I am no longer surprised at the responses I get to anything I write here, but I will admit that some of the comments on yesterday's post were unexpected.  Since I had no expectations, they were all, in a sense, unexpected, but that's not precisely what I mean.  I have observed that many people do not see reality as I do.  Generally speaking, however, most of the comments I receive here express at least tangential agreement with my expressed views.  Few people are bold enough to risk offending me or incurring my wrath by expressing contrary opinions, alas.  Those areas, such as yesterday's topic, which my readers tend to see in vastly different terms than I see them, are few and, if I would just think about it ahead of time, probably predictable.

The gist of those comments seems to be that most of you hate liars, lies, con games, and all forms of deception and fraud.  I can relate to those feelings because I once shared them.  I understand the humiliation of realizing that I have been fooled, suckered, that I actually believed a pile of bullshit.  I know the sinking feeling and sense of loss at having been betrayed by a friend or lover, or both together.  I know where you're coming from, because that's the same place I have come from.  I just don't live there anymore.

I was also a world class liar.  I knew how to shade the truth to make my lies believable.  I was intuitively sharp enough to guess what people wanted to hear so that I could gain their approval by feeding them the appropriate line of bullshit.  Approval was very important to me, and I was clever enough to manipulate people into giving it to me, but not insightful enough, for the longest time, to realize that when people approved of my false persona they were not approving of me.  If I had had any healthy self-esteem beforehand, such behavior on my part would have killed it.

I still tell lies.  I hate to admit that.  I'd love to lie about it and say that I have completely transcended dishonesty.  I am not sure that I'll live long enough to get there in this lifetime, but I intend to continue making the effort.  I have gotten to the stage now where occasionally a lie will slip out and then I will immediately correct it.  Sometimes it is a simple misstatement, such as one time I spoke of someone threatening me with a shotgun when the weapon involved had been an axe.  I have no clue to why it came out shotgun, but I realized as soon as I said it that it was wrong, and I corrected it.  Only rarely does it take me more than a moment or two to hear an untruth come from my mouth and correct it.

Sometimes, in reading over past episodes of my memoirs, I recognize falsehoods and correct them.  Often they appear to be that same kind of inexplicable misstatement, a mere brain fart.  Other times, I recognize that what I wrote was more plausible, palatable or acceptable than the unvarnished and incredible truth, and I wonder at my neurotic need to be believed, and the depth and persistence of my sick, immature habits of denial, avoidance, and manipulation.  Most of the time I am scrupulously truthful, but at odd moments, for no discernible reason, the insecure and emotionally needy old personality comes forth.

I had some expert help in learning the importance of openness and honesty, and in developing the courage to say what is in my mind.  Around the same time that I began working on being myself and saying what I mean regardless of the consequences, I started feeling more compassionate understanding toward liars and manipulators.  The more honest and open I become, the less I resent the deceptions perpetrated by others.  If that seems counterintuitive to you, then we're in the same boat there.  I guess it's mostly just that I can relate to the many reasons why people lie, and having forgiven myself for being weak and pitiful, I can't withhold my forgiveness from others.

Of course, I do understand that low self-esteem and the need for external validation are not the only reasons that people tell lies.  Other forms of fear, egotism and other pathological states also motivate people to try and hide their true intentions or to cover up antisocial actions.  One comment on yesterday's entry mentioned lies that were not to the liar's advantage and made no difference one way or the other to the hearer.  That one used to confound me, too, making no sense at all until I got to know my husband, Greyfox.

Greyfox freely admits that he used to be a professional liar.  He worked in the press office of a state government back East (showing my Leftcoastiness here), where part of his job was to tell official lies to the public.  Of course, they were rationalized on the basis of preventing panic and insurrection, for the good of the people, you know.  Perhaps Greyfox was good at that job because he was such a practiced and accomplished liar in his private life.  He is not so free about speaking of his private lies.

I have always confronted him on his lies whenever I caught him.  On many occasions, the lie under discussion would be one of those senseless ones that was in no way self-serving.  Often, the lie worked to his disadvantage.  In one of those confrontations early in our relationship, he told me that he had attended conferences on ACOA behavior, adult children of alcoholics.  One of the things he learned there is that ACOAs often lie when they would be better served by the truth.  In my opinion, anyone who tells a lie would be better served by the truth, but that's beside the point. 

