What Peggy's doing now that she's retired

Peggy gets frequent migraines, and marijuana helps migraines, but Peggy has been unwilling to use marijuana because she's a nurse, and nurses get into big trouble if they’re caught doing illegal drugs. Twelve hours after Peggy retired, she got a migraine and asked me for some marijuana. I rarely use it anymore because its effect on me had gotten way too weird, but I still have some marijuana cookies on hand along with a few buds. I’m proud to say that I made these cookie, and although they’re small, one-quarter is enough to put me at risk for hallucinations, so I only gave Peggy a crumb about the size of 1/24th of one cookie, and that was enough to make her migraine go away completely. She didn’t get high, but she hadn’t asked to get high, and I would never presume to trick someone into taking a bigger dose of a drug than they asked for, and I especially wouldn’t do it to Peggy because she’s afraid of becoming insane like a few others in her family. I would even say that she’s really afraid. The following is from my journal for October 2, 2000:

“Peggy and I were staying at a motel on the coast a few years ago. It was dark, and she was looking out over the ocean while I was in the bathroom. Suddenly she yelled, “Come quickly and see the pretty lights on the water.” I went quickly, but the lights had disappeared. The same thing happened a second time, and then a third. At that point, Peggy looked at me with an expression of fear and resignation and said, ‘I am losing my mind.’ I laughed, but she said she wasn’t joking. I decided to postpone whatever it was that I was doing in the bathroom and stay with her until the lights could be explained. It turned out that the moon, which was out of sight behind the motel, was coming and going behind some clouds and creating a truly beautiful light display upon the breaking waves.”

While on drugs, I’ve had hallucinations of demons, heavy metal music coming from toilets, my body levitating, angels flying above my head, and so forth without ever once thinking that I was going insane. Even so, I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to give Peggy a whopping dose of marijuana simply because Peggy has often said, “I don’t believe pot would get me high,” as if she's a bad-ass and I'm some kind of a wimp. As it was, we did take a hit together about an hour after she ate her cookie crumb, and while the hit got me completely wasted, it did nothing for her beyond the usual first-timer coughing fit. This in no way diminished my complete confidence that enough marijuana would land anybody on her ass.

All this occurred two days before I was to to go to the hospital—the one from which Peggy just retired—for my colonoscopy, and she was to be my designated driver. Ninety minutes before we’re to leave, she gets another migraine, and I give her another cookie crumb. I think it might it might be a little bigger than the first crumb, but since she didn’t get high off the first crumb plus a hit, I’m not too worried, forgetting that it’s not unusual for a person to not get high the first time they use pot. So, Peggy eats her crumb; her migraine goes away; and we leave for the hospital with her driving. Six blocks from home on a street she’s driven thousands of times over the last quarter of a century, Peggy says fearfully, “I have no idea where I am.” “Okie doakie, Peggy, maybe you should pull over and let me drive,” and we trade places. For her next trick, Peggy announces that there’s a cat in the car, but the cat turns out to be her purse.

So, here we are on our way to the hospital with me wondering how we’re going to get home, and whether Peggy is going to run amuck while I’m having my colonoscopy. I think it might be fun to scream, “Oh, my god, you’re losing your mind! You’re going to be just like your mother,” but then I realize how inconvenient for me it would be if she became hysterical, so I decide against it. I do suggest that, while I’m having my colonoscopy, she go visit her old buddies in labor and delivery and tell them how much she’s enjoying retirement.

By the time we reach the hospital, we're running a little late, so Peggy offers to park the car while I go in. “Are you sure?” I ask, and she says she is, so I let her, but not without trepidation, knowing as I do how fast a person’s perceptions and abilities can change while tripping. After an appropriate amount of time, Peggy joins me and purports herself normally (that is if you count cringing visibly when a brand new nurse fails twice to start my IV), although she says she’s high. I’m impressed because for much of my life, I found it impossible to act straight when I was high, and if I tried, I would tremble, violently, completely lose the ability to talk, and sometimes hallucinate. I have since learned to feign normalcy, but it took a lot of years and a lot of pot to reach Peggy's level. I just hope she can stay there because marijuana is a hell of a lot safer and cheaper than her Big Pharma medicine.

