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Don’t eat other people’s food or take their medication.

I’ve been putting this off.

This comment was left on my recent blog about how my tastes have changed:

Curious: which supplements are you using?

Posted 2/9/2004 at 1:58 PM by mups

One reason I didn’t respond sooner is that I’d said in that blog that it was, “my neurotransmitter precursor supplements” and earlier in the same blog, I wrote:

“…my amino acid supplements (the neurotransmitter precursors that quell my cravings)”

That’s the answer, there for all to see, so having answered the question already, I saw no reason to do so again.

Okay, okay, I’m trying to be a bit facetious, disingenuous… so sue me!  I did say that was ONE of my reasons, and it was.  I supposed that mups was looking for something like, “I take *this* and *this* and *that other thing*, and it’s just what you need, go get some for yourself.” 

Not bloody likely, Kiddies! 

Even if that supposition was incorrect, and mups was really just “curious” about what meds I’m taking, what business is that of anyone’s?  They work for me.  They are amino acid neurotransmitter precursors, chemicals that my body metabolizes into the precise neurotransmitters I need to correct my own imbalances.  That’s all any of you needs to know in order to start looking to find out what amino acid neurotransmitter precursors you might need to take to correct your own imbalances.  Google might be a good place to start if one has the ambition.

But I’ll be magnanimous here, and give you some clues, some good places to start looking.  Just don’t get the (mistaken, badly mistaken) idea that taking such supplements is enough to end an addiction or even quell the cravings for a specific substance.  I’ve also  mentioned “my new healthy diet,” which is equally as important as any supplements I take.  What I mean, if anyone needs more explicit words, is that what we don’t ingest is just as important as what we do ingest.  The supplements only work in conjunction with abstinence from addictive and allergenic substances, and such substances–allergies and addictions, sensitivities and suchlike–vary from one individual to another.

For a good beginner’s guide to discovering whether you are a slow-burner or a fast-burner, and to learn the importance of one’s ancestral diet and similar abstruse and esoteric matter (just kidding again–this shit is simple, basic nutrition and biochemistry), try reading:
Your Body Knows Best
by Ann Louise Gittelman

One of the important factors determining which foods one cannot tolerate and which ones are healthful is one’s blood type.  In general, type O thrives on meat, type A handles most vegies and poultry but not red meat or dairy, while type B tolerates beef better than chicken and is usually allergic to lobster and shrimp.  AB is largely a combination of A and B, and for dietary purposes you can forget the Rh factor.  Your diet is best if it’s consistent with your blood type, and the positive or negative thing is irrelevant.
Eat Right 4 Your Type
by Peter J. D’Adamo

Ah, but it’s not that simple.  It might BE that simple for a healthy infant whose mother gave it ideal prenatal nutrition, if it has not had any opportunities to pervert its tastes with such things as sugar, casein, gluten, or theobromine (the psychoactive and addictive substance in chocolate).  In the real world, many of us are born addicted, and most of us soon become addicted if we’re not.  You can learn more about addictive and trigger foods at www.nutramed.com.

Many of us have become obese or ill or simply malnourished as a result of our food addictions, and some have tried one wrong diet after another in the mistaken belief that what works for one person will work for another.  That simply is not true, so get over it.  If your eating habits or other habits have gotten you into addictive trouble, you need to find your own way out.  You might luck out and find someone else’s way that will work for you, but if you don’t get so lucky you have a lot to lose by such experimenting.  Get to know your own body and its needs, and then give it what it needs.

If the basic problem is an eating disorder or weight problem, a good place to start is www.dietcure.com.  There you can find self-test checklists to help you determine that nature of your problem, but if you want to know the specific cures, you’ll need to buy the book:
The Diet Cure
by Julia Ross, MA

Ms. Ross has also written another book for people whose neurotransmitter imbalances have caused depression, bipolar swings and other mood disorders:
The Mood Cure
She also has the same sort of self-test quizzes as mentioned for the Diet Cure, above, at www.moodcure.com.