In alcoholic families, or in families of addicts to other drugs, or families of incest or abuse, lying is the norm.  The entire family spends its days trying to survive and get around the elephant in the living room, while pretending that it isn't there.  As long as there are children being parented by liars, who teach their kids to lie and punish them for telling the truth, there will be succeeding generations of liars.  Fearing them, hating them, or avoiding them will not change the culture.  Compassionate comprehension of the roots of the problem, open discussions of it, and courageous confrontation of the behavior (as opposed to confrontation of the person), have the best hope of changing that culture of deception.

How we might bring to an end the official policies of church and state lying is another matter.  For myself, I just keep telling everyone who'll listen to me that the emperor has no clothes and the priest is a fraud.  Unfortunately, the lies that the bosses tell are more comforting and/or palatable to the intellectually lazy and self-indulgent masses than my unpleasant truth.  Unless you count yourself as one of that mass of fools, perhaps you could raise your voice and shout a little truth, too.  It might help.  We'll never know until we try.

BTW, on a similar topic, I just joined the Fundies Are Fruitcakes blogring.  You can, too.

On an unrelated topic, the sled dog racing season is well under way and I haven't been around to report on it.

Once, a couple of decades ago, I had a distressing exchange of letters with a man I considered a client.  He had asked me for a reading.  A few months after I did his reading, I sent him a routine follow-up seeking to discover why I hadn't gotten any response to the reading or any payment.  I had specifically asked for feedback, and thought it only fair that someone who had requested and received a service from me would either pay or say why he wouldn't pay.

He returned my feedback form, saying that the advice in the reading might be useful to him if the information was true, but he had no way to evaluate the truth of it, so he disregarded it, "considering the source."  It wasn't that I was just unknown to him, but that I was a mail-order psychic who didn't demand payment in advance.  That made me automatically suspect in his opinion.

He came to mind today as I was thinking about who I believe and how I decide what to believe.  I can believe nobody all of the time.  Some people contradict themselves so often or tend to exaggerate or fantasize so much, that it would be easy to disregard everything they say.  However, I don't do that.  I try to evaluate each statement from those unreliable sources on its own merits.  This makes interactions with them troublesome, so I tend not to communicate with them as often as with more reliable sources.

Some people I consider to be generally reliable sources are also tricksters.  My wisest mentors and teachers, whose words usually carry enlightenment, joy and peace, tend on occasion to throw in an absurdity or a subtle misstatement as a test or just to shake things up.  Also, even the most enlightened of beings is capable of being misinformed or deluded in some areas.  So I can't just relax and absorb every word from even my most reliable sources.

Greyfox called a little while ago.  One of the things he mentioned was that my newspaper horoscope for today said I would be, "tired but happy."  The paper, the Anchorage Daily News, recently underwent a change of ownership and along with less hard news, more fluff and puff pieces, and a bunch of new funnies, they have a new astrologer.  Neither Greyfox nor I likes this one as much as we did the old one, but that "tired but happy," line was spot on for me today.  Of course, I have no excuse for being tired, and have nothing special to make me happy, which may or may not validate that astrologer.  The fact that I'm usually tired, and generally happy for no reason at all would tend to invalidate it.

With my guys, Doug (adult son) and Greyfox (spouse and soulmate), I can usually tell if a statement is credible by some clues in voice and body language.  Lacking that, I have to rely on whether their words are supported by their actions, or else I just have to consider the source.  Each of them has areas in which he is generally reliable and other areas where he tends to lie or, to cut them some slack, to be self-deluded or in denial.

A while back, Greyfox was on the speaker phone, telling me how he had been using me in the forums at totse.com as an example of honesty and integrity.  When I tried to tell him that I'm not all that high and holy, he said I was also a paragon of humility.  He went on to call me "admirable."  Doug had been listening without comment until that point.  He chimed in to agree, and to add that, "It's not easy to live with."  Greyfox laughed and agreed with him.   He said just because I'm admirable, doesn't mean I'm particularly likable.  Given the choice, I prefer to be trustworthy, accurate, truthful... just being myself.  I don't need to be liked, but I like to be believed.

Earlier today, it seemed our hard drive had crashed... or something.  Anyway, the computer was down for no reason Doug could discern, and it would not at that time boot up, but at this time, it did.  This got me thinking maybe I had better blog while I have the opportunity, since I have been letting it slide so long.

