Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I’m finally out in the free world again after an all-too-long stay in the hospital. I’m quite certain that I could have been released after three or four days, but got stuck there for a week and a half largely because of the holidays — the relevant specialist doctors were on vacation, in addition to the pharmacies running on limited hours and limited staff making it difficult to get my frustrating narcotic regulation-crippled prescription set in motion. I have a nice pile of stories to tell and comments to make, but I’m going to sit on the majority of them for a little while because they’re still unfolding and I need to give them more thought to figure out what the “moral of the story” may be, and also I feel I need to respect the privacy of the other people in the stories (primarily my fellow patients) making me vague on some stuff anyway.

Officially I was in the part of the hospital that specializes in “medical de-tox”, but I was the only patient (of six on my floor and maybe a dozen and a half total) who had arrived via the pain management channels and was thus there to stabilize and then increase the amount of medication in my system. Everyone else was there because of difficulty with addiction and abuse, mostly some form of opiate but also a few who were struggling with heavy-duty alcoholism. Of course there was more than enough anxiety and thin nerves to go around, but everyone was very nice and we all got along great, with the exception of one complete scumbag user — as in user of people — who I’m pretty sure was just there for a free place to crash after she got in a fight with her [perhaps imaginary] girlfriend and got kicked out after being irrationally rude to everyone (especially after we all turned down her begging us to hook her up with heroin) and being high the whole time she was there. She’d snuck in a stack of fentanyl patches, which are a powerful opiate pain killer — or in her case, narcotic — that work sort of like nicotine patches. They are supposed to release 100µg/hr over 72 hours, but instead of leaving them on her shoulder where the nurses had put them she was tearing them off and chewing them. This can release as much as 7,200 µg into your system in a short period which is enough to kill many people. She didn’t drop dead, but she was nodding off the whole time, falling over, dropping face first into her food, and walking into walls. This might sound funny, but it’s actually very unpleasant to be around, profoundly ugly behaviour, and I’m guessing that it was quite upsetting to those patients who were recovering from opiate abuse.

When she eventually got kicked out — and it took a week of complaining about her even though she’d broken pretty much every rule she was capable of breaking — it took the nurses a good six hours to get her packed and out the door. She spent the last hour asking everyone if she could borrow a towel, and when everyone told her no, using the excuse that our towels were dirty, she pushed to borrow our dirty linens. Still met with refusal, she eventually found the cleaning staff’s supplies and I saw her walking into her room clutching some fresh bedsheets and towels. I’m sure that it will come as no surprise when I tell you that when the nurses walked her down to her cab that her beer belly had somehow morphed into a cubic shape. A few minutes later they returned and she’d mutated back to her scrawny trucker body with a round gut and the nurse was not-so-inexplicably carrying a stack of linens as our nemesis angrily whined, “they’re for my friend Bruce!”

Eventually they got her into the cab, and we watched out the window as it drove off the hospital grounds. To our amusement and horror it stopped half way down the driveway and she got out, and we suddenly feared we weren’t rid of her. She went and popped open the trunk of the cab and spent a couple minutes rummaging around until — surprise, surprise — she’d found her fentanyl. She couldn’t even wait to get off the hospital grounds before getting high again. For all I know she’s dead of an overdose now. It wouldn’t surprise me. I hope she gets help, and I understand that being an addict is a terrible illness because everyone — including yourself — blames it on you and you get very little sympathy, but wow, of all the ill people I’ve met, I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who it’s harder to wish well for.

But other than her, everyone on our floor was very nice, and very genuine about whatever healing they were there for. We all got along and — with the place being so boring to be in with so little to do — spent a lot of time talking and watching movies and a few of the nights ordered food. Stating the obvious, the hospital food was insanely horrible. I mean, I don’t think I could cook food that bad if I was trying to. Just awful stuff that I’m sure has a detrimental effect on recovery, so as I’m sure you can imagine, ordering comfort food like pizza was truly sunshine from heaven. Naturally, on the day we ordered pizza, the above-mentioned scumbag — who of course hadn’t offered to chip in for the pizza, but we were still naïvely willing to share it to try and help her through a rough time — walked over, picked up a piece, spit out “it’s fucking cold” and threw it back down on top of the rest of the pizza and stormed off. Real nice. A few days later when we got Thai food at least she didn’t contaminate our dinner, but upon seeing us finding a moment of happiness as we enjoyed it, she yelled “if you like it here so much why don’t you just move in” before slamming her door.

