Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Feeling crabby as fook tonight TRIGGER

I'm throwing my self a hell of a pity party...yeah its not going to be pretty.

TRIGGER - a lot of junk rolling about in my head tonight. Gunna uncap it, and spill some of it out.

I have a PVD in my right eye. It's left me with a dime sized floater and some stray stands of darkness  that follow my line of vision.

I keep hoping they will GO THE FUCK AWAY fade.

When the doctor confirmed my fears with the diagnosis, there was nothing inside. No anger, no sadness...just the feeling of my hands relaxing.

It's just another shovel of shit plopped onto my plate.

It's a sad reality that crap like this can happen to me and it doesn't faze me. I am so used to bad things happening to me that I have just come to accept that life is going to shit on me. After a while having the quality of your life slowly stripped away just stops causing reactions with in.

Boy in my 20's when I was handed the life sentence of a permeant back injury I raged against it. I grieved endlessly. It was an awful devastating diagnosis, it was hard to give up my athletic life. So hard. Running, skating, horse back riding, my career as a CNA, dreams of becoming a nurse...

the emotional pain equal to the physical pain.

Loosing my taste from the radiation was a jagged shank to my back. Out of the blue. No warning, just gone in a heartbeat. I was angry as hell, it's a known side effect, would have been REALLY FUCKING nice to have been warned.

Didn't know that my sense of smell was impaired already until the taste went. The day I stood in the kitchen trying to decide if the lunch meat was good or not. Couldn't smell it, couldn't taste it.  Soul  damaging pain....I couldn't even protect my children from something simple as spoiled food. You have no idea how triggering that issue is with me. Someday I should share with you how I was forced to eat bug infested food, and what the torture did to me.

my brain a dark play ground of anxiety, PTSD, DID, depression.

The peripheral neuropathy has taken my sense of touch too. 

I have normal aging hearing loss....

and now this with my eyes.

it,

is

...disappointing.

What the fuck did I do to deserve this? LISTEN UNIVERSE I HAVE BEEN SUICIDAL ALL MY LIFE. EACH TIME YOU CARVE AWAY A SLIVER OF MY QUALITY OF LIFE MY WILL POWER TO STAY AROUND AND SEE WHAT SICK FUCKING THING YOUR GOING TO DO TO ME NEXT ERODES AWAY.

ITS FRESH BLOOD ON MY HANDS THAT ARE DESPERATELY HOLDING THE ROPE. MAKING THEM TOO SLICK TO GRIP TIGHTLY.

When the doctor confirmed my fears with the diagnosis, there was nothing inside. No anger, no sadness...just the feeling of my hands relaxing.

That relaxing feeling SCARES THE CRAP OUTTA ME.

There is no fight there.

No fight in me equals painful acceptance. Acceptance means its okay to hurt me. Hurt me means I am dust, and not worth fighting for.

Is this the straw that broke the camels back? Is this where I stop flinching as life pummels me?

Is this where I stop looking both ways before crossing the street?

Is this what causes me to quote Shakespeare's most powerful words?

"O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!"

To lay here like a whipped dog and just take this without complaint is not me.  Its not healthy for me NOT to get enraged and fighting to keep going.

I can't summon that fight in me.

Writing here tonight difficult. The darkness in my eye worse with bright lights. Struggling to see past it to write.

Would really like to work on the "Skinned trilogy" but right now all I would do is bury her further under the earth and tell her to never come out.

I'm lost inside.

pulling back inside my head...

taking out my pocketknife

carving my name on the inside of my skull

the scratching vibrating the bone

echoing in the emptiness I am feeling.

clawing at the darkness as it slowly descends over my eyes...

Thursday, June 9, 2016

I have Mumbi

I am not afraid of going blind as one might think.

I have Mumbi

I grew up in the last true generation of children. Where both parents were married and the mother stayed home. Where TV was rationed and your toys ran on imagination not batteries. Where you could leave your door unlocked and not worry about getting shot at school.

Where the radio was the closest thing to the internet there was. Where trees had names and were your friends. Where creeks lived and breathed and nourished the children all summer long.