I have been depressed -- depressed but not sad.  I know it is a neurochemical thing, and I am not letting it get to me.  I have cabin fever, am going stir crazy, and am prudently avoiding any and all activity other than what must be done.  Even so, I am often out of breath and always impaired in my neuromuscular functioning.  It's something I can live with, but I do crave a little run out in the snow to catch some peachy sunset light or to see the aurora borealis, the full moon, whatever.  I wouldn't want to be out there very long or go very far, but for now, just for now, I'm not going anywhere.

Being depressed is only part of why I haven't been blogging.  Power outages have also contributed to my absence from here.  About a week ago, the electricity was off from Saturday night until Monday morning.  Doug and I lit a bunch of candles and read.  Well, I read, and played with the dog, and just sat and thought.  Doug read some, got out his Legos and did some building, played with melted wax, shoveled snow, chopped wood.....

The power outage was relatively tolerable at first.  We called the outage reporting line and learned that the outages extended from Hatcher Pass to Trapper Creek.  For those not familiar with the Susitna Valley, or the geographically curious, that's a big area.  Several U.S. states are not that big.  It became less easy to tolerate when the phones went down.  Phones were down again today -- another reason I have not been on the internet (keep losing the connection a lot.

Anyway, I just wanted to make an appearance, show the flag, update this thing.  I had been feeling vaguely neglectful.  Now Greyfox is trying to get through to me on the phone.  Gotta go.

Geez, I am GLAD it has warmed up.  After only two days with temps down in the mid-twenties below zero F, it gradually warmed up over the past two days, to the mid-teens above zero.  Of course, we've had a bunch of snow dumped on us, as always whenever warmer air moves in.  Tonight, Greyfox was telling us on the phone that they'd had over a foot of new snow down at his end of the valley.  I said I hadn't been out, didn't know how much snow we'd gotten, and Doug spoke up, saying, "Too much."

We now have one of the perennial problems that generally go along with really cold weather... I mean besides having the water jugs and buckets on the floor freeze; the water in the cats' and dog's dishes freezing solid despite being elevated on a double layer of two-inch foam insulation; having to sleep in shifts so that one of us is awake and alert to tend the woodstove every couple of hours, and having to suit up in arctic wear just to sit around in the house in relative comfort.

And I do mean RELATIVE comfort.  Despite wearing multiple layers of polar fleece and bulky sweaters (my winter pajamas), my silly-looking double layer of hats with the floppy polar fleece (picture a boreal version of an Ozzie bush hat) over the little knitted skullcap, and several layers of socks and fleece booties, I've been reading in bed with the covers up over my legs, a hot water bottle on my lap to help warm my hands, and a sleeping bag around my shoulders like a shawl.  After a day of that, I resorted to my old yeti-feet booties (over-the-calf white shag pile slippers with felt insoles) in place of the usual down-filled camp booties for when I got out of bed, and after a few times of slipping my relatively warm stockinged feet into the cold booties, I just started wearing them in bed, too.

The other problem is the refrigerator.  A couple of nights ago, I checked the indoor-outdoor thermometer in the kitchen:  minus 28 out and 36 in.  That's just marginal for my tropical houseplants, but fortunately the living room where they and the woodstove are, was a few degrees warmer.  I was heating water for tea, waiting for the kettle to boil, and warming my hands on it while the rest of my body was getting chilled.  I reflected on the fact that our fridge usually maintains a temperature of about 40, and for an insane moment thought about opening the fridge for a little shot of warmer air.

Sometime after that, Doug was preparing to bake a frozen pizza when he noticed that it had partially thawed.  That's the trouble with our fridge in cold weather.  When the ambient temp is below the fridge's target temp, it doesn't run and the freezer up top doesn't maintain its target of zero.  We are familiar with the phenomenon of ice cream, for example, being soft in winter and rock hard in summer.  Even after the weather warmed up outdoors (and it warmed more slowly and not quite as much indoors), the fridge is balky.  Twice, I have had to turn its dial all the way up near the coldest setting to get the compressor to kick on.  Once it starts running, I can turn it back to its usual setting and it completes the cycle, but won't come back on again on its own.

