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Health Update
It’s been a rough couple of months as my doctors lowered the dose of my pain meds. I’ve been done with the withdrawal process for a few weeks now, but as you may expect my baseline pain is higher now. I’m trying to adjust to the higher pain levels, but it hasn’t been easy and…
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Upcoming Withdrawal
Here we go. Today I start a lower dose of my opioids. I get why my doctors are forcing me to do this–there is a real abuse epidemic that needs addressing. As a result, (from what I understand) Kaiser now has a policy that everyone chronic pain patient must be under a certain dose, regardless…
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Personalized Cluster Headache Scale
I suffer from chronic Cluster Headaches. My meds generally keep them under control and keep them low intensity. On a typical day, I suffer 2-3 long-lasting KIP 2 or KIP 3 headaches. However, for almost two months now I’ve been hit with a bad cycle of Clusters, getting hit with 2-3 long-lasting KIP 5 or…
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On Mental Illness and Mass Shootings
So many thoughts about guns and mental illness. 1) There is no correlation between mass shootings and mental illness. Let me repeat: there is NO CORRELATION between mass shooting and mental illness. Are there some mass shooters who are mentally ill? Certainly. And that is because the population of violent (and evil) people is huge…
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Cis and Trans
Trans is a pretty inclusive term; it doesn’t just apply to the giant male-to-female or female-to-male cases. It can (but doesn’t necessarily) also apply to people who are non-binary, intersex, gender fluid, etc. Here’s a decent explanation of what “Cis” (vs “Trans”) means, and since that definition does not apply to me (surgery was performed…
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What I wish people understood about depression
Depression can be, and often is, a fatal disease. Depression is (IMHO) the AIDS of mental illnesses. Although Depression is not as frequently fatal as AIDS, it works using a similar mechanism: AIDS doesn’t kill you directly–it disables your immune system, and then some other disease kills you while your defenses are down. Similarly, Depression…
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False Binary: Real Harm
[The following essay was published in the Fall 2013 issue of Cultural Encounters. I’ve reverted many of the editor’s changes which were made because the original phrasing was “too heterodox” for publication (for example, restoring the original title and thesis statement), made a few other light edits for accuracy and clarity (like updating the link…
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Beware the Ide(ation)s of March
I’ve suffered off and on with Depression for decades now, and while I can’t really anticipate it, I do have a sense of its rhythms and patterns. I learned early on that Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) played a factor–my Depression and its attendant Suicidal Ideation would loom larger in the darker months of the year.…
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Familiar Territory
Depression has pretty much swallowed me whole for the past month or so. I had been making lots of progress on the depression front through the past year, and even just two months ago I was in relatively good shape with my pain levels (relatively) low/stable and my depression concomitantly low to match. However, depression…
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Crossed Signals
My body is doing this weird thing where it interprets hunger as nausea. So when I go a while without eating, my stomach will start feeling bad and the feeling will keep growing the longer I don’t eat. But since the underlying issue is actually hunger, once I eat something I invaryingly feel fine. Of…