If you’re already past the “mild mood disorder” phase and into full-blown addiction, especially if treatment or 12-step programs haven’t been enough to help you quit, you may need some more detailed, authoritative expert help.  In that case, try:

Stack Fire Revisited

These comments on my blog from this morning were waiting for me when I got home from Wasilla tonight:

That sounds very scary. You make it sound like it’s just a normal event of life in Alaska. Maybe so, I dunno.  I am glad you’re ok.
Posted 2/10/2004 at 11:23 AM by maggie_mcfrenzie

That does sound scary. Thankfully, you’re ok.
Posted 2/10/2004 at 1:56 PM by spinksy

its a good thing that you all have a handle on things like that….
Posted 2/10/2004 at 2:30 PM by shedragon

Maggie, if getting scared would help, I’d have been scared to death.  It was a real emergency.  In such cases, a cool head rules.  Greyfox mentioned after the fire died down and the danger passed that he’d been thinking of Dan Blythe, our latest neighbor to lose his home to fire.  It is far too common an event around here, a result of the combination of extreme cold weather and hazardous heating fuels:  wood, coal and oil.  Almost every winter at least one family in this immediate neighborhood is burned out.  The causes are many, and creosote is a common one. 

On the subject of getting scared, the time our ceiling caught on fire from a superheated stovepipe, two of our cats ran outside as soon as I opened the door to let out the smoke.  The third one hid under the bed.  If the house had burned down, she would have died.  In that event, it would have been fear, panicked reaction to fear, that killed her.  I have always tried to respond to scary situations effectively, and have tried to teach Doug the same strategies.  When we get scared, we think first and then get busy responding.

I’m glad we’re okay, too.  It was Doug’s quick thinking and his awareness of the situation that kept the emergency from becoming a catastrophe.  There are times when his propensity for staying up all night and sleeping at odd hours can be inconvenient.  Most of the time it is good to have someone manning the nightwatch, keeping the fire fueled and under control.  In the absence of thermostatically controlled central heating, we have a nightowl video game addict–one with the knack for field expediency (grabbing a nearby plant mister to put out a fire is a fine example of that classic military virtue).  That works for me.

Stack Fire

What woke me around 6:30 this morning was an unfamiliar sound:  pffft…pffft…pffft…pffft.  Well, it’s not all that unfamiliar.  A little too familiar for my taste.

It’s the sound my plant mister makes.  Doug was using the mister to cool the ceiling around the stovepipe.  He had been putting wood in the fire when a bit of metal that seals the joint between the cast iron door and the glass window in it, fell off.  It has happened to me a few times.  It usually means a hotter-than-usual fire for a while, from a greater-than-usual flow of air.  Then when the fire dies down and the stove cools enough to work with, I put the thing back in place.  I still haven’t done that this time.  The stove is still too hot to touch.

This time, things got hot enough inside the stovepipe to ignite the creosote built up in there.  Fortunately, a few days ago when Doug was on the roof shoveling snow, he took our all-purpose tool, the Mutt, up there and knocked loose a collection of creosote that had the pipe nearly choked off near the roofline.  If he hadn’t done that, there would have been more fuel in there for the fire, and more danger of a roof fire.  When we do the full job of stovepipe cleaning we let the fire go out first and go up there with the vacuum cleaner and suck the loose creosote out.  This time the weather was too cold to let the fire go out.  The creosote he knocked loose fell to the horizontal baffle at the top of the firebox.  I used my bent coat hanger tool to rake enough of it down into the fire to clear a channel to let the smoke out.  The rest of the job was being deferred until warmer weather.  Now it won’t need to be done for even longer.  The creosote has burned up.  Neat how that works, eh?

Since it hadn’t been a thorough pipe-cleaning this time, there was still some creosote in the upper portion of the pipe, too.  When I woke, it was burning with a roar, a big whooshing rumble in the pipe.  That’s why Doug had been misting the ceiling.  One day a few years ago I woke early and stoked the stove, then went back to bed, forgetting in my sleepy state to close the damper.  That morning the fire got hot, ignited the creosote in the pipe and what woke me that time had been the crackle of the flames as the ceiling burned.  After I knocked down the flames with the chemical fire extinguisher, Doug had used that same mister to “mop up” the fire: kill all the smoldering material in the ceiling tiles.

It is a small plant mister, only holds about 8-10 ounces of water.  I went looking for my bigger spray bottle even before he said he was running low on water.  I found it, filled it, and then discovered that the pump malfunctioned.  It would pump a spray or two, then stick and not pump again until I jiggled and coaxed it to recycle.  We limped along that way in relays, the two of us, him with the little bottle going pffft, pffft, pffts, and me with the poof, poof… silence of the bigger bottle, until I got the idea of getting a sports bottle with a greater squirting capability.  Ironically, the one Doug found in an upper shelf in the kitchen was one with Smokey the Bear on it.

He got it down just in time, for as the upper portion of the stack began to burn itself out and cool, the burning creosote broke free and fell to the baffle.  That was when the water-cooling of the stovepipe became critical.  The cherry-red glow we’d been seeing before that was okay, but when it lit up bright orange and spread, there was danger of the bottom of the stack melting, causing the whole burning business to collapse into the living room.  No thanks.  We redoubled our efforts at spritzing and misting.