Pain check-in

Pain has two parts, the pain itself, and the strength, or the lack thereof, of the sufferer. In my case, I think that much of what I experience comes from weakness because I never imagine that I handle chronic pain as well as the average sufferer. On the other hand, I think I handle acute pain better based upon what doctors have told me and upon what I’ve observed of others. I’ll give an example. When I was in the eighth grade, I broke my lower left arm on the playground when I forearmed another boy while the two of us were running full speed in opposite directions. The break was such that my lower forearm was bent backwards as if I were trying to tough my upper arm with the back of my hand. As I walked to the principal’s office through a playground of open-mouthed kids, I smiled. Part of what makes acute pain easier to bear is that it’s often connected to something that people can see, so they shower you with sympathy and praise you for your bravery.

I never feel that I’m any good at handling chronic pain compared to some of you who are reading this, but then how would I know? Anyway, I don’t think I am, and I get down on myself for being a wimp. Another problem with chronic pain is that people run out of sympathy. An acute injury brings out the best in friends and even strangers, but chronic pain produces feelings of awkward helplessness accompanied by looks of disappointment when the same boring questions are met with the same unhappy answers. As time passes, the sufferer feels unsupported if not unwanted.

Chronic pain also makes it difficult for me to think well of myself because I’m constantly reminded of all the things I can no longer do. For instance, I would like to join a gym in winter when I can’t work outdoors, but there are so few exercises that I can tolerate, it’s not worth it. I look at my future, and I see pain, pain, and more pain until I die in sixteen years or so. It’s the kind of outlook that leads people to kill themselves, and if I weren’t married, I might consider it.

Just thinking about killing myself makes me lose more self-respect because I regard even a fleeting temptation in that direction as a sign of weakness when so many people who are worse-off than I are able to carry on. I was sinking so low in spring that I figured it was time to experiment with what I see as my last resort—an expensive drug called Cymbalta. Fortunately, it’s helping (along with Neurontin, oxycodone, and Ambien), although I have so little confidence in anything at this point that I don’t trust it to keep helping. But for now, anyway, the knife-like pains in both shoulders, the severely bruised feeling in my hips, the sharp pains in my hip joints, the dull ache in my lower back, and the horrible tightness in my upper back are improved. 

Cymbalta also seems to be slowly helping my mood, at least to the extent that I don’t lie awake most of the night thinking about death (I now lie awake most of the night reciting poetry—I know a lot of poems). Unfortunately, the pain in my knees is worse, and I’m both exhausted and sore beyond sore in much of my body from my fence work, but these are minor problems compared to the ones that the Cymbalta has helped.

The worst part about living with chronic pain came some years ago when I was new to it, and found it so frightening that I would lie awake worrying that it would get so bad that I would be forced to kill myself. One day, while lying in the bowels of an MRI machine, it really did get that bad. Although I had taken Dilaudid, I lay there counting the seconds, feeling complete sympathy for soldiers who divulge information under torture, and wondering what atrocities I would commit if only I could escape the pain. I came close to that level on other occasions, and since one of my diagnoses was Complex Regional Pain Disease—a common outcome of which is insanity and/or suicide—and a second diagnosis, syringomyelia, wasn’t much better, it didn’t seem too big a stretch to imagine that the pain would become unbearable. Fortunately, both diagnoses turned out to be wrong.

I must confess that there were a few times when I became so desperate that I prayed, but instead of helping, my prayers only made me lose more self-respect because I felt weak for praying to a god in which I didn’t even believe—talk about pathetic. Yet, as pain increases and becomes a constant in one’s life, desperation also increases. That’s why, when I was in that MRI machine, I had those fantasies of committing atrocities. I thought, well, would I kill someone to escape this pain? Would I drown kittens? Would I transfer the pain to someone I love? And even if I wouldn’t do these things now, might I not do them ten minutes from now, but if not in ten minutes, then surely in an hour, that is if I wasn’t not a gibbering, drooling psychotic by then? When I hurt so much that I would be willing to abandon my moral values to stop the pain, it takes me even lower in self-respect.