I was telling Greyfox about this, and he said it threw a new light on the old problem of trying to sell refrigerators to Eskimos.  Still, it beats the old routine we had to go through when we lived off the grid.  It was a constant effort to monitor temps indoors and out.  When it was too warm outside, we'd have to hurry up and eat the perishable frozen stuff from the ice chest out there.  If it was too cold indoors, we'd have to put the indoor ice chest up higher to keep milk and produce from freezing.  Electric refrigeration is a wonderful thing, one I'd not want to go back to doing without. 

BTW, several people commented on Greyfox's expressed and demonstrated concern for my wellbeing.  I think it deserves comment.  He's not really "gruff," as one comment suggested.  He can be a crotchety old curmudgeon, and often has the pathological narcissistic tendency to exaggerate all his little difficulties and ills while remaining totally cold to anyone else's feelings, but he's more likely to be whiny than gruff.  There's a lot of history involved in his attitude toward me.  In particular, for many years he was unhappy and blamed me for his trouble.  He acknowledged the error of that attitude several years ago, around the time he got clean and sober and started working his way out of NPD.  But that did not bring an instantaneous change in his behavior.  He rises to the new attitude occasionally in his more lucid moments, and manages to maintain it for longer and longer periods of time with practice.  I enjoy associating with him more and more as time goes by, too, but don't love him more because he treats me more humanely.  I've always loved him not for what he did, had or was, but just because I choose to love.

At least one of you has been wondering if my prolonged absence signalled a setback.  I'm still not in tiptop shape (ooogha, understatement alert!), and the temperature is 24 below zero right now, but it was a technical setback, not a physical one, responsible for my failure to blog last week.

Suddenly one day, the file I was writing would save to the laptop's hard drive but when I'd try to save it to disk, it would say, "cannot create file."  When that happened, I stopped writing, being not particularly inspired nor urgently driven to write, when whatever I would produce would be forever trapped in this old Compaq.

I fiddled with it, tried using a different diskette, restarted the thing half a dozen times, then turned the problem over to Doug.  He may or may not know more about computers and their problems than I do.  He certainly has more of that wild talent that Greyfox calls the "technological laying on of hands," than I have -- and I have my share.  The old GMC Jimmy Greyfox used to have would get cranky for him occasionally, stalling, sputtering, hard to start.  I'd drive it a time or two, and it would straighten right out and drive fine until Greyfox bollixed it up again.  But I digress....

After procrastinating for a few days, and taking a different, presumably usable, previously used disk from the file box next to the printer, Doug plugged in ol' Schpeedy Trackbawl and booted him up.  First I heard the odd double beep I'd noticed upon startup a few times right after Doug had installed the Breeze word processor.  Then I heard a grunt from Doug that seemed to have a question mark or two after it.

I returned a questioning grunt and he explained that he'd gotten an error message, "checksum invalid," and then the machine went on and started DOS.  I said, "Hey, I'll bet it will work now.  It was giving me that for a while, then about the same time it wouldn't save to disk, it stopped doing that when I started it up."  Sure enough, it worked for him then, and this morning when I started it up, it gave out with the extra double beep and the "checksum invalid," and was able to save to the A drive.

Last week was largely uneventful in that except for a couple of days, all I did was rest and take it easy.  I still don't get any farther from my bed than the kitchen, haven't been outside since getting home from hospital, except for the one trip to the clinic for followup.  Wednesday and Thursday were eventful enough to make up for the rest.

Wednesday, Hurricane Greyfox blew through.  The supply run had been scheduled and delayed time after time for a couple of weeks.  Weather, his health, road conditions, other things to do... one thing and another came up to delay the trip, until finally, just as it started to snow and more heavy snow was forecast, he went through with it to beat the blizzard.  His plan was to bring up the groceries and a few books and videos, spend some time on our computer, take Doug and a few water jugs to the spring to load up on water, and do a few loads of wash for me at the local laundromat. A day or two before he came up, the Wasilla library had a bag sale, all the books a big  paper grocery bag would hold, for $3.00.  He filled two bags with a total of about fifty books, and credited me with having taught him how to pack the maximum load in the available space.  I won't be running out of reading material for a while.

The following day, on Thursday, I had a visit from the grader operator who plows the snow around here in winter and smooths out the gravel roads in summer.  I heard the grader approaching -- hard to miss, kinda noisy.  Then, it stopped out front.  As it idled there, Koji started barking frantically, then I saw someone walk past my south window.  By the time he knocked at the door, I was halfway out of bed.  Koji got to the door ahead of me, woofing loudly, protectively, threateningly.  I got a firm grip on his collar before opening the door. 