In the midst of this activity, Doug asked, “You want to get a picture of this for your blog?”  I demurred, saying I was too busy with damage control.  But when the fire had begun to exhaust its fuel and cool, I put down the mister and picked up the camera.  That’s the base of the stovepipe.

Soon after I’d gotten up to help Doug with the misting, Greyfox woke and sleepily asked what was up.  He misheard “seal” as “steel” when Doug told him what happened to precipitate the fire, and we had an involved explanation.  Then he just lay there until the emergency was past and I’d taken pictures.  Finally, as Doug was pausing in his misting to take off his hat and one of his sweatshirts, first chance he’d had to do so, Greyfox sat up and said, “Can I help?  I need to piss.”  I said he could help by staying the hell away from my stovepipe.  The house is already redolent of Simple Green cleaner, some residue of which had been in the spray bottle I was using.

Doug protested, suggesting that we let Greyfox piss on the stovepipe and take pictures.  Greyfox expressed the thought that blogging that would disqualify me for ZangaZine.  Then he offered to put on his hernia truss first, to which Doug replied that would be “emetic, but not erotic.”  Another episode of our sit-com life.

Greyfox got up and checked the thermometer in the corner of the living room.  It was 75°, warmest it has been all winter.  Our misting had raised the humidity in here, too.  Dry air is a perennial winter problem.  I’m truly comfortable in here right now, in all this warm moist air, even if it does reek of chlorophyll.

I wonder if there’s any point to going back to bed.  Probably not, wouldn’t be able to get to sleep, unless I get something to eat first.  Eat first….  Then after the fire goes out, I can put the stove back together, shovel the ashes out of the firebox, rekindle the fire… then I have to go to the laundromat and get a shower before I leave for town today.   Later, all.

¿Qué quiéres en la vidá?

Meet my new favorite filmmaker, Robert Rodriguez.  As I’m writing this, he is speaking about filmmaking technology off to my right, on screen, on the PS2 monitor, on DVD, in the “extra features” that came with Once Upon a Time in Mexico, which Greyfox rented tonight.  We watched Open Range last night (I’ve been in a Western mood, and Greyfox has been indulging me.).  It was an excellent movie–hell, more than excellent, but words fail me–filled with credible versimilitude, but it just didn’t grab any of us the way this flick did tonight.  Old Kevin Costner could learn a thing or three from young Robert R.

The question I ask above, “What do you want in life?” is a recurrent theme in the film.  This flick is the third in a trilogy that started with El Mariachi and Desperado.  My style of movie-watching is different from Greyfox’s.  I either hear of one that sounds interesting, see a preview of something that catches my eye along with some other movie, or see it on the rack at the video store, and go for it.  Greyfox checks out the things he sees at the video store:  he goes online, reads reviews (lets other people’s opinions influence whether he views a video or not, which is something I’d never do) and checks out the filmmakers’ filmographies.  That’s how we found out about the prequels.

I didn’t need to be sold on the movie.  The title was enough for me.  I love Mexico and many things Mexican.  It’s a karmic thing:  I spent a series of lifetimes in Mesoamerica, Mexico and the American Southwest.  Some of my descendants are still there.  The fact that Johnny Depp stars in it was a heap of sweet icing on the cake.  Love that man!  I didn’t even know until his first scene tonight that Antonio Banderas plays El Mariachi himself.  That’s another whole layer of cake and icing for me.

At first, Greyfox had just told me about the movie and asked if I wanted to see it.  Before I could answer, Doug spoke up with an enthusiastic request to see it.  I guess he’d heard some buzz somewhere about it.  Greyfox’s idea was to try and find the first two movies in the trilogy before seeing this one.  We did try, last week in Wasilla, to find El Mariachi.  The local general store/video rental was supposed to, according to the owner, have Desperado.  Later we learned from his wife that he’d been mistaken.

Blockbuster didn’t have El Mariachi, either.  The cute young clerk (Greyfox didn’t agree that the chubby little guy with the odd facial hair was cute, but…) told us the movie is in Spanish with English subtitles, and they don’t carry it.  So, after learning that Desperado wasn’t available, my conservative soulmate (opposites attract) decided to go ahead and rent Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

The first thing that caught my eye and piqued my imagination, was a production credit that flashed onscreen:  Troublemaker Studios.  “My kinda guys,” I thought.  Now I’ve learned that the studio used to be R.R.’s garage.  It’s where they made the Spy Kids series, and Once Upon….  Before that, before he turned his garage into a high-tech studio, this guy made El Mariachi someplace else, reportedly (reported by Johnny Depp, who was greatly impressed by the fact) for $7,000.