I’m off shortly to get Nefarious at the airport, which I’m very much looking forward to, so let me begin wrapping up here. I scheduled the hospital stay while she was off visiting her mom for the holidays. I do however want to briefly add a public thank you to all the nurses and doctors at the hospital. I was treated with respect and kindness the whole time, and even flattered by a few who treated me like a celebrity (and knew quite a bit about me after some googling I guess), and even though I was completely dreading the experience of being “locked up”, other than the first few days where my pain level was very high (thankfully though I never went through even a moment of withdrawal as the medications changed), it was a good experience. I got a mountain of reading done, and in addition to television and socializing, I fiddled with the limited art supplies they had there to pass the time.

Unfortunately the place is radically understocked in all ways, not just food. I’ve already dropped off a couple cases of soda and other treats for the patients, and I’m going to think about some other ways that I can help the place out (other than donating cash to the hospital’s foundation which is lower on my charity list than direct action).

But before I get rambling on other stories or politics, I must report that although it’s a little early to say too much, from a medical point of view the visit was worth it. It was only to get my pain management on a new path and didn’t do anything for the underlying disease, but now I’m on methadone which the doctors tell me is the very best medication at their disposal for the type of chronic pain that I have. For those that don’t know, I have a rare genetic disorder that’s causing a grid of tubular shards of calcium to slowly shred and destroy my skeletal muscles, leaving useless junk tissue in their place. In addition to eventually leaving me completely paralyzed (and possibly blind), it’s extremely painful, and the pain is constant, relatively consistent, and never goes away. The pain gets worse and the condition accelerates the more I use the muscles, so I can probably minimize it (but not reduce it) if I spend most of my time in a wheelchair, but the reality of my life is that I prefer to be as active as possible, which may not be so good for me but is a trade I’m willing to make. I’m currently on a medium dose of methadone, and I’m expecting that it will still double or triple from where it’s at now (it behaves very differently from person to person, and I tend to be extremely drug tolerant), but it’s already more effective than Oxycodone, Dilaudid, and any other opiates I’ve been on with the exception of diamorphine/diacetylmorphine by a significant margin. For the first time I’m hopeful about this medication’s ability to help me, and I’m looking forward to being able to start focusing on treating the disease rather than just its symptoms. It’s not going to be easy but the future is definitely a little brighter.

By the way, let me make a standing offer to anyone reading this in the future who’s considering similar treatment (methadone pain management) or has a similar disorder (tubular aggregate myopathy) that you’re welcome to email me if you want advice from someone who’s been through it. I’m at snowrail@gmail.com and if you don’t get a reply, just email me again. I get a load of email and sometimes stuff gets missed in the bulk or falsely auto-filed as spam.

Tomorrow morning, real early for someone who would love to sleep in, I’ll be checking into the hospital for an indeterminate stay — until they can stabilize my pain medication — which will likely be about a week long on total paranoia-inducing the-outside-world-doesn’t-exist lockdown. There’s no point in hoping for less time, because I’ve been in on thirty day forms twice before, the first time “voluntary” and when I wanted to leave early on my own terms they made it real clear that they could step in and switch my status to “involuntary” and explained the draconian and completely implausible procedures for debating their abuse of my illusory freedom. Nonetheless, it could be as short as three days, and most people are there for five. So I’m scheduling for a week. Nefarious went to visit her mother in Virginia today for Kwanza or whatever it is that they celebrate down there, and will return just before New Year’s, which is when our little family here will be celebrating our “sort-of Christmas”. I’m sure I’ll be out by then, and I can’t even being to tell you how hopeful I am about this experience bringing me to a better place than the expensive and unpredictable pain roller-coaster that I’m currently being tormented with.