The man asked me, "Are you Kathy?"  I said yes, and he said, "Your husband's in town?"  I acknowledged that fact, and he went on:  "You just got out of the hospital?"  I said, "Recently, yes."  Then he got to his point.  "Is everything okay here?"   Greyfox had been trying to phone me, and the phone just rang and rang, with no answer.  He had called the State Troopers and asked them to make a welfare check.  Either the troopers had been otherwise occupied, or the unplowed road had been too deep in snow for them, and the dispatcher had sent the snowplow driver to check on me.  Just another of the wonderful things I love about living in Alaska.

I smiled at the man, thanked him for stopping by, said that my cats had probably unplugged my phone again, and told him I would check the phone line and call Greyfox to let him know I was okay.  I did that, and our conversation was interrupted by an incoming call from Trooper dispatch, letting him know that I was okay.  When he called me back, he said he had apologized profusely to the dispatcher for his panic, and had been assured that it was all in a day's work for them.

Greyfox was uncharacteristically emotional.  Not that he does not get emotional, but his usual strong emotions are of the anger and outrage sort.  Anxiety, for him, usually relates to weather or finances.  He has seldom if ever expressed any concern or anxiety over my wellbeing.  He said several times how glad he was that I was still breathing, which sorta surprised me.  Before the end of our conversation, he said he was getting all misty, teary-eyed, with relief.  Go figure.  Maybe his sticker shock over the hospital bill has begun to wear off.

I am writing this propped in bed, laptop on lap, dog curled up beside me.  Lately, I have spent so little time at the other computer, the one that connects to the web, that surfing Xanga feels like getting back to school or to a job after a long vacation.

Each day that I feel up to it, I check in on four or five of the Xanga sites to which I've subscribed.  That displays to me how far behind I have fallen, without really bringing me up to date. I just get a tiny glimpse at what is running through someone's mind at the time.  With some people, it's okay because there's not that much continuity to their blogging anyway.  With others, I feel disoriented and strange... as a stranger, foreign, out of touch, not weird or bizarre strange.  It doesn't take being out of touch to make me feel eerily strange.  That's my normal state of being.

Some days, I check messages.  Some days I read my latest comments.  I seldom have the stamina to stay up there long enough to do both.  One day since I got home from hospital, I opened comments in my feedback log and read everything back to the last thing I remember before that ambulance ride to town.  I ended up wishing I hadn't, because there were several of the kind of comments to which I used to enjoy responding because they were so absurd and/or off-base.  Now I lack the energy for that.

I'm not saying I didn't get the urge to correct their misconceptions or take up the challenge to a battle of wits.  I would have to be either dead or a lot more highly spiritually evolved than I am, before I stop getting that urge.  I just don't have the energy.  I know that I couldn't do the effort justice.  I tried to make Jello today, since I couldn't interest Doug in making some yesterday.  I went in the kitchen, but gave in to the shaky legs and vertigo before I'd even made my way through the clutter, to the pantry. Clutter is the normal state around here, even when I am relatively well and able.  But without my continually picking up and straightening things as I move through the house, it has grown to a startling and disheartening mess.  Doug steps over the messes he and the cats have made, or kicks them out of his way. I caught myself dreading the task I have ahead of me when I get well enough to tackle it.  That's no way to facilitate my recovery.  I must watch such thoughts.

Greyfox has commented several times recently on my forgetfulness and absentminded blunders. I had not been aware of anything extraordinary, not more so than usual.  I asked Doug, and he said he hasn't noticed anything, either.  Now I'm wondering whether Greyfox is imagining things, or if Doug is just inattentive.  If I am more absentminded than usual, or am extraordinarily non compos mentis, I suppose I have adequate cause, but it's difficult for me to quantify such things.  Being brain foggy is nothing new to me.

There are some things that I recognize to have recently worsened, such as a much greater number of transpositions as I type, and the difficulty I have in finding the word to express what I'm thinking.  None of that is new, and it is all easily attributable to M.E./fibromyalgia, but in the aggregate these new or more severe symptoms represent the biggest flareup I have ever had --if that is what this is, if it's not something else.  I'm getting more cautious about just writing off every new or particularly bothersome symptom to the M.E. now, since I mistook the onset of pneumonia last September for an M.E. flareup.

