got ready to burn it. I could see the monitors, and I could see inside me.

Yes, I came fully awake on 3 different drugs that should have kept me from moving or speaking at all, and I said I changed my mind, I want to keep my baby.

Guess what I got. "Shut up, bitch, and lay still!" I don't suppose they thought I'd remember that, but I remember the nurse looking rather shocked at me after she said that. I DID feel the rest of the scraping and cried all the way through it, not for the pain, but because I was a prisoner, and they had lied to me, and because it took all those drugs to break me free enough of fear to finally be honest with myself. Every cell in my body knew this was wrong, that bad people were invading my body and destroying something precious. Every cell in my body wanted to fight and kick and scream, but I was so drugged I could only lay there and cry.

I never told anyone any of that until I reached my 40's. The math teacher never knew the horrors I faced and the way I was treated, because I never told him. I finally told Scott, and he couldn't believe I had kept all that inside for so long.

That was not the end. Something was wrong, really really wrong. Removing the baby didn't make everything better. Everything got *worse*. I bled far longer than I was supposed to. I had inexplicable pain. I got my first migraines after that procedure, very nasty migraines that curled my stomach and turned me green. And I want to proclaim to the ~world~ that I aced all my algebra tests that summer IN PEN on my first try under this ongoing duress. All my other math classes had been prep. I saw my victory over anguish in that class. No matter how ill I became, I could do the math. Take *that*.

But he had gone. He went back to another teaching post somewhere else. I wasn't dragging his life down or holding him back. I had made the sacrifice so he could go on. I tried so hard to make something noble of it.

I was told when I went back for a followup checkup that they almost hadn't done the procedure because my blood pressure was too low. They also told me I had an STD, no wonder I'd felt so sick. I hadn't told them what my 'real' doctor had said, so they didn't know how sick I really was.

I spent the next fall weeping through all my classes. It was so bad that one of my teachers asked me to drop his class and try it another time. I told him I was sad, I was just crying, and I wasn't bothering anyone, so he let me stay, tears running down my face through every lecture, every test. It was social psychology, one of the toughest sociology classes ever invented aside from statistics. I aced it, and not because I cried.

I had an outstanding fall semester. I aced everything right and left. When I reached the day in December that the child would have been due, I finally stopped crying.

My mourning has never really been over, though. Every Mother's Day I go through the blues. Every year about this time I think about how grown up that child would be now and the decisions people make out of fear or ignorance. If I could go back now with the skills and knowledge I have and do it over again, how would I have handled it?

But I'm not the sort of person that goes over the past with a fine toothed comb. Things were the way they were. My math guy and I were both lost and ignorant. We were both lonely and learning. And it never really was about making a child go away together, although it turned into that. I do feel that no matter what happened, if I had stood up for instinct coursing through my body, I would have loved that child in so many more ways than my mother loved me. I feel like I should have risked it. I should have been in a hospital, actually, and was foolish not have checked into one. I read in the newspaper shortly after my abortion, another woman died at that clinic during an abortion. Bled to death. I wonder how close I might have come to really dying and never knew it.

So now it's been 20 years. I keep wondering why I look back on all this, why don't I let it go. The day I had the abortion, Bohemian Rhapsody was playing on the radio. In that song, I heard my child telling me to go ahead and let go. I saw the path laid out. It's possible things could have gone like that. It's possible I could have died in childbirth or after, as sick as I was, so I can't say what would have become of the child. So, as many women do, I let my child go. I can't debate whether this is good or bad, but I cry every time I hear Bohemian Rhapsody. To me that feels like a very personal human wish to have never been born. But I wish I had taken the chance. I wish I had gone to a hospital and not worried about what anyone else thought. I might have wound up with a smart little guy on my hands.

That math teacher was the big turning point in my aspie life. If I had never met him, I would never have fallen in love with the math and gone on to my big plunge into theory. Because I loved a mathematician, I have also loved Hawking, many other scientists, and now Kaku, and I dream of the next big discovery. What will they figure out next? For twenty years I have kept myself going through really tough pain and illness with a drive to Learn Everything, and the key that opened the biggest door was that teacher. Maybe what I felt that first day I saw him was the door opening to the rest of my life, but I didn't understand back then how to really talk and be friends. I wish I had.