There is no part of my life that pain hasn’t touched. Like rape or cancer, it has spread through my entire being as, one by one, it invaded every place within me that I had considered inviolable and in which I thought I could find safety. Like a war veteran, I’ve been set apart forever from normal people. Pain has even lowered my IQ, and since I had prided myself on the fact that, no matter what else I lost in life, I would still have my intelligence, to see even that slipping away has been a hard thing indeed. I forget what people tell me, and I forget what I tell them. When I’m doing one of my handyman projects, I make mistake after mistake. I don’t even want anyone to help me because I don’t want them to see how stupid I am. I can still make sense enough when I write, but I can’t measure a board with any confidence. Even if I check my measurement repeatedly, I can’t trust that I calculated correctly or even that I’m able to read the ruler correctly, and this too lowers my self-respect. Peggy witnesses my loss of intelligence more than anyone, and I find it humiliating for my wife to see how low I’ve sunk. I ask myself what am I still good for, and I can’t come up with as much as I think I should.

Perhaps, you can now understand how difficult it is for me to know what to say when someone asks how I’m doing or when they offer facile advice. Because they can’t see the source of my pain—as they could when I crushed my thumb last winter—they can’t begin to understand how bad it is, and there’s nothing I can say to make them understand even if my appearance didn’t belie my words. If you’re not writhing on the floor, or at least grimacing, people don’t take you seriously, so there’s really no point in talking about how you feel. Yet, the last thing that I want is to look like I’m in pain because the appearance of pain would suggest that I’m out of control, and being out of control would be the ultimate humiliation.

I’ve spent hours picturing myself washing down oxycodone with vodka while holding a .38-special in case I panicked when the drug paralyzed my breathing. Even though I never intended to do such a thing in the foreseeable future, I knew the day might come when I would have no reasonable option, and I wanted to harden myself against that day. Besides, I couldn’t stop the fantasies. Fortunately, Cymbalta has done just that. If only they will stay gone, but, as I said, I no longer trust anything to really help because I’ve seen so many things start out promising only to fizzle. Such experiences have taught me that it’s foolish to be optimistic. Likewise, it’s foolish to try to have a social life. It’s foolish to talk about how I feel (I regard writing about it as another matter). It’s foolish to ask people to help me. Most things involving other people have come to seem foolish because no one wants to be around someone from whom so much has been taken.

I have my work. I have my blog friends. I have my writing. I have good drugs, good books, a good cat, movies in the evening, a growing collection of old TV shows, good food and good coffee, such work as I can still do, trips to the mountains, houseplants, yard plants, an occasional dinner with people I’ve known for a long time, and, of course, I have Peggy. These things keep me going, and they’re enough. I would like more, but they’re enough.

I chose Bosch's painting of Christ to illustrate this post because it represents my sense that other people are around me but not with me, and, given my desperation, this makes them seem stupid, boorish, and oblivious, as disagreeable to me as I am to them. Of course, it's also true that I try to hide most of what I'm feeling because: there's really nothing anyone can do; I find it impossible to communicate my feelings verbally, and people wouldn't want to hear them if I could because I would be saying the same things over and over; and I don't want others to imagine that I'm a weakling and that they're my superiors because, unless they've survived pain better than I have, they're most certainly not. 

On shyness, depression, retirement, alone-time, health issues, and manual labor

As Peggy and I age, she’s becoming social and I’m becoming isolated. This is a reversal of how things have been for much of our 43-years together. I attribute it to two primary factors. One is that chronic pain has robbed me of much of the pleasure of socializing, and the longer I live a solitary life, the less thinkable it becomes that I would even try to be around people I don’t already know. Another is that Peggy’s interests and hobbies have gotten her out among people more, and since she makes a loyal companion, she has slowly accumulated friends.

Peggy just left for her last day at work as a labor and delivery nurse (she chose July 4, so she could get one last day of overtime and one last month of health insurance). She has only worked 20-hours a week for years, so it’s not like she’s at work a lot, but now that she’s retiring, she won’t be at work at all, and although I miss her when she’s gone for nine hours, I frankly don’t know how I’m going to like so much togetherness. That said, she often goes places with her friends for anywhere from a few hours to several days, plus she visits her family down South once a year, so I will have at least some time at home without her, but she will almost never have time without me, and yes, she has complained about it. In fact, just before she left, she suggested that I go somewhere, and I said that she didn’t need to worry because I would be busy building her an apartment in the garage so the cat and I can have our own space.

