SPP: The Secret

Photo Credit: Marilyn Armstrong

He felt the shit splatter. All over his butt. And spray the floor around the toilet. He didn’t care. He wiped, flushed, did a cursory wipe of the toilet seat, and then staggered to the wall, soothing his aching head on the cool wall. He wouldn’t a need new Depends, thank God.

He popped another Percocet and checked his hair in the mirror.  Wiping and adjusting his jacket, he took a deep breath and opened the door.  He pasted a smile on his face and went back into the party.

He didn’t realize yet that it had happened. He’d entered Percocet Hell where the only way back to life would be worse than death.

== 114 words ==

---

Thank you to Marilyn Armstrong for sponsoring SERENDIPITY PHOTO PROMPT 2015 #13 – ON OLD CAPE COD . We are asked to write a story without boundaries to her prompt(s) (or anything else of our own fancy) and post a link to our story here.

Daily Prompt The Loneliness of Illness

I feel truly lonely when I’m seriously ill.  The last time I was sick was when I was dealing with Percocet addiction, and taking a cocktail of about 15 pills a day for depression, pain, insomnia, hot flashes, and then all of the side effects from drug interactions.  I had to take Miralax to counteract the constipation from the Percocet and then had to over-drink water to make up for the dehydration the diarrhea created.  My stomach was in a constant state of cramping from the Miralax.  I could barely walk outside because I would shit in my pants if I wasn’t close to a toilet.  I shit on my bed sleeping, and finally had to buy adult diapers and line my bed with plastic sheets and towels.

I begged my psychiatrist to help manage my drugs better, but I have found that psychiatrists are doctors that treat diseases, not people.  He stared at me with cold eyes and told me “that’s not my job” and then looked at his watch as though to remind me my 15 minutes was up.

The wait for a Pain Center appointment is over a year, so getting their help was impossible.  I was seeing a neurologist, physiatrist, orthopedic surgeon, psychiatrist, psychologist, my GP, physical therapy, acupuncture, Alexander practitioner, massage therapist, chiropractor, all at the same time, that’s how desperate I was for relief of my pain and some sort of control over my meds.  I was in the Emergency Room constantly.  I knew the ER doctors.  My GP tried me on other opioids which made my head spin so terribly I was throwing up constantly.

I went through the withdrawal process twice:  Once I had to in preparation for a subclavian bypass.  The surgeon wouldn’t do the surgery unless I cut down my Percocet consumption.  I didn’t stop it, but I cut it down, so this withdrawal was bad, but not as bad as the total withdrawal that followed.

After I recovered from the surgery, I increased my meds again, and back to the same cycle of misery.

One day I decided to give it all up cold turkey.  My neurologist urged me to reduce my meds one by one so I could have better control over my withdrawal symptoms, but I was desperate to have it all out of me so I could start from a clean slate and try to figure out the minimum drugs I needed.

I thought the withdrawal process would be just a couple of days of hell and then I’d be better.  But such was not the case.  For at least two weeks my depression hit rock bottom.  I couldn’t stop crying and squirming in agony.  Every pore in me hurt.  I threatened Hubby that if he didn’t start helping me get better I’d kill him and then kill myself so no one would ever catch me.  I wanted to get into my car and drive it off a bridge or into a wall, I felt so deeply depressed and sick, with no relief.  I found a beautiful documentary about The Buddha by David Grubin and watched and rewatched it over and over and over and over as I tried to wait it out.  I took a pen and wrote “Om Mani Padme Hum” on my bed sheet and then retraced it with the pen again and again.  It’s still there.

It took at least a month, maybe two, before I could actually have a day where I felt normal again.

Although many who read my blog may think I lead a screwed up life, smoking pot and taking Ativan, this is the first time my chronic pain, depression, and anxiety are under control with no side effects.  There are reasons for this, the primary being that instead of being gentle to my body, I’ve discovered I really need to exercise it hard (just under the point of injuring myself, which is why, when the weather is warm, the running I do is Chi Running) and be dedicated to flexibility.  The performance enhancing part of pot helps me push myself.  I’ve replaced one yoga session with a foam roller session now.  With the foam roller I can work out knots from not only my quads, iliotibial band and glutes, but also my back muscles and shoulders — maybe some of that is scar tissue from cancer treatments.  The foam roller hurts like hell, but with the pot as a pain reducer, I can target the knots more accurately without the pain making them inaccessible.