Physically, I'm extremely uncomfortable.  Legs keep falling asleep, eyes fill with sticky tears that blur my vision, throat is sore... nothing new in that, just the same old fibro crap.  My mental and emotional discomfort all relates to the severity of these old chronic symptoms and the persistence of the more acute respiratory symptoms.  I'm often overcome with an urge to hop out of bed and get busy, but the best I can do is crawl out of bed, totter across the room, limp back, and creep into bed again.  As I realized just a short while ago, I have emotions similar to those I had during the early days of my incarceration almost forty
years ago, when my lack of freedom first really sank in.   Not that I am just itching to get housework done.  I'd rather go dancing, but right now either ambition is futile.  I think I'll just save this, take the disk over to the other computer and post it, then work on staying hydrated, and read a book, unless my eyes go all wonky on me.

How does the world turn in your reality?  What do you see?  Is it one or another, or all of the above?  There are about as many different ways to view something as there are people to do the viewing.

In the early portion of this lifetime, I was taught that seeing is believing, and I believed that.  I also believed that God (the jealous, vengeful, patriarchal god of Moses) was real and ghosts were not; that Sigmund Freud had understood and explained the human psyche as well as anyone could; that crossing my fingers behind my back when I told a lie would make it okay, that wishes made on the evening star would come true, and that ideas such as astrology and reincarnation were nothing more than ignorant superstitions.

In other words, I was a gullible, ignorant and superstitious kid.  I suppose that if this life were to extend as far into tomorrow as it does toward yesteryear, I would then find just as many examples of ways in which I am currently misguided, misled or misinformed.  Fact is, I don't know how much I don't know.  All I know is that I have learned a few things in my life so far.

Take, for example, that "seeing is believing," bullshit.  I see a lot of things I don't believe, and certainly have the power, should I so choose, to believe things I have never seen.  From David Copperfield to David Blaine, illusionists and prestidigitators entertain me, and sometimes baffle me regarding how they do what they do, but they don't deceive me.  My masters, mentors and gurus, by teaching me how the mind manifests that upon which it focuses, have taught me that believing is seeing, that our reality is conditioned by our beliefs.

Off and on, for about fifteen years, I have focused my mind on transcending the beliefs I was taught.  It has always been a more or less sporadic, spare-time activity, except in times of stress, unhappiness or danger, when I could recognize that my peril, pain, or panic was unnecessary, and that I could relieve it by removing the beliefs behind it.  I choose to believe that all suffering is optional, that the universe is basically benign, and that love and joy are attained by choice, not by chance.

Sometimes, now, I find myself thrust into the role of mentor, passing along the wisdom of my mentors to some suffering soul who chooses to believe that he or she is weak, powerless, fated to live out the life role in which society has cast her or doomed to descend to the end that God has ordained for him.  I'm not on a mission to convert anyone to new beliefs.  I just tend to respond when someone asks for help, and the best help I have ever had to offer is the information that suffering is optional and we can empower ourselves through the choice to own and exercise the power we possess, the powers of our attention and presence.

Frequently, however, people ask for help when what they really want is to be comforted and reassured, to have their beliefs validated.  These troubled souls are seldom if ever comforted by the news that their misery is of their own making and their deliverance lies in their own power.  I often cringe when it becomes apparent that I have innocently wandered into a mentoring relationship with someone whose subtext is something like, "I'm broken.  Fix me."

I can have fun challenging the false and limiting beliefs of some unhappy but arrogant know-it-all.  I can do that with a clear conscience, confident that if any of my ideas stick and take root that person will undoubtedly benefit immediately, and though I may be sending him off on a trip through Chapel Perilous, he will have the mental momentum to carry him through.

Those others, the ones who profess weakness and look to me for salvation challenge me to find a way to facilitate their self-empowerment simultaneously with the transcendence of their false and limiting, but comforting and emotionally supportive, beliefs.  I don't want to be responsible for leaving someone in a fragile and vulnerable state hanging over the abyss through the long dark night of the soul, which is what can happen if these unorthodox ideas I'm presenting suddenly blow a big hole in one's reality tunnel.

Maybe I am being overcautious, and a shock is what a person in such a state needs to impel her to transcendence.  It is hard to know how much of a shock might be too much.  Sometimes I feel I'd rather not be consulted, rather not be confronted with the need to explain my views and adapt the message to each new individual recipient.  But most of the time, once I realize that this is where some conversation is headed or that this Work will be the basis of some new relationship, I welcome the challenge and work to meet it.