Next thing to grab me was another credit:  “Shot, cut and scored by Robert Rodriguez.”  “This man,” I thought, “is really an auteur,” that fancy word Greyfox has taught me, for someone who does it all.  Indeed he does, and he cooks too.  In the “Ten Minute Cooking School” on this disk (along with a “Ten Minute Film School” and other goodies), he says that not being able to cook is like not being able to fuck.  I agree wholeheartedly.  Anyone who can’t cook and won’t or can’t fuck is wasting oxygen.

Okay, I’m impressed.  That much ought to be obvious by now.  See this movie.  It’s rich, visually, in mythic theme and metaphor, in great music and bloody violence… it’s even romantic.  I intend to go to Amazon next and see if I can order the first two flicks in the trilogy.

Now, for something completely different:

1. Everyone has a photographic memory. Some don’t have film.
2. He who laughs last, thinks slowest.
3. A day without sunshine is like, well, night.
4. On the other hand, you have different fingers.
5. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.
6. Back up my hard drive? How do I put it in reverse?
7. I just got lost in thought. It was unfamiliar territory.
8. When the chips are down, the buffalo is empty.
9. Seen it all, done it all, can’t remember most of it.
10. Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t.
11. I feel like I’m diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
12. He’s not dead. He’s electroencephalographically challenged.
13. She’s always late. Her ancestors arrived on the Juneflower.
14. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say will be misquoted,
then used against you.
15. I wonder how much deeper the ocean would be without sponges.
16. Honk if you love peace and quiet.
17. Pardon my driving. I’m reloading.
18. Despite the cost of living, have you noticed how it remains so popular?
19. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.
20. It is hard to understand how a cemetery raised its burial costs and
blamed it on the high cost of living.
21. Just remember… if the world didn’t suck, we’d all fall off.
22. The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting something
right, there’s a 90% probability you’ll get it wrong.
23. It is said that if you line up all the cars in the world end to end,
someone would be stupid enough to try and pass them.
24. You can’t have everything, where would you put it?
25. Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world’s
population.
26. If the shoe fits, get another one just like it.
27. The things that come to those that wait may be the things left by those
who got there first.
28. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he
will sit in a boat all day drinking beer.
29. Flashlight: A case for holding dead batteries.
30. Shin: A device for finding furniture.
31. As long as there are tests, there will be prayer in public schools.
32. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.
33. It was recently discovered that research causes cancer in rats.
34. Everybody lies, but it doesn’t matter since nobody listens.
35. I wished the buck stopped here, as I could use a few.
36. I started out with nothing, and I still have most of it.
37. When you go into court you are putting yourself in the hands of 12
people that weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.
38. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright
until you hear them speak.

And…

create your own visited states map or write about it on the open travel guide

Can you tell I’m a Westerner?  I had covered the West and Southwest in my youth, but had not been east of the Mississippi until Greyfox sent plane fare for Doug and me to go to Pennsylvania in 1990 to help him pack and move up here.  During that packing-and-moving time, we drove to Virginia and got married.  Virginia was better than Pennsylvania, but in general I just didn’t like the East.  Each time we went from his place in Harrisburg to his mom’s place in Dauphin, we went a few miles on a westbound expressway.  Whenever we took the exit for Dauphin, I always wanted to just stay on the road headed west. 

Then, when we all headed west in two separate vehicles at different times, Doug and I left first, went south and saw Mammoth Cave, then did a leisurely tour up through the Moundbuilders’ sites before making our rendezvous with Greyfox at Custer State Park in South Dakota… and that’s how that eastward extension of my “visited states” happened. 

How my Tastes Have Changed

It was my night to drive the rehab van to the NA meeting again.  I drove last week, but the alternate driver had an event to attend at her child’s school tonight, so we’ve altered the schedule, and now her turn will be next week and we start all over with alternating weeks.

I have realized that one thing these meetings do for me is to make me remember how I was and how I have changed.  I need to remember that, because that’s what I’m supposed to talk about when I share, and I must talk, y’know?  It is good for me, also, to remember how I was and to observe how I have changed.  It gets me oriented in time, so to speak–reminds me of the road I’ve traveled and where it has brought me.  That’s a lot like what I think that old woman in my dream was urging me towards when she told me to start journaling.