I do yoga religiously every day, and force myself out to do a hard hike every day.  I meditate 2-3 times a day.  I’ve cut out online gaming, which I had been using as an escape from my pain.  Now there’s just no time for it.  Except for watching with Hubby, I rarely watch Netflix now.  When I was on Percocet, I’d spend part of my day doing origami, and the rest of the day in bed watching Netflix.  Now I blog, read other blogs, read books, and take photos when I can.  Whenever I get the urge to go to bed and rest and watch Netflix, I think of the things on my daily to-do list and knock off one of those instead.

I would say cold turkey withdrawal of opioids and all of the other drugs I was taking, chemotherapy, and miscarrying at home were the three loneliest times of my life.  They say that only through suffering can you be made stronger, so I feel lucky, thankful, and joyful for where I am today.

When was the last time you felt really, truly lonely?
Cut Off

Daily Prompt: Display? C’mere, Lemme Explain Something to Yus

Aside from my seven white boards, the wall closest to my computer is(was) covered with dry erase paint.  I have notes written all over that wall from ceiling to floor.  Unfortunately, it only lasted a season and then began ripping apart, and now it’s half curled up, ripped paint.  I keep telling myself I should take advantage of it and scribble all over what’s left since there’s no salvaging it.  I do collect larger pieces of dried up, curled up paint sheets.  Why?  Who knows, maybe one day I’ll be inspired to make a curled-up-paint statue.

In addition to financial and legal notes all over my white boards, I have a list of Internet lingo that I use to translate gamer talk to real English:  “imma”, “c’mere”, “moar”, “idk”, “hai”, “ofc”, “lemme”, “kthxbai”, “evar”, “yus”, and “XD”.  It’s not a full list.  It’s a neverending chore to keep up with the current linguistic state of people under 30.  When I’m gaming I mostly shut up and laugh if I think someone just made a joke.  It’s a guessing game.

I also have one of the few drawings I’ve ever made hanging on my white board to give it a little color.  It’s a green curly-cue tree with a bunch of red and orange curly-cues in the sky and an unbelieving sun staring up from the bottom left, I guess shocked and pissed off that I put him at the bottom instead of the top.

The rest of my walls are filled with picture hooks.  I moved them from the bedroom into my office because I’d like to start framing my photos for the first time.  I already have a handful framed and hanging in the hallway outside.

When I was going through one of my percocet episodes, I hung rows of string across my bedroom, about 2 feet apart, and dangled origami birds and suns from it.  Somehow I thought they would bless my pathetic life.  When I finally overcame the addiction, I tore them all down so I could move my life forward.  I left the picture hooks, so there are about 30 picture hooks on my bedroom walls.

Oh, I do have a photograph on my white board too.  It’s lopsided, tacked on by a magnet on a corner.  It was taken when we were visiting Hawaii for my grandmother’s 100th birthday (22 years ago).  Hubby and I had our picture taken, and my little niece stuck her tiny head in at the bottom.  It was very cute, and we didn’t know until afterwards that she had done that.  She followed me around everywhere that trip.  She even climbed Diamondhead with Hubby and me.  She was only about 7 years old, barely big enough to carry her backpack, but she never complained once during the entire hike.  She’s grown up now, an intelligent, beautiful woman.

In the kitchen and dinette area I have hung coat hangars all along the walls.  We also have a coat rack.  In spite of that, all of the chairs in the dinette are still covered with coats and various forms of scarves and rain gear.  On the floor lies scattered about a hundred pairs of boots and shoes and showshoes, and dirty clothes spilling out of our laundry area.  On the kitchen floor is a stack of food.  Hubby hates putting food into the cupboards, because things get buried and then you don’t know what you have and what you need.  Imagine how thrilling it was when my geriatric 85-pound dog walked through the kitchen into the dinette while letting loose about 3 gallons of pee.

