Sunday, January 29, 2017

High five!

So the night I finally vow to everyone from my mother to the straining-to-be polite fitting and training technician lady that I'm FINALLY going to unpack and figure out and actually use my month-plus-old CPAP machine, my eight-good-day streak on the psychotropic that initially made me black out and rip up my face has ended.

Fuck.

I'm heartened that I haven't fallen into depression or anxiety, though those are things I know how to handle. Tonight I'm in a weird, unprecedented, floaty, dizzy, skin-hurty, face-touchy, eye-rolly, pig-grunty, unfocusy, shivery otherworld where gravity feels crooked and it's freezing hot and I should be asleep and I promised myself I'd limit my whiny bipolar shit on here but posting from the middle of the hurricane somehow helps me center myself and give me a record to look back on when I'm good to maybe help me to better anticipate and and ride out when I'm bad and even though my parents are upstairs and my sister's family is a mile and a half away and all of that is profoundly comforting and strengthening, talking about all of it in rambling detail in a public postwhere friends and strangers can read it or not read it or like it or ignore it or block itactually quells the confusion and fear and loneliness. I know it sounds dumb. I know it sounds Munchausen syndromy. But I also know it helps.

So in addition to my yes-I'm-still-wearing-it ulnar neuropathy arm splint and my perpetually bloody, Jell-O-y face scars and now my who-knows-what's-gonna-happen CPAP machine, I'm piling on my floaty, dizzy, skin-hurty, face-touchy, eye-rolly, pig-grunty, unfocusy, shivery, otherworldly, I-truly-feel-better-for-posting-about-ity psychotropic side effects and taking the best possible left-handed fight-the-man selfie I can with my compromised superpowers and crawling into bed.

Thursday, January 26, 2017

Scars and haircuts

One month ago right now I'd just completed my signature black-out-and-fall-Timber!-and-crack-the-tile-floor-with-my-head-and-lacerate-my-face-with-my-shattered-glasses-and-bite-mostly-through-my-lip-and-get-a-concussion-that-hurt-like-hell trick and I was finally back awake and reasonably coherent as the emergency room doctor sewed up my face with anesthesia that totally didn't work. But I was a big boy and I whimpered only 37 times. Before I lost count.

Anyway! I sure can prattle on and on and never get to the point sometimes. OK, all the time. Like right now. I mean really. How tedious.

Anyway again! I've had stitches and protective stitches glue and scabs and oozy gross stuff all over my face and in my beard since my visit to the anesthesia-resistant emergency room sewing circle and since I looked like a moldy desiccated cat anyway I kinda stopped caring that my gooey beard was scraggling down over my neck and my hair was blossoming into a luxurious, full-bodied thneed.

But! As of this week my beard goo has finally disappeared and nearby children have stopped spraying me with Zombie-B-Gone and since it's actually been one month to the day I finally went and got a haircut and a beard trim and five new shirts at Target but don't tell my mom that last part because she keeps saying I'm finally handsome again and if she found out I'd gone recreational shopping it would totally harsh her buzz as the kids say. Or the drug addicts. Whatever.

Whew! So I finally got to the point and I feel human again and my mom says I look handsome and I'm kinda hoping when everything is totally healed I still end up with a badass scar on my cheek so when I'm in the nursing home and little schoolchildren come visit me through their scary-old-people-need-love-and-poorly-drawn-crayon-art program and they ask me about my battle scar I can regale them with the epic tale of that one time I passed out from standing up too fast to change the laundry.

Sunday, January 22, 2017

Pre-existing conditions and the ACA

Before the Affordable Care Act, I was completely uninsurable—no special considerations, no gray areas—if I was unemployed, which I was for over a year before the ACA was enacted ... though I did qualify for relatively expensive COBRA coverage through my former employer that very fortunately filled that time gap.

But COBRA eligibility expires after a fixed time, and without the ACA—and until I could get stabilized enough to hold a job—my expanding schedule of doctor visits and my compounding and perpetually evolving psychotropic prescriptions and my surprise hospital visits would rapidly drain me to bankruptcy and eventually relegate me to living on expensive federal disability coverage.

I now have a job but I'm staying with my ACA-sanctioned plan because it specifically covers the entire network of doctors and specialists and pharmacies and hospitals I've managed to assemble and sign release forms for and ensure are thoroughly and reciprocally sharing my complete medical history. Plus I'm not 100% stable and I'm still—and definitely not without precedent—spooked about becoming unemployed again, and my ACA-sanctioned plan gives me tremendous peace of mind about maintaining a reliable continuation of coverage.

Let me clarify for the sake of precluding any tedious welfare-state arguments that might arise that I am paying the full premiums and co-pays and deductibles for my coverage and am receiving no federal subsidies. U.S. households with incomes between 100% and 400% of the federal poverty level are eligible to receive federal subsidies for policies purchased through the Affordable Care Act exchanges, as they should be. For me, the ACA simply allows me to purchase coverage through a broker or directly from an insurer just like anyone else, with no restrictions or refusals for having a pre-existing condition.

Four weeks ago, I started taking a powerful psychotropic that within a day caused me to black out, slam my head into a tile floor, shred my face with my shattered glasses, bite deep into my upper lip, suffer a concussion and not fully come to until I was holding the side of my face together with a bloody cloth in my sister's car on the way to the emergency room.

We just got the bill for that little adventure, which if I'd still been uninsurable would have struck an immense financial blow. And it doesn't even include the cost of an ambulance since my sister drove me to the hospital. But as this photo shows, my ACA-sanctioned insurance helped save my face, my brain and my finances.