“Drug of choice” is a phrase often heard at our meetings.  Forty-some years ago, my drug of choice was a cocktail of adrenaline, dopamine and endorphins.  I was a chronic risk-taker, thrill-seeker, addicted to my own brain chemistry, not only the adrenaline of fear and exhilaration, but the dopamine of orgasm and the endorphins of rough sex or willful SI.  By 1963 or ’64 (although I did not know this at the time) I’d reached adrenal exhaustion.  The most obvious sign of that, although no one ever told me this and I found it for myself decades later in my study while trying to find cures for what ailed me, was the onset of asthma and other severe allergic symptoms.

It was then that I started seeking out exogenous highs… when the endogenous highs began to fail me, I started looking to drugs to reproduce those feelings.  That was about the time, also, that I became old enough to legally buy liquor.  I seldom ever needed to buy it, though.  Men were always happy to buy me drinks, and I was always a cheap date, a one or two drink drunk.  But I hated and still detest the taste of alcohol.  Nor do I enjoy puking, falling down, and being told the next day about my bizarre behavior of the night before.  But the booze from the bars and liquor stores, and the tranquilizers and painkillers from the doctors, were the only drugs I knew, the only things then that I had access to.

Then, in 1965, I went to Japan.  While I was there I heard that a new drug, LSD, was out there, available.  A few years previously I had read a Life Magazine article about Dr. Leary’s work at Harvard.  I looked for LSD, asked around, and heard from several of the GIs I knew (I was there as a guest of Uncle Sam, an Air Force dependent) that they knew where to get some, but no one came up with any in the time I was in Japan.   I was curious about it but not driven to seek it out, because what I had read about it did not attract me so much as intrique me.

Then after I returned to the States, one night on duty in a convalescent hospital, I was in the nurses’ station reading the PDR.  The description of methamphetamine grabbed my imagination.  Its therapeutic use was as an antidepressant, but it had interesting side-effects:  it relieved symtoms of asthma and allergies, gave energy.  All of that sounded great to me.   I’d been depressed since childhood and the drugs the doctors gave me (barbiturates, opiates, tranquilizers)  only made it worse–not to mention what alcohol did to me.  I started seeking a source.

It took a while, but I found my source of supply:  outlaw bikers.  First, they supplied me with marijuana, their second drug of choice after alcohol.  At the time, Bay Area bikers were dealing amphetamines, big Mexican “white crosses”, four-way scored tablets that tasted vile but did the job.  The bikers, however, around there and then, did not approve of using the speed, and they avoided all psychedelics.  That changed in time, but for a while my ol’man was bucking the system by buying speed for me.  He did it though.  That biker who claimed me as his property liked the mood it put me into, and it was cheaper at only 5 cents a hit (how times have changed!) than either booze or weed was.

Coming down was misery, so I tried to avoid running out of speed.  Then I got into the company of needle freaks and discovered something that wasn’t there with the pills:  a rush.  I rushed.  I ran.  I crashed and burned, hard, in jail.  But before then, I’d put not just a lot of amphetamines in my veins, but lots of other drugs too.  Along the way I’d found some LSD, and even a few downs that I could enjoy injecting.  And now all of that is ‘way behind me.  Psychedelics are, as Dr. Leary said, self-limiting.  Enough is enough and eventually one realizes that.  I kicked the needle, the ups and the downs, thirty-some years ago and have had no strong desire to go back.  I had fantasies.  I had a series of dope dreams while I was locked up, dreams of chasing down the meth, scoring, finding works, trying to find a vein… I never managed to get off in one of those dreams, but did come close a few times. 

In the real-life waking world, I didn’t even come close.  Various drugs have come into my hands and into my body for various therapeutic and recreational uses, but for all intents and purposes my addictive use of illicit drugs ended over thirty years ago.  Following the advice of a bunch of abstinent heroin addicts who ran a residential rehab center, I substituted sugar, chocolate and caffeine for the meth.  They almost killed me, those last three licit drugs.  They were so readily available and socially acceptable that nobody, not even I myself, recognized my addiction for what it was for decades.  Even now I encounter drug addicts who express doubts about the addictive characteristics of such “foods” as sugar, casein, gluten, etc.  That junkies can ease their withdrawal by substituting those substances might, one might think, be a clue, but many people are still clueless.  Not so for many biochemists and nutritionists.  Their research confirms my experience.