It's the heart afraid of breaking
that never learns to dance
It's the dream afraid of waking
that never takes the chance
It's the one who won't be taken
who cannot seem to give
and the soul afraid of dying
that never learns to live

And once again, I had a vision just before it all ended. It was very late one night, and my daughter was in bed. I was still sick and heartbroken and so tired of crying. I asked "How can I never have my heart broken again? It hurts so bad. How can it ever heal?" And everything stopped. Time slipped sideways, as if all the clocks had stopped ticking, and the world was frozen in stillness. And in the very stillness, deep in the dark, I heard a very soft Voice that said "You did this to yourself." And I knew then it really was my fault, I had broken my own heart far worse than anyone else could ever have been able to break it, and I cried again. And I saw in a vision a beautiful heart of lead crystal, perfect and elegant, bathed in a beautiful light, and I saw myself shatter it apart into a couple of big chunks. I was so distraught and panicked, and thought "How can Anyone ever fix my broken heart? Because I don't know how!" and I wept very hard, knowing I could never live for long like that. Then I saw a Hand use a hammer to smash my heart to bits, and kept smashing and smashing until it was ground to a pile of lead crystal dust. My heart was a pile of dust, and I was very shocked to see it like that. Then another Hand showed up, and both Hands scooped up the dust and squeezed it very very hard, until all the crystal melted back together, at first very hot and glowing like fire, and then cooling. And there was a heart again. It was still lead crystal, but in another form. The dust had been so perfectly ground down and melted back together that it formed a solid heart of dust, as hard as steel. It was no longer transparent or elegant, but it was still pretty, because if you looked close, each piece of dust could reflect on its own. I was shown that my heart could never again be broken, it would be impossible to shatter dust that was so bound together at a molecular level. It was like my heart had been turned into a diamond. I picked it up and immediately felt better, and with a sudden gasp of breath was back in regular time.

Ever since then I have taken responsibility for my own heart. No one else can break it like I did, but I don't stand there and let them try, either, because that would be foolish of me. I think it's easy to blame other people for pain we feel when the biggest pain comes from something we said or did ourselves. Our hearts are our own to take care of. We speak of giving our hearts to others, or someone breaking our hearts, but I wonder if the reality is us putting the burden of our hearts onto other people. I don't think I could carry someone else's heart for them, it might break at my every little turn, and I would be ignorant how to stop making mistakes that hurt them.

I think it's better to be honest. If I had been skilled enough with communication and juggling my feelings as an aspie to be able to be honest with myself and my math teacher, I might never have cried like that. And since so many of us don't understand these things until we are much older, I doubt he knew any better, either.
- 5:12 pm
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A Long Dusty Road

About 20 years ago, in my mid 20's, I was destroying myself with alcohol and starvation. I didn't see it that way, most people don't at that age. At that age we are indestructible, wacked back and forth with self love and self hate, dreaming big dreams and not having a clue how to reach them.

I reached an event horizon and sucked myself right into the black hole of my soul. I've been bad places, seen bad things. Somehow I tripped gaily through like a lamb through a slaughter house, oblivious to the horrors around me. I had no feelings about it.

I hung out with a drug lord in Phoenix back then. He was underground, on the run from California, establishing new territory for a new purple marijuana cross that was all the rage on the coast while he covered as a pizza delivery boy. Basically ripping the rug out from under the local drug lords, getting ready to move big shipments cross country. Offered me a run, I turned it down. He was 17, slick and professional. They were all young.

I never dealt, never bought. Compared to other people, I barely used. I did love alcohol, though. And I was this kid's friend. I hung out with his girlfriend. He could trust me because I didn't care. I didn't take sides, didn't care about money, had no other friends. Autism may actually be what kept me alive through that, I don't know.

Rode with him one day to a part of town I hadn't been. It's actually a huge city, sprawled over 50 miles in every direction, some of it nice, some of it crap. I loved it out there, gorgeous sky. Had a good job in a 4-story hospital. Used to watch the sunrise from an empty construction area. About the only thing I really ripped off was toilet paper. I wasn't into needles and that crap. I had free run of the place, being on the overnight stat housekeeping crew, which was small. I cleaned up after dead bodies, births, surgeries, and really contagious stuff, and I saw everything from gunshot wounds to crazy people walking out the doors in their little night gowns. I walked freely through the guts of the hospital, the lab and records and the morgue.

A nurse once thought it would be funny to sprinkle trail mix all over a hallway and call a stat cleanup. I don't put up with crap. Showed my boss and he nearly got her fired. You sneer down on the people mopping up the blood and puke, you get what's coming. You don't trivialize 'stat' in any way, shape, or form. Stat is sacred.

