It's a day off between treatments, and when I awoke my mind felt numb from how my life is on an ongoing holding pattern thanks to my battle with late stage kidney failure. Yesterday marked my 145th straight week on dialysis, so with three sessions per week, plus yesterday's, I have undergone regularly scheduled dialysis 433 times, and there's more to come. And that's excluding the handful of times when I had to go in for an extra session to remove excess accumulated fluid. (I forgot to note those on my calendar.)
It could be worse, but it's a torturous existence. Mentally and emotionally, I am just exhausted and I have little or no energy for doing much of anything. My medical odyssey has been ongoing for just about a decade, starting with my first stents for my heart, then the years of agonizing atopic dermatitis the rendered me looking like the titular character from THE HIDEOUS SUN DEMON,
more stents, a near-fatal bout of pneumonia (that was mis-diagnosed by Presbyterian-Methodist), kidney failure leading to dialysis, and finally my recent foot surgery. It's as though when one issue is dealt with, another comes to take its place. It just does not let up.
In relative terms, it was not too long ago that I was unfettered by medical woes and I could go anywhere and do damned near whatever I wanted to at the drop of a hat, but those days are behind me and my time of unavoidable inactivity during the past ten years has allowed me a great deal of time for introspection and consideration of the life I have lived up until now. It may sound corny, but hindsight is indeed 20/20 and I should have paid more heed to the excesses I was subjecting my body to during my misspent youth and early forays into adulthood. I certainly had a lot of fun — or at least I thought I did — but if I knew for a fact then what I know now, you had better believe I would have lived my life more sensibly.
Yes, some of my issues are no doubt part of the inevitability of aging, but I think it's a safe bet to say that the majority of this can be chalked up to the abuses I put myself through during those days when one is either blissfully unaware or unheeding of one's own mortality. I was a mess for a good three decades, which is a long time of not getting one's shit together. Deep down I knew that I was self-medicating as a way to avoid dealing with my rampaging inner demons and the trauma wrought by assorted deeply-scarring childhood and adolescent trauma, but rather than seek professional help I just carried on partying while ignoring the earliest signs that there were issues with my health.
It took me until between the ages of 40 and 42 to finally get to grips with my mental/emotional ills, at which point I cut down my consumption of liquor and weed by something like 98%, seemingly overnight and with no symptoms of withdrawal, but shortly thereafter is when my body began its unignorable deterioration. At first I had no medical insurance, but Obamacare eventually got me sorted in that department, and without it I have no idea what I would have done, so while I may grouse about the ongoing state of being caught in treatment limbo, I am grateful that I have it.
Please pardon the rambling, but on days off my mind tends to wander and it helps to articulate those thoughts in order to get them out of my head, even for a little while.
Anyway, bottom line: NEVER take your health for granted, either mental or physical or both.
