Small places

Wednesday, 5/29/19
2:15 PM

I want to sleep. I want to eat. Both of those indicate me trying to recharge my battery.

After ten hours of sleep last night, I awoke this morning at 9:40 feeling exhausted. My body hurt. How can I describe the pain? Low level. Inflammatory. But what metaphor? I didn't feel like a punching bag.

I felt like a suitcase with too much in it. A tired suitcase that had traveled from plane to plane, shuttle to shuttle, conveyor belt to conveyor belt, turntable to turntable. It just wants to get home.

But at home what happens? It gets unpacked, aired out, and put in a dark closet to await the next time it is needed.

A dark closet sounds awful. Suffocating.

Yet that is how this illness feels as the benefits of the routine injections wear off.

One would think I'd be used to it by now. "It" being the predictable roller coaster. I know where the steep hills are. I know when to expect the crest of the hill and when I'll go down the other side and when the steep climb begins again. Over and over and over.

This has been the pattern since I began receiving routine steroid epidurals in December 2013. And even before that, since July 2011, the roller coaster was a predictable pattern as I would titrate my daily prednisone up and down, up and down, up and down.

Yet, after eight years, I am still not used to the roller coaster. Maybe that is a good thing. Maybe it indicates I am not giving up the hope that I can get off steroids and still reasonably function.

On the other hand, my not-getting-used-to-it might indicate that I am in a type of denial of irreparable damage.

Yet I'm not naïve enough to think that eight years of daily prednisone, along with 5-1/2 years of steroid injections every 6 to 12 weeks, has not damaged my normal adrenal function. I question if my adrenal glands could reasonably function at all right now without steroid supplementation. And what of the eight years of a metal hip implant leaching cobalt and chromium into my body, slowly poisoning it from within?

And then there is the trauma from my ex-mental health therapist which began in 2010 and crescendoed in 2011 when he tried to smear my character with outright lies. In 2012, NY state flew me to Albany to be a witness for the state in front of the state licensing board. In 2014, he lost his license. That alone would tax even healthy adrenal glands.

I was a loyal follower of The Way International for 28 years, a true believer. I left and got involved for a short time with an ex-Way splinter group. I got deeply involved in an anti-Way online forum. I drifted from the splinter group. I became anathema at the anti-Way online forum after I stood up for someone who, unknown to me at the time, was a nemesis of the forum administrator.

That's why I hired a then-licensed mental health therapist who supposedly specialized in cult recovery. He became my mentor and 'colleague" in cult-recovery activism. Then we became "friends." Boundaries became blurred; I found myself enmeshed again. All the while I was his client. And then he tried to smear my character among the cult-recovery community. He was partially successful.

And that's only a fraction of the trauma and loss since the onset of this dis-ease.

It's a wonder I'm doing as well as I am.