I have been “clean”, abstinent from my first, last and most difficult to kick drug of choice for over fifteen months.  I quit the sugar-casein-gluten cocktail (my favorite delivery system was always cinnamon rolls) on Halloween of 2002.  That’s the date that, by right, in a perfect and rational world, should be my NA “birthday”.  But it isn’t because, for one thing, I wasn’t “in the program” then.  I didn’t have help to quit.  The program didn’t even help me quit my social and recreational marijuana use, but that’s the occasion that I mark with my NA “clean date” of May 23, 2003, the day Greyfox came off his last alcohol binge and quit tobacco and weed (and cut down on sugar) at the same time.  I quit smoking then because when he quit I could see no reason to go on growing and smoking the nasty stuff.  Besides, it always gave me the munchies and made it harder to resist my sugar cravings.

It was that easy to quit pot, easier really than to go on smoking, no detox or withdrawal symptoms, no cravings, just an occasional habitual blip of an urge to indulge at some time when I’d habitually indulged before, always followed quickly by the recall that I’m now a non-smoker.  That’s how I know that I wasn’t ever addicted to cannabis.  There are two sorts of biochemical responses to pot:  some people are stimulated by it, while others are relaxed and sedated by it.  I’m one of the former, Greyfox one of the latter.  It has to do with brain chemistry and the balance of neurotransmitters in individual bodies.  From some informal anecdotal research I’ve conducted I’ve learned that, at least in my small sample, it is those who are sedated by it who tend to become addicted to it.

There are those, too, I’m told, who don’t become addicted to sugar.  I was addicted to it probably before I was weaned from the bottle and that “formula” of condensed milk and corn syrup.  I have to really watch my consumption of fruit, and should probably avoid fruit juices altogether, because there’s just too much concentrated sugar there and if I forget what I’m drinking and try to quench thirst with it, I get a sugar high and then have to grab the reins, stop the binge, take my amino acid supplements (the neurotransmitter precursors that quell my cravings) and get back on track.

And that is how my tastes have changed.  Until fifteen months ago, my attempts to kick the sugar jones were sporadic and apparently insincere.  I’d quit for a while but if someone tempted me with chocolate candy or a cinnamon roll I’d indulge.  Sometimes I would “cheat” and indulge secretly, as just about every addict has done when “trying” to quit.  Trying to make people think we are trying to quit is more like the truth.  Addictive behavior is similar no matter what the drug is.  Abstinence and recovery are also similar, no matter what drug we’ve left behind.  In meetings, if I just talk about my “drug of choice” and don’t say it’s sugar, everyone can relate to my experiences.  But of course I don’t often do it that way.  I’m too up-front and in-your-face to have any fun dissembling.  And that, too, is one of my tastes that has changed.  Oh how I used to love putting people on, but that’s another story….

P.S.
It was a wretched, horrible night for driving, weather-wise.  Snowing lightly as we started on our way into town, it increased all the way.  If I’d had to stop at the first traffic light after I pulled away from the rehab in that van, I’d have skidded into the intersection, but luckily the light changed and I was able to ease around the corner with only a slight loss of traction.

Greyfox met me back at the rehab in his car and we headed back toward Wasilla on our way home.  The road was blocked by a wreck, apparently a high-speed head-on.  We turned around and took an alternate route.  Before we’d gone three miles we noticed traffic slowed ahead of us, easing around a rollover, a truck on its side blocking all of one lane and part of the other.

With my new healthy diet and my neurotransmitter precursor supplements, I no longer have exhausted adrenals.  The wrecks, the skidding into intersections, the long drive home, gave me all the old feelings of adrenaline rush and letdown–and it wasn’t any fun.  My tastes really have changed.

Anosmia

Yippee!  Google has come through for me again. 

I’ve had this symptom of anosmia, lose my sense of smell completely for long periods of time, for many years.  I’d never seen that on any of the ME/fibromyalgia symptom lists, but lately had noticed a pattern.  When I’m in a flareup, the smeller doesn’t work.  As the fog clears, all six or seven of my senses clear up including that of smell.

I had always attributed the loss of smell to some harsh chemicals an EENT specialist once swabbed into my nose, supposedly to toughen the membranes and “cure” my allergies.  The treatment (of course) didn’t seem to have any effect on the allergies (just kept me from going back to that doctor), but I did lose my sense of smell temporarily and then periodically ever since.  Now I’ve begun to doubt that his primitive medicine was the sole cause, at any rate, of my anosmia.

This morning, I wanted to see what I could find on the web on this subject.  My search terms were, “anosmia fibromylagia.”  It netted for me this fine article with much food for thought, about the apparent viral triggers of the disorder: 

Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Guidelines for Doctors

The burneymoon is over.

