"Hippy New Year" (Pull Them Boners) ~
Interesting two days, trail amigos. I'm not sure I want to post this, but since I have nothing to do while eating,.....
Mommy gave me genes for a hyperactive immune system. And ADHD, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and Daddy was perfect.
My lungs had to deal with asthma when they were young. Piss-ant lungs. I was usually okay, but sometimes I couldn't even walk. Wuss. I think gym teachers and some people thought I was a wuss, and so I herded them up in a bus and yelled at them, while driving up and down Colorado Boulevard. (No, I didn', Coby.) I didn't know what was happening, and they didn't care. But I should have traded in those genes and got other ones, right from the get go. "Turn back!"
At 33 and a half years of age, my interim of healthy life crashed abruptly into a panoply of illness and a cornucopia of pharmacopia. Pharma-ecology, matter of fact.
To keep our lungs clear and wet, the immune system does all sorts of things. In a small number of people (ahem, guess who) who've had asthma when younger (it wasn't bothering me after 13-15 or so), the immune system's residual preventative chemistry creates a condition, an environment, an ecology, which is coincidentally a perfect ant farm for airborne fungi. The Beverly Hills Hotel, as a matter of fact. They set up in there, rent free, and grow and turn to caulking cement. The lungs fill, turn literally solid, quadrants collapse, and Gaugie dies.
This "disease" occurs predominantly in males, usually beginning around age......33. August of 1986 I had my first near-death experience. When I say near-death, I mean it literally.
The wonder drug Prednisone is the only reason I did not die, if one counts out Destiny as an amused-by-torture mumsumbitch. Which is not entirely unlikely or disproved. But would Gaugie really be dead? Yes. In the branching time-line universe, and leaving cancer and other infirmities off the list, there are eight times in the last twelve years that Gaugie went to other universes. There are a lot of "Me" around. If we add those other "incidents", I have more than nine lives running concurrently. Like eleven or something. The suffering foisted on those people and worlds and wives and parents and medical systems is staggering. Crippling. We can only imagine. So magine a dozen Gaugies.
Anyway, when you are lying in ICU dying, it's a strange feeling. To know you're dying. You can tell it's happening. Closing. Rolling down.
You'll look the way you look right now, in few hours, when you're dead. These are the clothes, you're wearing the clothes you're going to die in. These sheets, this bed.
You think of these things.
It will be night. Like this.
Or mayhaps I will make it to day.
My body will be here, the end of the trail, the washed shore spot, and my wife will cry. So will I. I think.
Even ICU prednisone and medicated breathing therapy was not raising the all too observable monitors.. They ambulanced me off to the specialists hospital, and I could tell my Dr knew I was in deep fukn shit. They quadrupled the amount of prednisone.
I lived. (Amazing how they can build suspense, even when they're writing the story post-facto, uh?)
(Actually, this could be parallel universe Gaugie number 10, talking to you right now.) (Hi!)
I didn't want to die, because MJ didn't want me to. At other times I didn't care, almost needed to. This is a side effect of prednisone ~ sever mental disorders. I've taken it a lot the last 12 years, and while it has truly saved my life, several times, it has also ruined it. Not completely ~ just within an inch of it, for a decade.
Depression is a chemical disorder. It will kill you if it goes right.
Prednisone causes this kind of depression.
Severe, severe, severe.
It can also cause insanity; which is, remarkably, a little different but the same. (But we know I don't have that, right? Right?) :o)
The ball of bone at the top of your upper leg bone, the femur, is supposed to be spherical. Where it joins into the hip socket, it needs to sit in there in a very precise arc. If it's off 1/32nd of an inch, you're going to know about it. It's stunning, literally stunning to me, to know that all of this information and energy is carried gene code from some drunken little spermies having a good time and suckering some fertile balloon into a nap.
Boink! Bone, perfect bone.
Perfect eye, brain, organs, yadda, yadda, Crown of Creation.
Prednisone, God's blessing (if you want to live) ~ prednisone kills bone. Bone is normally very alive, replacing itself mysteriously, the femur head in that perfect arc of sphere. When it dies, it wears away unreplaced, shrinks kind of, collapses. It doesn't take very much, and if it's happened, if it's changed shape even just a little, it will not re-form to that perfection. Never.
If it hasn't changed shape yet, is still Perfect; they can hollow out the bone and let blood-bearing tissue get closer to the surface of the sphere; hopefully supplying the dying bone enough good blood to survive.
Gaugie's left femur has changed shape. The arc has broken. You can see it, sadly and beautifully, in the X-ray.
The Dr's will MCI the right femur, to see if it can be hollowed out now, ahead of disaster.
It might work; it might save it.
The other one is toast, coming out when I can no longer stand it and going into a jar on top of the refrigerator. ("That's Paul's hip. Looks like a mushroom kinda.")
Prednisone also does this to shoulders, and knees. My knees hurt. But I think they're okay; just sympathetic. My shoulders are shrugging. They don't know what's going on; shoulders never do. They're cold. Thank goodness my right heel was smashed before this, because this leg is now my good leg. I can put weight on it, whereas before the surgeries for it I was sitting, barely walking, or in a wheelchair. So that's nice; that not everything happens at once. (To me.) A friend says that is the Real Function of Time; that is, to spread out shit. Who am I, to argue that one. Well, I could argue, because I'm curious and kind of cantankerous, but not enough.
Some of the literature I read says they don't know if even small, short periods of prednisone usage may cause these kinds of problems. Mental and physical. They do; without doubt; but how long it takes to trigger bone death is apparently not known, or not known to me.
The three main causes of this "hip death" are: injury, prednisone, and lo and behold, alcohol. |