I’m replacing our backyard fence. This means removing posts that were set in concrete, so it’s a hard job even though I’m only working two or three hours every other day (I’m hurting so much right now that I’ll probably take some oxycodone soon). Even so, the work is worth the pain because it makes me feel useful, even manly, and I can’t give that up. Even if money were limitless, I would still want to work because I’ve always taken satisfaction in manual labor. I didn’t do much of it for years because I kept hoping that I would get past the pain if I took care of myself—and had enough surgeries and saw enough physical therapists—but having gotten over those delusions, I’m working again, because, well, why not? What would I be saving myself for if I didn’t? At 65, my workdays are limited anyway. Even my strong-as-a-bull father had to cut back when he hit his mid-seventies.

The 2 ½” cyst on my kidney that might have been filled with cancer turned out to be filled with blood from when I broke my back on November 30 (that’s a date I’ll never forget). I had to wait six months to find this out, not that I minded because I never thought I had cancer anyway, and if I had had cancer it would have probably been a slow-growing type.

I get a periodic colonoscopy next week. I dread the gallon of foul-tasting laxative, but I don’t mind the procedure itself because once they tank me up with joy-juice, lying on my side while another man pokes a flashlight up my ass doesn’t seem half bad even if I am a heterosexual.

The Cymbalta has helped both my depression and pain. I’ve taken so many anti-depressants by now that I can’t even remember them all, but they’ve certainly been interesting if only because they have proven to my satisfaction the extent to which a person’s mental state is chemically produced. I mean, really, when you can go from being profoundly depressed to being almost cheerful after taking a drug, it says a lot about what makes us as we are, and it sure the hell ain’t religion, philosophy, or simply “deciding to be happy.” (When a depressed person buys the line that, “A man is about as happy as he makes up his mind to be,” it only makes him feel more wretched. Interestingly, the source of the quote was Abraham Lincoln, a lifelong depressive.)

I took my first anti-depressant (Norpramin) in the ‘80s, which were the old tricyclic days. Now, everything is either an SSRI or an SSNI, and they work a lot better with fewer side-effects. The first one I tried was Prozac (which was about all they had back then), and it made me almost deliriously happy (damn near manic), but the effect went away after a few weeks, so the shrink kept increasing my dosage until I topped out. Then, I experimented with various others, most of which didn’t work. The last one I took was Zoloft, and it did the trick. I never got high on it like I did with Prozac, but it worked a lot better in the long-term. I took it for years until I got tired of not being able to cry, tired of having my highs as well as my lows modulated, and tired of not knowing what my life would be like without it. I finally stopped cold turkey, which was a really bad idea because I felt as if I had been pushed off a cliff, mood-wise.

I did get one lasting benefit from Zoloft. Before Zoloft, I had been shy all my life—extremely shy in some situations—but I haven’t been that way since Zoloft, although I stopped it about ten years ago. I can’t say that I never feel shy at all anymore, but it’s rare that I do, and I never feel crippled by it. I remember when I was so shy that I was sometimes afraid of the sound of my own voice (when I was a child, I stuttered and couldn’t pronounce various letters, including the one that makes up half of the letters in my name, and it left me with a lasting scar), but those days are long gone. Now, I just don’t care all that much about what kind of an impression I make. I think age has also helped keep my shyness at bay because I saw it happen that way with my father who was a lot more shy than I ever was.

The picture is of Peggy the last time I roofed this house. She didn't help much because she was touring Alaska with Walt (see last post) for much of the time. Actually, I rather like having her go away when I have a big project because it gives me the freedom to focus entirely on my work.

Are atheists more rational?

I find it easy to criticize most forms of theism because I consider any claim to the existence of a benevolent and supernatural deity to be unprovable and self-contradictory. Criticizing atheism is more difficult because the burden of proof lies with those who make a claim rather than with those who challenge it. Most people consider this obvious in the case of the Loch Ness Monster, but they somehow manage to overlook it where God is concerned. Perhaps, this is why a lot of what passes for an attack on atheism is really an attack on the character and personality of atheists. For example, we’re often accused of being arrogant, immoral, intolerant, and argumentative, and some of us are, but our detractors paint us with too broad a brush. Even so, I consider it likely that, as a group, we really do differ from theists in various ways, although my thoughts about this are mostly based on my own observations, and can’t therefore be taken as gospel. In this post, I want to discuss one of those ways: how atheists regard rationality.