I have a photoblog brewing.  Pics of the new snow are being saved to my hard drive as I write this, but that was more or less an afterthought today.  Since yesterday I’d been thinking about the best way to describe the status of that little third degree burn on my right thumb.  Unless you’re a medic or have had a severe burn, you may not know that third degree burns don’t hurt.  The nerve endings are killed by the heat.

I’d sorta forgotten that fact from my first aid training until I experienced it last Tuesday.  The U-shaped area of second degree burn around the more severely damaged area did hurt for a day or two, then that stopped.  That thumb is callused, and the skin over the entire burned area is… well, crisp is the only word that comes to mind.  A couple of days ago, from being whacked on the space bar (Unconscious touch-typing may be fast, accurate and easy, but it’s not conducive to healing a sore thumb.) the crispy crust cracked.  That’s when the thought crossed my mind:  “The burneymoon is over.”

When air hit the new tissue under there, I felt just enough discomfort to clue me that I had a wound, an opening that might let in infection if I’m not careful.  Now I’m being careful:  Betadine®, and Band-Aids® applied frequently, changed if they become soiled, and latex gloves if I’m handling meat or any other apparent source of contamination.

I’m going into so much detail here largely for LuckyStars.  She can’t seem to help mothering me, and since my own mother died she’s my primary nurturer (except for myself–I do a pretty fair job of it on my own), so I want to reassure her.  She and Greyfox wanted me to go “have it looked at” at the clinic, but I won’t do that unless and until I look at it and see that it needs some medical attention–like if it gets infected, Heaven forfend!  If that doesn’t happen, my thumb and I will happily heal as I go about my usual business with a few prophylactic precautions.

The old accumulation of snow had been knocked off a few of the posts in the yard.  They serve as bird feeders and cat perches.  On the ones where the snow caps were left undisturbed, most of them slumped to the side with the new load of snow.  Most of them are slumping south, but there’s one maverick that leans to the north.  It also appears to me to resemble the head of a carousel horse, slightly.

Doug was washing dishes last night as we slept.  This morning when Greyfox started to make coffee, he discovered we were out of water.  He once wrote a lengthy humorous piece about “Alaska Coffee” when we lived in the old place off the grid.  It included not only a trip to the spring for water, but shoveling out a snowbound car, disconnecting an empty propane tank, schlepping it to the lodge to get filled, then back home, before he could heat water for coffee.  This morning, he had to shovel the driveway twice, scrape windows and brush snow off the cars (his, which he will be driving to the laundromat later, and mine, which is the one we use to haul water).

His two driveway shovelings come on the heels of one Doug did yesterday so that Greyfox would be able to pull into the driveway when he got home from Winter Carnival.  It snowed two nights in a row and off and on through yesterday, so that accounts for the need for Doug’s work and the first shoveling Greyfox did.  Then the snowplow came through, moving fast.  Good thing none of us was out in the yard.  The fast-moving plow threw snow so far up into the yard that it had to be brushed off the hood of my car.  In the photo at right, between the ergonomic snow pusher and the black trash can is another can buried by the snowplow.  Some of that snow has been shoveled at least three or four times.  It really gets around… well-traveled snow.

I walked down to the end of the block, to see if any snowmobiles had packed a trail into the cul de sac.  No go.  It’s still a two-day accumulation of new snow all the way to the end, with about a three-foot-deep berm barring access at this end.  I don’t mind short trips out into hip-deep snow for a good purpose, but wading through a dense berm to get to a long walk in deep snow is not my idea of a pleasant stroll.

As I walked along the road, I could see frost glittering on the trunks of the trees.  For my last shot before I came back in the house, I waded into butt-deep snow to get a close-up of the sunlit side of this moose-scarred white birch.  I was hoping to capture the glitter, but only got a few highlights.  Duh!  Of course it would take video to get the glitter effect.  Silly mee.

I brushed most of the snow off my pants and my new nifty boots and came back in, winded, breathless, refreshed but not chilled, because the two snowy days and cloud cover that lasted through the night, followed by clearing and sunshine today, has warmed it up to the high twenties out there, near to thawing.

I’ve discovered a neat trick to keep my feet warm without the problem of slightly-too-small felt innersoles shifting in my new boots and my socks working themselves down to crowd my toes.  I put the innersoles inside my socks.  It not only prevents the sock-creep, but when I come in from outside and change from boots into my wooly slippers, I have felt innersoles in the slippers!  Warm feet are the best kind to have.

RELEASE

One of the most valuable gems I’ve picked up among the garbage in the quite-valuable-yet-quite-flawed 12-step programs is the injunction to let go of resentments.  In AA, the original 12-step program, it is written that resentment is the “dubious luxury that normal men can afford” but we addicts cannot.