One of the persistent beliefs left over from my childhood is that each of us needs to pull her own weight, earn her oxygen and justify taking up space on the planet.  At this time in my life, there are few other ways available to me to earn my keep, and there has never been anything else that I have been better at doing than this.  My successful victims ...er subjects have been eloquent in expressing how highly they value the power that comes with their new state of mind.  Perhaps if I were a better salesman, I could gain wealth through this work... but how does one go about selling disillusionment?

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I said I would tell more of the story of my emergency hospitalization.  I think this will wrap that up and let me get on with more current thoughts and experiences.

The night, several weeks ago, that my condition went critical and Doug called 911, while we were waiting for the EMTs, I had told him to find a small backpack or duffel and pack warm clothes for the trip home, and some of my "meds", the little bottles I put together, containing my 3 daily doses of various supplements, in case I would have to spend time in the hospital.  He failed to find a bag, and ended up putting my stuff in a plastic grocery sack.

The bottles of pills were rattling in the bottom of the bag, and as they were moving me from the ambulance into ER the EMT asked me about them.  I said they were vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and such.  She said the hospital would not allow patients to keep their own medications, and they would have to be locked up for me while I was there.

When I was wheeled on the gurney past the counter surrounding the nurses' station, the EMT flopped my sack of stuff onto the counter and told someone I had meds in there that needed to be inventoried.  A while later, after my gurney had been rolled into an ER cubicle and I was inhaling various medications, someone mentioned needing to take those bottles out and inventory the meds I had brought.  I said the bottles wouldn't tell anything about their contents, since I had reused old bottles, and each one contained several different supplements.

Looks were exchanged and consternation was expressed.  I said I could look at the pills and identify them.  Someone said I'd need to talk to the doctor about it, and my sack was placed on the bottom of the gurney.  ER staff came and went, other patients came in, time passed.  Somebody asked me how I was feeling, and I said I wasn't feeling quite as well as I had been when I had arrived in the ambulance.  The bronchodilators and oxygen I had received in the ambulance had me feeling euphoric, the first time for several days that I had not had to labor to breathe.

By the time anyone asked how I was feeling, I was not breathing so easily, and I had a bad case of the shakes from a heavy overdose of Albuterol.  (I have written previously about the adverse reaction I had to Atravent, the other bronchodilator they gave me.  Each subsequent treatment with it left me feeling increasingly worse until one of the respiratory therapists and I identified the problem.)

Doctor Hagberg came in and asked me some questions.  I answered as frankly and fully as I could.  When he asked me how often I had been using my nebulizer at home, I said that since Friday, three days previously, I had been using it almost continuously, just as often as I could.  He asked how often that was.  I said every few seconds, or minutes or however often I was able to use it.  His face was showing anger and his voice expressed it too, when he said that I seemed to be trying very hard not to answer his questions.

I said I was answering him as well as I knew how, and asked him to repeat his question.  He asked again how often I had been using my nebulizer.  I repeated that I had been doing it whenever I could, as much as I could, when I was not trying to eat, drink, speak, etc., and when I could get enough oxygen to be able to use my hands.  I had already said that my nebulizer was an old, rubber bulb powered, manual thing, but I guess he missed that.  I went on to say that, while the new electric, compressor powered nebulizers delivered a whole ampoule of albuterol in five minutes or so, one of those ampoules lasted me about a day in my nebulizer.  Finally, he got it!  ...but it didn't seem to do anything to mitigate his hostility.

Maybe it was the way I looked.  I'd been really sick, unable to brush my hair for days, and the clothes I was wearing were old and none too clean.  It might have been how I smelled.  I hadn't had a bath in quite a while.  It could have been the fact that I had no insurance.  It could have been a combination of all those factors, or could have been something entirely unrelated to me that had gotten him into a bad mood.

He left, and in a short while a nurse with short black hair came in carrying a clipboard.  She turned it toward me, apparently for my signature on a discharge form, and pointed to a line where someone had written in, "prednisone."  She said, "We are going to give you a prescription for prednisone.   Do you have a ride home?"  I said, "no", meaning I had no ride home, and told her that I had had an adverse reaction to prednisone in the past.

She asked me what kind of reaction, and I answered, "psychotic."  She gave me a look that equalled the hostility in Doctor Hagberg's, turned on her heel and stomped out.