Where you pulled your red wagon down to the library to haul all the books you checked out home.

Your library card was a passport, time machine, golden ticket to endless adventures...

I set out one summer to read every book on the kids side of the library. I finished the little kids section in three days reading them onsite a shelf at a time. The older kids section took longer. I got to the M's before I lost interest because I found a book on the adult side that caught my full attention.

It was a large brown book that was in braille. As I  sat at the table running my fingers over the dots, the librarian saw me and came up to my table with a identical book. "Start with this one" she smiled.

I opened that one and discovered it was a set of books to TEACH braille.

Those two books were checked out to me for the remainder of the summer. I studied and taught my self to read braille. Because, well after reading about Louis Braille each year at school I was lead to believe awl accidents were much more common then they really are; and I figured it was only a matter of time before I ended up blind.

So among my odd ball skills, I can list that I at one time was fluent in braille.

That summer I took a day and blinded my self.

I placed thick dark pads over my eyes and used a handkerchief to hold them in place. I spent the day that way.

Even went up to the park and played. Did my normal stuff around the yard and creek. Later in my room I explored my treasures. Pondering there meanings to me now that I was blind. Would they still be important? 

I got out my art pad and drew a page of doodles. Wondering if the next day they would look like I imagined as I drew them.

Then I went to the shelf of model horses and felt down the row, marveling how the ears tips reminded me of braille. I selected one horse as random and pulled it out. All my models had name and stories attached to them. They were my friends. I quickly deduced that I had in my hands one of my 8 Family Arabian Mares.

I kept going over and over her trying to see if I could tell who simply by touch, smell, taste, hearing.

At last I felt my way to my desk and placed the model on it and on a piece of notebook paper wrote.

I have Mumbi

That night as I went to bed I removed my blindfold, and went to sleep without opening my eyes. My dreams that night were fantastical spectacles of drama and purple lightening.

When I awoke the next morning, the world seemed so small....limited.

Being blind was akin to the magical pull I feel being out in the darkness of night.

I went to my desk and there standing on the papers I had written and drawn on was Mumbi. My hands had known her.

and things didn't seen to dark.

While I don't think I could have handled going blind as a child. There was still so much of life for me to see.

But I think I could surrender to the darkness now if it were to come. Seeing is a special thing for sure, but my interests have changed as I have grown older. I no longer need to see with my eyes. My imagination is sooooo sharply tuned and highly developed that I "see" without seeing. If that makes sense.

I would gripe and belly ache and throw a hell of a pity party, but I think I could go on living.

In a sadly ironic twist, the peripheral neuropathy has robbed me of my ability to feel with my finger tips, rendering me deaf to braille.

However, I have within my head an endless library of the most incredible books never written. Available to be read over and over again.

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

old eyes

Heading to an emergency eye appointment shortly, Have just enough time to stress, throw up and google lots of terrifying things. Worried I am about to become the next family member who's retina detaches. Of course its my non-conformist eye, the one that is so oddly shaped they had to special make orthopedic contact lenses for it. sigh.

Writing helps me from chugging the whole bottle of Ativan so lets get out the white board and play Dr. House shall we?

current symptoms:

dime ...sized dark shadow in vison field (up close only) NOT a floater, this one is moving with my line of vision.

contributing medical history that runs in my family: glaucoma, retina's that decide to just detach themselves.


My health issues that are significant: Have Graves disease, so thyroid eye disease could play in the mix.


most important concern: it's interfering with my surfing of the internet on my day off!!!


current hypothetical diagnosis: It's notta tumaa!


uuuggh. life ‪#‎whyyoubeingsomeantome‬?




And the results of our visit......vitreous detachment, sadly normal aging, the new spot is here to stay in my visual field. (sarcastic yippee!)

In other words...my eyes are as old as shit. Now my junkyard of floaters has more company. I am calling the dime sized nearly circular spot Pacman and the much older floaters will be the ghosts.  So if you find me staring off into space with my eyes jerking, I am trying to get Pacman to eat the ghosts in my own personal visual version of ocular Pacman.

I go back in 6 weeks to make sure it hasn't torn the retina.