In another life, maybe I’ll have more of a sense of Feng Shui.  In this life, clutter and practicality are the words of the day.

What do you display on the walls of your home — photos, posters, artwork, nothing? How do you choose what to display? What mood are you trying to create?
Wall to Wall

Daily Prompt Meditation and Living the Good Life

It’s ironic that the day when the title of the Daily Prompt is “Easy Fix”, pingbacks are broken again.  Here’s a little secret I can give you as a 30-year veteran of the software engineering field.  IF IT AIN’T BROKEN DON’T TOUCH IT!

New software engineers have to learn this the hard way.  It’s really easy to get into code and think you’re so smart you can make it better, prettier, easier for others to read.  So you spend the night rewriting this code that is only marginally connected to the one-line fix you were supposed to be doing.  You test it once, and then release it and go to bed.

The next morning you wake up to find out that either the system in some other configuration doesn’t build, or you broke some basic functionality and now the entire project spanning 3 different countries is broken.  People in India are sitting around twiddling their thumbs.  Some kind person working late at home might have caught your mistake and is now backing it out in a process that takes at least one entire 12-hour day.  In the meantime the director is on the phone to ATT explaining to them why they can’t get their one-line fix today and their system has to remain down another day.  Every thread on the project mailing list mentions your name as the culprit for the break, and you might have had one or two nasty flames thrown your way publically while you were snoring away.

The sign of an experienced engineer is someone who knows how to fix the one-liner and then steps away after submitting that fix.  If there’s another bug in the code, it gets treated as a separate bug and submitted separately.

Anyway, all this technobabble is to say, WHO IS TOUCHING THINGS!?

Oh, and don’t mix pot with work!  Has someone on the staff been reading my blog?  I actually have in the past mixed pot with my late night working sessions.  Under certain circumstances pot does a fine job when you’re coding.  Lots of things are tedious.  If you have the code already designed and written, pot can help give you the focus to step through every line of logic and debug it.  I haven’t done that since my 20’s though — at the very beginning of my software engineering career.  I stopped smoking pot simply because it was illegal, I didn’t have contacts to buy pot from, and it wasn’t important enough to hang out with potheads and then have a bunch of people in my life that I didn’t particularly like.  So the rest of my 30-year career was pot-free — until my cancer, and now the legalization of medical marijuana.

I still do my blogging and financial and legal work without pot.  So even in my free-spirited state of living I have boundaries for when I feel like I can safely use it and when I feel more comfortable being straight.

SO WHOEVER IS SMOKING WHILE FIDDLING WITH PINGBACKS, STOP THIS MINUTE!

Oh crap, no one is listening in spite of the caps.  Let’s get on with important blogging.

I was reading a blog post last night where someone reposted an article about why meditation is bad for you.  This article cited people getting OCD and terrible depression and fixations, people ending up in mental hospitals — the whole article shocked me.  I just googled “Why meditation is bad” and discovered a ton of people think it’s bad.

One time, years ago, I was extremely angry about something.  I meditated on my anger thinking about the phrase “face your anger”.  Well, instead of the anger disappearing, I discovered I was seething afterwards.  I’d inflamed my anger.  The lesson I learned from that is, meditation is not just sitting and thinking about anything, it’s sitting and meditating on your breath.  All of your answers to life are in your breath.

When you read dharma books like Eckhard Tolle, Sharon Salzberg, Thomas Merton and the like, they may be saying things that are cryptic, like talking about precepts or lovingkindness and such; but in every single thing they say, there is a fundamental prerequisite which is “Establish a sitting practice.  Listen to the teachings with your internal being and not your external monkey brain.”  I’m the sort of person that needs to really understand step one before I get to step two.  Some teachings seem to rush too much.  To establish a sitting practice and meet that inner person takes a lot of dedication and practice.  I hardly think it’s practical or sensible to rush people through the precepts before they’ve even understood the feeling of joy in emptiness, because they haven’t developed the proper motivation.