Another nurse failed to tell me the stat cleanup in the ER was after a family of lice. I got a 4-story hospital locked down over that one after I heard a secretary joking on the phone about having to check them in at midnight. By 4 a.m. I'd been all over that hospital, including labor and delivery, and that was considered serious contagion. I mean, who wants to go have a baby and then find out the hospital has been locked down because some idiot nurse didn't consider an entire family ~*dripping*~ with body lice worthy of telling a housekeeper to gown out for precautions. I even asked if there was a precaution on the room before I stripped and disinfected it. I could have been covered in lice and eggs for hours just from rolling the sheets up and throwing them into a regular hamper, which also got laundry locked down, big time. My boss tracked that nurse down, as well. You could say MY boss pretty much ran that hospital when errors were made.

A charge nurse on the second floor once called me to clean up a glass breakage. I arrived to find mercury beads strung out all over the room and into the carpeted hallway. I put everything down in the middle of the hall and left it in everyone's way so they'd be forced to walk way around that room. I found her and asked if the breakage was the blood pressure gauge, which was the old fashioned kind on the wall. Yes, that was it. I asked her if any of it got onto her clothing, or whoever it broke around. She didn't know, had no clue if a patient had been in the room. I asked who all walked into that room since the breakage, because the mercury was obviously strung out into the hallway, and then I asked her if any beds had been rolled in or out of the area through that hallway. She got snotty with me, got in my face about how she didn't have time for this, who was *I* to be questioning *her*, etc. I just smiled and called my boss. Boy, did she get reamed. Mercury poisoning is no joke, particularly in a hospital, and that stuff was ~everywhere~. We even had to throw our shoes and clothes away. I went home in scrubs and footies. A special clean up crew in biohazard suits locked the floor down and cleaned EVERYTHING. Think about this the next time you go visit someone in a hospital and see little kids running around touching everything. Smile at the housekeepers. They are doing excellent jobs.

I'm not against nurses. I'm not saying nurses are inherently bad or stupid or negligent. But I am saying don't take your housekeepers for granted. Some of us just might be saving a few lives ourselves. You never know.

Anyway, I hung out with a drug lord, but I was pretty 'clean'. My only love was alcohol and the occasional brandy bong. I was young and pretty, but I didn't care. I never dated, except for one guy who bugged me to no end, but it took him forever to get anywhere with me. Somewhere in my recent past I'd had a very scary ex-husband and a child he'd abused. Dropped the kid at my mom's house and just drove to Phoenix for a 3 month vacation from having to deal. I just couldn't face it.

Back to the story. Rode out with this kid one day to a different part of town. Went into a guy's house. Heard that guy tell my guy that if such and such didn't happen, they would cut off his hand. Everyone around us looked at me to see if I reacted. I just smiled back, never flinched. I had butchered plenty of animals growing up, I cleaned up after blood and gore and death in the hospital, just hearing someone threaten to cut off a hand was nothing to me.

I realize now that guy took me with him to witness, in the event they had killed him. He trusted only me for that. I would have been the one going back with his body to tell his girlfriend and call his parents. Guess the alliance worked out.

Lamb through a slaughter house, oblivious. Autistic.

And I was like that. If I felt something I didn't want to deal with, I could cast it off. If I felt any guilt or anguish or fear, I could walk away from it. I was Mr. Spock. I felt nothing, cared about nothing (except obvious breaches in protocol, like the mercury spill). I felt no love, no need, no sympathy. I turned completely off.

At the end of that summer, I was suddenly ready to come home. Something was wrong, I didn't know what. I just knew I had to get home. Quit my job, left my key, never said goodbye to anyone. I made it from Phoenix to my mom's house in MO in 23 hours flat. The highway patrol in New Mexico never caught me, and truckers blocked them off so they couldn't. I flew like the bats of hell were after me, slapping myself hard to stay awake, screaming to stay awake, freezing myself with the windows open and nearly falling asleep doing 90 through the night.

By the time I got home I could no longer move. My fingers wouldn't unbend. I could barely walk to the house. I couldn't turn the knob, so I had to knock. When they opened the door, I fell in.

I spent a week in bed in a deep fever and sweats, writhing in nightmares. I had liver poisoning, setting off my first lupus flareup. My dad is Mennonite, my mom is a health store nut, no one ever took me to a doctor. I don't know how I lived. I remember the haze, the series of dreams, the visions. I remember a week went by without food or coherent conversation. I remember God.

I was on a dusty road, leaving a house. I had a robe, a staff, and a little pouch. I was setting off on a journey. As I shut the door and turned to the road, a figure appeared. I didn't see a face. He instructed me to follow the road and collect the treasures for my pouch. He said I would know them when I see them. Then he vanished, and I turned and started walking.