The gravest  impediment to my quest to let go of my resentments has shown itself to be my “righteous indignation”.  I don’t harbor unjust resentment.  If I hold animosity for anyone, it is because they have done me harm–not just insult or disrespect, but real harm.  It was not always thus.  The ‘sixties saw me going along with my peers in resenting the military industrial complex and hating the police.  In my youth I resented my parents and teachers and anyone else (even God) who imposed restrictions on me.  I have matured out of a lot of those foolish resentments, but I have had a devilishly hard time in letting go, for my own growth, recovery and peace of mind, of my “justified” resentments.

It has not been at all difficult to release my resentment toward police.  In general, the cops and criminals tend to have more affection and respect for each other, through familiarity, than either group gets from normal law-abiding citizens.  Some of the kindest people I have known were cops.  Tim, the former sheriff’s deputy I dated forty years ago, adopted K-9 rejects, German shepherds judged too vicious for police work.  Those dogs, as well as the ocelot and the St.Bernard that rode around with him in his little sports car, loved him.  Animals, I’ve found, are good judges of character.

In the years since I’ve matured, settled down and toned down my life of crime, I’ve had contact with a number of honorable, admirable and helpful Alaska State Troopers.  One of them, just a little guy, intervened and took down a large and dangerously drugged-up armed man, keeping him from robbing, and possibly from injuring or killing Greyfox at his roadside stand.  Others have joined in wilderness searches for people I love, and they routinely do humanitarian tasks around here such as delivering emergency messages to people who live off the grid.  Cops, on the whole, are okay by me.

There is another group, however, against whom I have long harbored general resentments.  Even though I have known many doctors and nurses who were decent people, and even once worked toward my own career in nursing, I have hated, feared and resented the medical profession… for good reason.  Entrenched medical dogma prevents the adoption and acceptance of both new and ancient “alternative” therapies.  The conspiracy between the silverbacked physicians’ entrenched power elite, pharmaceutical cartels, hospital administrators and insurance industry bean counters puts medical care out of the economic reach of many people whose quality of life and very survival are imperiled by that fact.  Those are just some of my general, impersonal, cultural and political complaints against the institution of Medicine.

I have personal gripes, too.  For my entire life, on balance, I think doctors have done me more harm than good.  For all I know it was good hospital care and quick neonatal surgery that ensured my survival from a lengthy and traumatic birth.  I know that it was ACTH, a new drug at the time, that saved my mother’s life a few years later.  But the series of misdiagnoses, malpractice and mistaken treatments I’ve received have taken away any gratitude I might have, as well as much of the strength and vitality I might also have now if not for them.  The list is long, and anyone curious enough to look can find a lot of it in my memoirs.  A few highlights include my parents’ being told I “would not live to grow up,” and my being given (in the ‘fifties when such things were done) radiation treatments for a wart that earlier would have been surgically excised and now would be removed by laser.

There was the young Air Force MD medical officer who gave me a “hot” allergy desensitization shot and killed me–and on the other side to balance that one, the old master sergeant combat medic who brought me back with a shot of adrenaline.  Another case of iatrogenic illness that did immeasurable harm but also had a positive result was the irresponsible internist who gave me four prescriptions for the various symptoms of my hypoglycemia and made me so ill that I quit going to doctors for the next twenty-some years.  Now when I drop into the clinic, it is with my diagnosis firmly in mind and a handful of supporting documentation to give to the PAs there.  I leave nothing to chance or to their skills, which are to me an unknown quantity.  I question and investigate every opinion they give me and each prescription, before I accept them.  I argue and they (some of them) hate that.  Those are the ones I avoid the next time I make an appointment.

Anyhow, for me for many years the AMA has been a dirty acronym on the same scale as the GOP.  In my view, reactionary, backward-thinking “conservatism” in both organizations has not only been impeding progress but has been causing great loss and destruction on this planet.  Nothing has happened to change my mind about that, but now I find I can forgive them.  It is not for them that I do it.  It is not a reasoned act.  It is an unabashedly selfish and emotional choice I’ve made, to simply forgive.

One thing did contribute to that decision, besides that oft-repeated injunction in the programs, that bit about releasing those “dubious luxuries.”  That thing is a book that Greyfox brought home, a discard from the public library.  I started leafing through it when I found it lying on the floor.  The first little essay I read brought tears to my eyes.  By the second one, I had found the release I’ve been fumbling towards for months.  Feels good, doc.  Thanks.