I think it safe to say that nearly all atheists are rationalists inasmuch as they hold that beliefs based upon logic and evidence are more likely to be true than are beliefs based upon authority, intuition, emotion, and mysticism. For instance, when I recently wrote about my fear of death, an atheist friend offered an argument reminiscent of that of Epicurus who said,

“If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not. Why should I fear that which can only exist when I do not?”

I find this argument to be as flawless as it is meaningless, but without intending to disparage my friend, I will go further and say that it is irrational to ascribe to rationality the power that many atheists imagine it to have. Surely, David Hume (pictured) is well-considered to be the epitome of rationalism in the modern sense of offering arguments that are rigorously logical and evidence-based, yet even he wrote that,

“Reason is…the slave of the passions.” 

I suspect that some of the atheistic emphasis on rationality comes from the fact that atheists want to distance themselves as much as possible from those whom they consider credulous or superstitious, and this leads them to judge left-brain activity as superior to right-brain activity. I think it might also be true that most atheists are left-brain oriented by nature, and, like all people, they tend to regard as superior those attributes that they find within themselves.

The fact that I am a right-brainer seems to be a minor liability among atheists because so much of what right-brained people think about is relative and imaginative rather than sharply defined and logical. This is why I am attracted to the liberal arts rather than to math and the sciences (at least in any depth). I often see this in my relationship with Peggy whom is my superior at understanding math and science, whereas I’m her superior at understanding religion, symbolic literature, and philosophy, things that often strike her as arcane, convoluted, nitpicking, and even nonsensical. My right-brainedness might also explain why I’ve have had a much harder time letting go of religion than most atheists.

I also differ from most of the atheists I’ve known in that they assume a correlation between rationality and happiness. I would challenge them to prove this because I’ve seen no evidence of it. For example, my friend, Walt, is irrational about money in that he never saves, and he only cares about how much something costs so he’ll know if he has enough money to buy it. Years ago, he had a desperate need for money, so he borrowed from me. I assumed that he would learn from the experience and become more rational, but it was not to be. One day, he and I were talking about our differences, and he argued that he would feel less anxiety if he were abandoned penniless in the middle of a foreign country where no one spoke English than I would feel if I were abandoned in the same country with a million dollars in the bank, and he was right. All my providence regarding money doesn’t make me happier (although I would definitely be unhappy if I were broke).

Likewise, Walt doesn’t worry about his house when he’s away from home despite the fact that he has done nothing to protect it from burglars. I’ve put a lot of thought and work into making my house unappealing to burglars, yet I still worry, although again, I would worry more if I hadn’t taken these measures. Despite Walt’s irrationality about various things, he is happier than I as can be seen in the fact that he's more cheerful, confident, generous, and spontaneous. Even so, I wouldn’t trade places with him because I’ve seen so many bad things happen in his life that never would have happened to me.

My point is that I see rationality as a tool that enables us to accomplish things that we couldn’t otherwise accomplish and to avoid mistakes that we couldn’t otherwise avoid, yet it’s not a tool for happiness, and even someone like Walt can employ it as well or better than I when he feels the need, so it’s also not an even/or proposition. This is why some very smart people who are rational in every other way can still base their lives upon irrational beliefs (e.g. religion, excessive optimism, excessive pessimism, or an unrealistic sense of self-confidence), and why people who pride themselves on rationality in regard to these things, can still behave irrationally in other areas (e.g. money, relationships, health-care, and managing their emotions). As I see it, ours is simply not a rational species, and this includes atheists. To quote Hume again, this time in full: 

“Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” 

Another problem with rationality that many atheists appear to overlook is that it either cannot produce, or is limited in its ability to produce, love, purpose, art, music, and literature, and it’s also powerless to give us an appreciation of these things, yet without them, we would be little more than machines. As it is, we are all composed of two cerebral spheres, and some people—to their detriment—are overly dominated by the right, and others—to their detriment—are overly dominated by the left, and each group devalues the other. This makes them blind to the influence of the other sphere on their own behavior as well as blind to how they sabotage the gifts that the other sphere has to offer. I think it likely that differences in cerebral orientation are like differences in sexual orientation in that whatever you’re born with is permanent, and your job isn’t to change it but to use it wisely in order to be the most balanced person you can be.