I walked a long, long way. The road was dusty, and uninteresting. I walked and walked and walked. As I walked I felt heavy, tired, discontent. I ached. I thought, if I just take off the part that is making it hard, I can enjoy the walk. So I peeled off some skin and tossed it to a bush. I took off a fingertip and tossed it off the side of the road. I slowly peeled more skin, and each time I did, I felt better, lighter, unencumbered. The road slowly curved around, and still I walked and walked. But it got easier and easier, because I kept picking parts of myself off and tossing them away.

Finally the road curved back to where I was heading back the direction I had come, and it still stretched off a great distance. Walking was becoming so tedious that I thought I shall have to pick off more, and I did. It was amazing how much I could pick off and throw away so I wouldn't have to feel hot and tired and thirsty, or sad and lonely.

After what seemed like days and days of walking, I arrived to a huge gulf, like a deep rip in the earth. It was dark, and the sky was dark, and the other side was black. I knew I had to cross it. But how? Who could cross something like that? I looked over the edge, there was no way to climb down. It was much too far to jump. But I had been instructed to follow the road.

I was nearly to give up, standing there feeling angry at how ridiculous this was. Then I heard a Laugh. It creeped me out, and even though I had no skin left, I could feel where the hairs would have been going up in goosebumps. A big face floated up out of the depths of the gorge, looking at me with hard mocking eyes, laughing at me. He said he would help me over. I said No, you'll eat me. He laughed at my fear. He said he was the only way I could get across, and I said No, you'll pull me down in there. He laughed and floated his face very close to me at the edge, and as he got closer his face turned into my face, and I cried out and fell down in despair, because I knew then that I had destroyed myself, that I had brought this chasm into my life, and that there was no escape.

The despair was horrible. I couldn't escape it. The face laughed and laughed, and I cried and cried. Should I just throw myself off now? I could see no way out. Is this the end?

Then the figure appeared next to me. I still couldn't see his face. He was very stern. He said I told you to follow the road. I wept with my head down and said I followed the road, but I can't follow it any more because it's broken, and there is no way across. He said I gave you a pouch to put treasures in. Show me the treasures you have found. I wept and held out my empty pouch. I said I saw no treasures. He said What about the pretty rock? You saw a pretty rock. I said Yes, but it was just a rock. I felt so terrible that I had not picked up that pretty rock to show him. I realized I had seen other nice things along the way, and that I had nothing to show for my journey. He stood there by me for awhile, silent while I wept and wept. When I was nearly wept out, I asked him How do I go on? What do I do now? Tell me and I will do it.

He said You must go back the way you came. You must find all the pieces you threw away and put them back on. You cannot go on until you have them all back. I said Ok, and in great gloom and sadness turned back to retrace my steps. I could see now I was only a skeleton. I had no flesh left. I looked back and the figure was gone, but so was the laughing face.

The walk back was even longer than the walk forward. I had to stop and search every bush, every rock, every part of the sides of the road for flakes of skin and pieces of fingers and all the other tiny little bits I'd torn off. I tried to make them go back on my skeleton, but they were dried up, useless, unable to cling into place. I put the shriveled pieces into my pouch and kept searching for more.

After a very very long time, what felt like weeks, I arrived back at the door I'd first left, still a skeleton in a robe. The figure appeared. He asked if I had found every piece. I was very miserable and not sure, some of the pieces were so small and dried up I could have missed some. He told me to give him the pouch. It looked pathetic, a small pouch full of dried up flakes of skin. How could that ever cover my body again? They looked too small to ever be able to be usable. I dreaded what he would say. I handed him the pouch and looked away, feeling miserable.

He told me to shut my eyes, so I did. He blew on me, and said Open your eyes. All the skin and little bits were back in place, looking like they first had, and my robe was white. And now I could see his face. He had very stern but kind and loving eyes (I still can't tell this part without crying) and told me to start again. I was to follow the road and collect the treasures I saw. And I had a new command. Never again mutilate myself so that I couldn't feel something. Then he turned and went through a white door that appeared, and I was left with the road.

The rest of the vision went by quickly, as if I were seeing the future. I saw myself gathering pretty stones and flowers, and my pouch growing large. I saw myself happy and having a picnic with others by the side of the road when we got hungry. I saw sadness and grief come over me and pass through, and I saw myself sing again. I saw that I could feel every little breeze on my arms, and feel every blessed pain in my legs.

And when I reached the gorge, it was just a crack across the road.

I stepped over it.

And I woke up. My fever was gone. I got out of bed and ate some food, and have spent the next 20 years of my life following the road.
- 12:08 pm
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bluejacky

I've started transferring my survey posts over to Surveypalooza so people coming in from search engines on mobile devices will be able to see the surveys.

Apologies for the missing vids, another upgrade during the server migration swept through like a scan sweeping through the Enterprise. I'll fix those later, kinda busy...