I spent a few minutes alone, listening to the man in the next cubicle retching and groaning.  He had overdosed on something, and was getting somewhat more hostile and scornful treatment than I was, which wasn't as much consolation to me as you might think it would be.  Then, the respiratory therapist came back in to give me more bronchodilators.  He asked about my previous reaction to prednisone.  Since he seemed interested in details, as the black haired nurse had not been, I told him about the ugly hallucinations and frightening delusions I'd had.  Then I concentrated on breathing the vapors, and when that was done, he left.

Eventually, Doctor Hagberg came back and questioned me closely about my psychotic reaction to prednisone.  I explained that it had been given me to
treat a contact dermatitis from poison oak or ivy, and that with the first dose I had experienced hallucinations and delusions, and that I had been advised by the physician who had prescribed it to avoid ever taking it again, and that other physicians had repeated that advice subsequently upon hearing about the reaction.

He sat there looking irritated, and said something about prednisone, corticosteroids, being the common treatment for my condition.  I said that I had
previously taken low-dose inhaled steroids with no problem, but had thus far followed that medical advice to avoid high-dose oral steroids.  I asked him if there was some less risky alternative treatment for me.

He acted as if it pained him to say, "We can admit you to the hospital and try to stablilize you."  Then he left.  Shortly after that, I overheard the black-
haired nurse say, in a whiny tone of voice, "But it's not a true allergic reaction."  Another voice, which I recognized as that of the respiratory therapist who had been treating me, said, "Yes, but it is a common adverse reaction."

I identified four separate voices, two feminine and two masculine, in the ensuing discussion of my reluctance to accept the prescribed prednisone.  The black haired nurse and one other person took the stance that I should just take my little paper prescription and go home.  The others each had something to say about the side effects and contraindications of steroids.

The respiratory therapist had the last word,after the black haired nurse once again whined, "But it isn't really an allergy!"  He said, "It's a dangerous
drug.  That's why it's prescription."  I couldn't help wondering if, when I said, "adverse reaction," the stupid black haired nurse heard, "allergic."  I
certainly know the difference.  Maybe she doesn't.

I was in there for a while by myself after that, long enough to look around and read the posters on the wall.  There were two, side by side, that I assume said the same thing, although one of them was in English and the other, presumably in Russian, was printed in the Cyrillic alphabet.  I'd bet that in parts of the U.S. other than Alaska, that poster appears in Spanish.

It said that the law requires them to accept and treat or transport to an appropriate treatment facility, anyone with an urgent medical need, regardless
of that person's ability to pay.  I'm paraphrasing and leaving out a lot of the details, but that was the gist of it.  It was also news to me.

I saw no more of Doctor Hagberg or his black haired ally.  Another doctor came in, took a brief medical history, questioned me again about the reaction to prednisone, asked about my allergies, and then signed an order for my admission to the hospital.

The RT came back, and wheeled my gurney to the elevator and from there to my room.  When he moved my bag of clothes and pills from the shelf on the bottom of the gurney, the pills rattled and he asked me about them.  I told him what I'd told everyone, and he told me the same thing they'd said, that I could not be allowed to keep them.  They would have to be inventoried and then locked up until I was discharged.  That was the last I heard of that.  Nobody ever got around to actually looking at the pills or letting me tell them what they were.  I was able to keep my meds and take them every day I was in there.

There was one more bullet I managed to dodge on that trip to the hospital.  In the ambulance, the EMT grabbed my arm, started slapping the inside of my elbow, and asked, "How are your veins?"  "Terrible," I answered.  "Sometimes, they've had to do cutdowns on my legs for IVs."  She kept slapping, looked worried, turned my arm and hand this way and that, looking for veins. 

Her mother (the other EMT, her partner) squeezed my hand, looked at my face, and said, "She doesn't look dehydrated."  I assured them that I had been forcing fluids for weeks... months, as I tried to deal with this series of respiratory disorders:  pneumonia, then flu, then a cold.  They decided to skip the IV.   Something similar happened in the ER.  Later on, after I'd been admitted, several times, a nurse or aide would ask me, "Where's your IV?"  Then they'd express surprise when they found out I didn't have one. Twice, I was told, "Everyone gets an IV in ER!" Yeah, and everyone has to let them lock up their personal meds, too.

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