Help, I'm Alive

Today, 11 days in, someone addressed how I am doing emotionally / psychologically with this arduous experience of suffering for the first time.

Frankly, and this may be the paranoia of the institutionalized, I think it was because I asked for tissues and my nurse intuited that I'd been crying.

A nurse practitioner came in and I had the same conversation for the 4th time in 2 days about why I can't sleep: my heart is pounding away in my chest. All day and night I can feel it, like a scared rabbit trying to run away.

I tried some deep-breathing / relaxation stuff that has helped in the past but in my current state it makes me light-headed.

Constant blood pressure and pulse monitoring (and another EKG) are sufficient to convince the monstrous many-headed beast that is Western medicine that my heart is not beating harder. I am simply more aware of it than other people. Lucky me.

Having half as many red blood cells as anyone reading this post has, I'm sure, nothing to do with it.

The recommendations were that I take a sedating anti-depressant called Trazodone and speak to the hospital social worker as soon as possible. He doesn't work holidays or weekends. That's not a good time to have feelings in the hospital.

He did not suggest using clonazepam, the drug I am already on that I already know works for me, because he doesn't know that and it's always constantly my job to explain myself and what I need over and over to the endless parade of care-givers in order to receive the care I need.

Here's what I did instead: I wrote a blog post (this one and another, sort of a prose poem).

I called my girlfriend, the best listener in the world, and vented my frustrations with the system that currently has me in its fumbling, insensitive talons.

I took half a clonazepam.

I fucking cried about it.

I read some poetry.

Then I felt better.

I can't help but feel that the advances we've made scientifically in treating illness have come at a steep price.