Meditation can be good or destructive.  It depends upon whether we’ve had instructions on how to do it properly.  Same goes for pot.  It can be really good or really destructive if you misuse it.  You have a choice when you’re high.  “Do I sit on the couch for the rest of the day eating potato chips and watching Netflix or do I get off my ass and use my high to do productive things with my life?”

The key word in life is choice.  You have a choice.  Be happy or be miserable.  In trying to fix my own misery I’ve made a lot of mistakes through my trial and error methods.  But I know that I have the power of choice in everything I do.  The last time I detox’d from percocet I was on 20 other different antipsychotics and random other drugs to compensate for drug interactions.  I was in so much pain and suffered from side effects which triggered hot flashes and stomach issues.  I was so fucked up I couldn’t even articulate to the doctors what exactly my problems were.  I had constant diarrhea from the Miralax to counteract the constipating effects of the percocet.  I quit everything cold turkey, nearly killing myself in the process.  My main goal right now is exercise, yoga, and meditation on my breath, take a minimum of drugs, keep writing and taking pictures, and hopefully make the rest of my life worth living.  I want to die looking back on my life with a smile, thinking “I’m ready now.”  And perhaps I will have a gravestone that says “And All was Right In the World”.  I would lke that.

Easy Fix

Write a post about any topic you wish, but make sure it ends with “And all was right in the world.”

(Thanks for the prompt suggestion, Timothy Baldwin!)

Daily Prompt The Uphill Struggle of Retirement and Being

Gut Feeling
Daily Prompt:  When’s the last time you followed your instinct despite not being sure it was the right thing to do? Did it end up being the right call?

The most significant “gut instinct” call I’ve ever made was the decision to retire.  I had been hoping and praying to make it onto the retirement offer list, knowing I would take the offer.  When the time came that I qualified, I took it readily, knowing that I’d thought about it long before it happened.

But retiring after 40 years of straight working is no small potatoes.  It’s a leap of faith into a black hole.  How will I live without an income?  What will I do with my life?  What will happen to my health?  How will I survive without work to drive a social life, me being the hardcore introvert I am.

It’s been 2 1/2 years since that moment.  I’ve gone through 2 bouts of percocet addiction and withdrawal, including the constant diarrhea due to laxatives you have to take when you’re on percocet.  At one point I must have been taking at least 10 pills a day for pain, depression, hot flashes, sleep — various forms of the stuff psychiatrists love to prescribe without thinking too much about how it all interacts.  I’ve been through countless ER visits, MRI, CAT, PET scans, blood tests, endoscopies, colonoscopies, etc.

For the life of me, I couldn’t get in a day without my head spinning with all of the drugs I had in me.  When I was going through withdrawal, I wanted to drive my car off a bridge or gas myself in the garage.  I threatened to kill hubby for not being there for me.  I spent a week in bed, bundled up under my covers, freezing, hungry and sick when we lost electricity in one winter storm.

I had always pictured that if I could retire, I would spend my days writing, walking through the woods, and meditating.  The evolving process was not at all as smooth as that.

When you’re used to the structure of working for 40 years, retirement is a hard transition.  You get up every morning and think you have to be somewhere.  Something’s wrong, because you don’t have to be anywhere.  What do you do with your day?  You’ve identified yourself with your profession your whole life.  Your whole life you’ve known that there are other things you’d love to be doing instead, but working is a no-brainer.  You’re raised to believe you need to earn an income and money to retire on.  It’s our culture and it’s the truth.

The problem I began having with this mentality after my cancer was that when I get sick or old enough that I’m forced to quit or get laid off, it’s too late for me to have the physical resources to rebuild a new life.  I didn’t want to wait until my cancer was back, now at stage 4, before I gave myself a shot at a new life.

Now, after 2 1/2 years, I’m finally doing more fun photography, writing, screwing around with my weed, which so far has given me no negative side effects.  I’m keeping myself in shape and thinking about maybe one day building my decrepit body up to actual running.  My goal is to just be. Be. Be.  Be happy with the now, settle in and be content but keep my eyes open to see the world around me, listen to the silence, and smell the fresh air and the earth.