Last night and this morning have been unusual even for me. I lay down to take a nap around eight o'clock with the television on, and woke up at regular intervals at the end of each sleep cycle needing to relieve my bladder every time, and a lot each time. My body was ridding itself of fluids. Something wasn't right.
I decided to try to sleep until dawn. Finally, around 4:30 a.m., I got up anyway. i was nauseated and not feeling well. I had no trouble with constipation and relieved myself more fully than I had for a week. Fixed some coffee, then started puking my guts out and diarrhea up the yingyang. I don't know if this happened because my body is anticipating getting the colonoscopy done this afternoon or not. Either way, the technicians are not gonna find many obstacles to their explorations.
My younger brother will come and get me at 11:00, and we'll drive over to the VA together. I don't think there will be any need for him to stick around the hospital once he gets me there. The colonoscopy is scheduled for a specific time and I won't need him but for to drive me home. Everybody I know that has had this experience tells me I'll be really whacked out on the anesthetics.
I think he'll be able to run around Fayetteville as he wants to until about the time I'll be getting done. He has worked all over Fayetteville and has a clique of friends with which to divert his attention.
My body reacting like it has is not that unusual because that's the side-effect of the prescription medicine I'm taking. Methotrexate. I take eight pills at the same time one day a week. I do that on Tuesday, and so it's no surprise that side-effects showed up last night and this morning. Some weeks it doesn't happen at all.
When I told a medical friend about that, he quipped, "Ah, so the methotrexate has become a sacrament now... eh?" My honest answer was simply, "Yes." It could be any of the other medicines rheumatologists prescribe for rheumatoid arthritis these days. In the last couple of days I've begun to wonder if what the methotrexate is doing is allowing me to inure myself to the pain. It's not like the pain has gone away or the cause of it abated, the medicine allows me to tolerate it better.
My youngest brother and the UPS man who has handled his account for a couple of decades came into the diner where I was eating. They're confidantes enough to the point that the UPS man seems to have a running account of what's going on with me like I'd only expect a family member to know. He knew I'd been diagnosed with RA, and as a joke, reminded me of how I'd stated in the past that I'd like to figure out how to get off sexually on pain.
It'd be hard to deny I've spoke of it. I've written about it here. I thought I was just attempting to be witty. The idea of turning pain into pleasure is a constant in conversations where there are just men around. He likes irony. He grinned at me and asked me directly how I'm coming along with that. I might be doing already with coming along with that. One component needed for the ritual is present in spades. Pain.
Now, all I gotta do is learn how to turn what's already a major issue into a source of sexual pleasure. If I could get healed of rheumatoid arthritis I might be able to take a moral or ethic stand on the issue with an eye toward attracting the camaraderie of a group of decent, God-fearing folk that might get me an invite to the upper crust soirees, but nobody is offering me the slightest bit of encouragement to believe that miracle is gonna happen in the length of time I got left. My best hope to cope is masochism. '-)
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
