I have written quite a bit about pain, both in fiction and on my reality. We ponder and write as one of the many ways we attempt to justify and process all that happens to us, and for me, pain is a constant part of that equation. I have written about a lot of my troubles and there are still many I have yet to put down, be it from not getting to it or wanting to keep the full memory repressed. Unburying from around the fragments that like to sprout back up, from experience, just leads to more headache.
With my disorder, everything has to be taken into consideration. Every stressor, every potential jab, every headache into a complex hypothetical equation. One of those equations you don’t quite have written out or structured, but your gut will give you an answer. I have to do this with every interaction. Consider the idea I was born with a rapidly-speaking dragon tethered to my soul.
If it is too stressful, my dragon will surface itself. The dragon that gnaws at my limbs and squeezes at my organs at a moment's notice. The dragon spewing controlled flames over the areas that flair and burn seemingly from the slightest stress, but then won’t appear when you attempt to replicate the circumstances to understand the disorder. The dragon you try desperately to understand, but it refuses. Imagine everyone had the potential to spew, out of nowhere, the stress no matter how mild that will spark it. That it could be literally anywhere, literally anything.
It won’t even arrive immediately. The dragon waits. The dragon is patient, it doesn’t want you to be able to track its movements and avoid it. It doesn’t want you to understand it, it only wants you to suffer. It even found new ways to do so. All those attacks on your stomach taking its toll, having a hidden secondary effect that would come closely. The stomach acid washing over your teeth every few minutes on those horrid days not seeming to harm them at first, but as time goes on they crumble from the back forward. Chipping away and cracking new teeth as you try to enjoy your meal, exposing nerves so your every waking moment becomes an agonized nightmare. Your smile, though others say they hardly notice it, is not the smile YOU once knew. The smile you saw everyday of your life now stuck with lines.
This is not decay, though it does allow decay to spread. This doesn’t always have warning. One night a tooth looks healthy, and the next? Half of it has come off as you try eating French Toast. The dragon doesn’t attack the body, it attacks the mind. Already knowing you have a crumbling self-worth from the demons of your childhood and teenage years, it strikes your self worth. It leaves you paranoid, for you see it is smart enough not to take your front teeth first. It only takes one, like a warning. It doesn’t even take all of it, only half. Like a morbid before and after picture.
Then the dragon takes your teeth from the upper back. Where the stomach acid arcs on its way out when you vomit with the violence the dragon desires. Like it is squeezing it out of your guts with a bear hug. One by one your teeth from the upper wisdoms forward crumble. The dentists tell you your insurance will not cover it, they quote you numbers that seem similar to sports cars than dentures or implants. You have to bite back the pain. You have to get used to it.
Whether it is attacking you or not, the dragon whispers sweet nothings to you. Memories and quotes from your past that, like everything in your imagination, is detailed enough it is only one step away from your mind's eye. It convinces you that telling anyone would force their perceptions of you to become closer to your own, which the dragon has made certain isn’t sturdy with its rapid fire commentary.
Now imagine you are fighting with this dragon one day. Let lift the veil of metaphor and get real. Picture a teenage me. I know it was sometime after I was 18, and I hadn’t started smoking cigarettes until then. I specifically remember my first encounter with pot to include a cigarette, but this isn’t about my first time. This is about when I found out Pot was magic. Stay with me now, I am not going to “hippy talk”, and if you consider it that.. Well, I hope my explanation might help break down that backwards belief.
All I want is peace. All I want is for my life not to be endless agony. I do not speak merely of mental anguish. Real, burning, physical pain. Complete with seeing your body shift and morph. Your hand swell to a hand shaped blob that can’t flatten to a palm nor curl into a fist. Frozen like a statue, surrounded by an inflatable glove or pulsing, throbbing pain. Not just on my hand. If it can swell, the dragon can find it. The dragon can mold it.
Imagine a young adult. Body attempting to curl itself into the fetal position with every body spasming heave. This isn’t typical vomiting, my entire body wants what is clogging my gastrointestinal system out. The problem? It is a portion of that system. Swollen and molded by the dragon. It can puke out every little drop from my stomach, it can heave until all the energy I gathered from that food is spent. It forces me to erupt in heaves that sound like someone is shoving their fist down the throat of a banshee. It forces me to understand the minute details of dehydration, make me delirious in fatigue. My body would tremble through the process and feel like I am in a freezer from the combination of the sweat clinging to my skin and my lack of energy. It is a unique cold. The cold of having no energy for your body, which you are used to pumping out an odd amount of heat, to keep a normal body temperature. Least, that is what it feels like. I have been the colds of tahoe, I have fallen into a frozen lake.. And nothing quite matches this cold. It isn’t colder, it isn’t cold to the bone like ice water. It isn’t an empty cold like depression.