When I look at my life, I’m not sure that I have ever experienced physical pleasure, like the sort that one might get from doing drugs, or preferably, yoga and a really, really good massage. This seems sad and unfair and maybe even cruel, but you can’t dwell on bad hands like that, because you have what you have and there’s no changing that. Unfortunately I despise massage because it’s so painful for my skin to be touched, but I hear it can be awesome even without the artform-degrading happy ending. I think perhaps I did feel physical pleasure a several decades ago, the “simple joy” kind, not the complex “Bob Flanagan transforming agony into extasy” kind that I get if I trigger just the right nerves in just the wrong way, say by pour boiling water on myself (the brain-body-malfunction that probably helped make me run BME so well), but the past few years of living the worst sort of apathetic morose agony — a constantly throbbing never-ending torture — have completely erased from my memory the idea that your body does anything but bring you misery or at best, if you’re loaded with opiates, nothing at all.

The idea that this living hell may end is pure heaven to me. My disease can not be cured, but perhaps the pain can be stopped. I have the feeling the clinic I’ll be at (because it does methadone and detox among other ~~crazier~~ “less obvious” things) is going to be full of street junkies, so I’m looking forward to loads of Burroughsian, Van Zandtian, or even pollution-loving Bukowskian stories that make me very jealous as at least their depravity occasionally feels good. I’ve tried nearly every drug under the sun to make my pain go away, including extremes like mainlining heroin, and it didn’t do a damn nice thing to me. Not one hint of a high. Sure, I was able to walk without wanting to die at every step for a change as my legs weren’t feeling as internally mangled, but I definitely didn’t feel “good”. For all I know euphoria is some sort of placebo urban legend. It makes me so jealous to see these unfortunate enemies of gentrification be able to find a moment of bliss, even if it destroys their piss-soaked destitute “I’ll suck your cock for some smack” life. I just wish there was some way to for me to have a taste of not being surrounded by an ambient drone of slow torture, and I’m holding out hope that at least at the end of this hospital stay I will be a little closer to “normal” and will be able to live my life without every action being misery.

Fingers crossed.

For now I’m going to go pack a backpack, a nice sturdy green parachute bag my military brother gave me when I was barely in my twenties. I am bringing a nice stack of books and borrowed Nefarious’s movie and MP3 player so that I have plenty of entertainment while I’m locked up. I wish I could bring a computer to write on but it doesn’t seem to be permitted. That said, it’s so rare for me to have the enforced solitude to read beyond what I do at Nefarious’s bedtime that I should be and will be very thankful. Beyond the slow stabilization and titration of my drugs, I really don’t know what to expect will be filling my time, whether I’ll have to participate in “talk about our problems” groups and such or if it really will mostly be medication adjustments and blood tests. I also don’t know what the split will be between drug addicts and pain patients like me. Most of all I’m looking forward to peace and quiet to do lots of reading, so hopefully I don’t have a horrible roommate that screams during evenings of nightmares or farts or jacks off incessantly or something. I have a million good stories from the people who I lived with in psyche ward decades ago, so I’m sure it won’t be that bad and that I will leave with a new chapter for my biography. At least horrible circumstances to tend to draw interesting characters.

Before I go in there are a few people I have to thank, most of all my daughter who gave me the strength and motivation to survive this long, and equally to Caitlin whose warm and unquestioning support and love has built a stronger foundation than I could have imagined possible, and finally to my old friend Dave, who was always there to help me and get me through the difficult stretches. There are many others who were there for me that I am eternally grateful to — my father who was there for me as a loving family, Saira who always was there to listen if I needed it, the many friends here in the online world, some known to me in-person and some near-strangers who showered me with love and support that made me feel very special and someone who owed it to the world to make it and to keep fighting. Thank you all so much, and I’ll see you soon. Sadly visitors are not permitted at this facility, and I won’t even be able to check my email but none of that will change that I love you all and will miss you dearly.