FULL BLEED: MY BRAIN HURT LIKE A WAREHOUSE

The hits just keep coming.

Last week I had a routine pain in my foot which turned out to be not so routine. I won't go too deep into the details, but almost two years ago, there was an event that sent me to the hospital twice. The doctor I talked to after said "You're lucky, 20 percent of the people get one of those find out because they just died suddenly." So that's led to a weird tightrope of lingering symptoms and me getting anxiety wracked every time a trigger symptom pops up. Given the state of the health care system we have, my admonition was "every time you get one of these pains, you have to go to the ER because it may be life-threatening."

So I've been to the ER a bunch. I'm lucky to have insurance as good as we have. And it's still expensive and stupid because we don't really have a good preventative health care system. It's pretty good at emergencies when it's not overwhelmed (and mostly when I've gone to the ER, it's been overwhelmed.)

So, long story short. Trigger symptom pops up. I say "Ugh, fine" and try to line up a diagnostic instead of just going to the hospital for the diagnostic. Get that done. Wait while they interpret results. They then say "Time to go to the ER."

At least it wasn't a false alarm, right?

I'm more or less fine at this point. Minor but irritating pain. New medication, much more on the metal side of things, much more on the body acceptance/horror scale. That's fine. At least it should be effective, right? Feels like it might be, or that's me feeling like something has to change.

Couple really unwelcome results to this - upcoming trip to Italy is likely grounded. Not sure when to reschedule to, but sometime, once things clear. There was a second trip to DC and then drive to New Orleans and World Fantasy there in November. That might be a go. Might not. Haven't talked to any of my regular physicians yet. Holiday weekend, don't you know?

Like I said, if there's any good out of this, it's that the ineffective previous treatment course is over and I should be on a better one. So it's an interruption. A lacuna. Get to get a little more reading done with my foot up. Right now it's a fairly old anthropology text on shamanic ecstasy and how for lack of a better word frenzy/mania/psychosis/transcendance is part of the practice. It's fairly dry, but there's some interesting tidbits in it. Finding it useful. But I'm getting in the bad habit of writing thoughts that it prompts right into the book instead of a notebook. Whoever buys this for five bucks at a used bookstore after me is gonna be confused.

I'd talk about writing, but nobody wants to hear about that. Otherwise it's reading and rearranging schedules and just making sure that shit is in order.

Yes, I'm still looking for a publisher for my most recent book. Lemme know if you know one.