You are frigid to the soul and every inch in between. Possibly because, at that moment, you truly feel that nature hates you. As pain like you never felt radiates from the swollen cluster that makes your belly mildly bloat, you feel like a god is stabbing you with every spasm. You can feel the blade of pulsing flesh churn in your guts with every dry, spittle spraying upchuck. You have prayed and cursed to EVERY major deity you had heard about. Being a fan of mythology since I was a child, I had a MASSIVE catalogue of them. I even tried Nyarlethotep.
Having been taught the wonders of crazy by Susan, my..grandmother/mother-through-adoption, when they did not answer the first year or so (specifically while curled up in the emergency room the first time this happened.) you switch to cursing all these gods. Being the weirdo I am, I am also thought-cursing these deities while simultaneously apologizing for not knowing their language. So I can properly smack talk their asses.
Imagine a friend of yours, that pot-smoking friend everyone has, offering you something that might help. He doesn’t offer it with the hissing smile and wily eyes D.A.R.E. tried to claim. It was concern. It was genuine, somewhat frazzled, concern. So I did.
The first puff of pot and the pain began to subside. It never went away, even with all the puffs, but instead of feeling like I had a lost chestburster in my stomach, it now felt more like as healing punch to the gut. Better yet, my nausea cleared up IMMEDIATELY. Not mild nausea either. This was motion-sick child forced onto a gravitron kind of nausea. This was world turning nausea. GONE.
I COULD DRINK WATER, GUYS. This sounds simple, but the dragon attack would last for days. The time I went to the hospital and had to stay there? Doc said I was a day away from death by dehydration. I was 15 or 16. There was, at that time, no medication that worked. There were other things, but the pills didn’t work well, threatened my liver, and would be useless if I vomited them up. I am trying medication now, but I only learned about it a couple months ago. Given the manufacturing issues and how I haven’t received my preventative still, only notes saying it has been delayed, I am not putting faith in it saving my life.
As time went on, I learned that not only did it assist with my symptoms when swelling, it made my symptoms clear up quicker. Episodes that could last a week or a month (depending on how much the situation was affecting me) now lasted one or two days. If they even happened, because I noticed the more I smoked the less I swelled up.
But wehat about the mental side-effects? You may aski. Well, I noticed something else. I wasn’t losing focus, I was GAINING IT. You see, I have ADHD. I used to, through my childhood and up until I was maybe 17 or 18, be medicated. Once I was an adult, suddenly, every shrink and pill-pusher I met REFUSED to give me ADHD medicine. Instead, they gave me anti-depressants that made my ADHD worse. Even told me that was a common side-effect, even if I went to them FOR MY ADHD. People refuse to prescribe for it. To diagnose it. TO EVEN FUCKING TREAT IT.
ADHD sufferers often suffer from a lack of proper dopamine creation. Also known as the thing Pot helps you create. I had a LOT of trouble focusing. Not because I didn’t want to. Not, I REALLY wanted to. I wanted to focus on everything. Read everything. See everything. EXPERIENCE EVERYTHING.
Or at least, my mind thought I did. I was both engaged and disengaged at all times. Smoke enough pot? I am not what I was like on ADHD medication, but I can write. I can focus on my thoughts better. I can push away the PTSD mental snowballs and flashbacks away and better mold them into my stories and characters. I can see my worlds clearer, I can interact with people better. I can see through the agony and the pain.
I can be human again.
So, why am I ranting about your blood disease and pot like this? Well. This has gone on a bit long so I will write that in my next post. My post on the fgucking horror that the medical marijuana system is. A glorified subscription service pretending it has my health in mind.
I would like to end this on the reason I kept describing my blood disease as a dragon. It wasn’t purely for metaphor, you see, people throughout my life have argued on pot and drugs. I am not saying everyone using them is good. No, I am talking about me as a fucking DISABLED american needing the only fucking thing I found that works for my problems, so far like magic.
They say we are eternally chasing dragons when we smoke pot. I am afraid I am not, and never was. The high does not interest or appeal to me. When I smoke, I am not chasing dragons.
I am trying to escape from them.