The Affordable Care Act is a vital, grossly overdue federal program that provides medical care and financial protection for millions of citizens in a spectrum of medically and economically challenging situations. Our new president and our newly Republican-controlled congress continue to work noisily and patronizingly and almost belligerently to repeal or dismantle or destroy—or whatever the spin-certified verb du jour is—the Affordable Care Act without providing a consistent or sometimes even plausible justification for their efforts and after months and years of chain-rattling still failing to provide even a shadow of a shred of a consensus—much less a foundational set of proposals over which to negotiate—on what to enact or not to enact in its absence.

The whole exercise stinks of political theater and desperate partisan grandstanding and manipulative demagoguery that cruelly continues to waste time and resources and patience while the health and solvency and even dignity of millions of sometimes desperate citizens and their families and dependents hang in the balance.

And I can personally attest that it's costing our country immeasurably more than just money.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

Despite what your lying eyes might tell you ...

I am not an internationally famous pout model. I'm a PERSON. And I deserve to be treated as such. Except for apparently a few more weeks while what remains of my stand-up-and-black-out-and-crack-the-floor-tile-with-my-face scars continue to dig in their little scar heels and slow the healing process to a glacial pace. Fortunately after three weeks they continue to itch and sting an creep creepily and all spidery into my visual periphery. But now they're also—and I swear I'm selecting my words judiciously so I don't get all graphic and horrifying here—more stickey-outey on my face and tiny sections of them are clearly starting to follow gravity but with a stated mission to never let go—how am I doing so far?—but I still can't be a big boy and bravely pull them off like a band-aid because—and I'm sorry but there's really no delicate way to put this—my absorbable stitches haven't finished (or even started?) absorbing and the damn things are still stitched to my face. 

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done writing about gross things. I think.

So I'm trying not to be all-bipolar-all-the-time because despite my long and verbose and thoroughly documented history of being all bipolar all the time I'm actually fucking sick of it: the free-falls to despondency, the impermanent triumvirates of normalcy and clarity and energy, the endless and clearly more and more arbitrary attempts at changing meds that eventually and predictably fail one after another after another, the new wrinkle that I'm apparently apt to stand up too fast and black out and crack the tile floor with my face, and the endless worry and frustration and exacerbation I cause my family and friends as I cycle through all of the above and ultimately end up sleeping through life. So I'm actively trying not to think about it. But while we're here ... speaking of all of the above, I'm (I hope) finally emerging from a rough four days of hairpin ups and downs and canceled plans and missed uncling and a weekend where I've barely left my bed and never left the house all as a prelude to point out my soaring bedhead. Honest! I just broke my promise to myself to drastically minimize my bipolar talk with the honest intention of providing a few words of context beyond "I haven't showered all weekend" to help you laugh at my lofty locks with a more informed sense of derision. You're welcome.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done wallowing in emotional and tonsorial self-pity. I think.

Actually, no. In the last few months, four—four!—guys I've had long-ago, too-shy-to-ever-tell-them, clearly unrequited crushes on have announced their happy gay marriages on here. I haven't seen or even thought about some of these guys in over a decade. I didn't even realize we were Facebook friends. And I'm not sure what to do with all these weird, long dormant emotions these four rapid-fire revelations have awakened. And I'm not sure why I'm being all Duckie and weighing down this already ponderous post with this information except to get it out of my head. Which I guess I've done.

And you can open your eyes now; I'm done brain-dumping all the vaguely whiny, I-don't-know-what-to-do-with-all-of-this emotional noise in my head. For realz.

So it's a relatively quiet night here at the Stigers Home for Bitchy Cats. Mom is reading, sometimes aloud to my mostly blind dad; Sibelius' watery, disciplined, asymmetrical, shamelessly triumphant Second Symphony is on repeat in the background; Dad just accidentally stepped on the cat, an incident I will be neither amused nor disquieted by; I downloaded a Gaither Vocal Band southern gospel song for my folks and now iTunes is trying to sell me all the desperate tatters of the inauguration entertainment lineup; we're all waiting for the dire-warninged but now rudely late snowpocalypse that has kept everyone pre-emptively hiding in our houses all day; and one of us is obsessively typing a seven-mile Facebook post on his shattered iPhone screen. But I won't say who.

And you can open your eyes now. Or close them with me; I'm going to bed now so I can get up at six for a much-needed ass-whupping by my trainer. And I'm not taming my hair for her.

Sunday, January 1, 2017

My little New Year's Eve gathering fell through tonight

So I'm sitting home alone (well, my parents are snoring contentedly in their bedroom down the hall) by the light of the tree with Bitch Kitty glaring at me from across the room and a LOT of oh-my-god-these-are-AMAZING Hy-Vee fudge brownies on the counter. And if you don't live in a Hy-Vee state, it pains me to tell you this but you have wasted your entire life eating really shitty brownies.

But from my safe, cozy—albeit admittedly lonely—perch on our extremely comfortable couch in these last hours of an emotionally contentious year where our country seems to have lost a disproportionately high number of beloved celebrities but I landed a job I love in practically every way and where I have continued to ramp up and ramp down and suffer side effects and endure withdrawal effects of countless psychotropics in my ongoing struggle to beat bipolar depression but in the process my love and appreciation and respect for my family have grown stronger and deeper and more joyous and hopefully more reciprocal, I can't help but harbor grave concerns about the coming year.

I'm concerned to the point of being terrified of the pending horrors wrought from the blind nationalism and the arrogant ignorance of the inchoate and yet already alarmingly destructive Trump kakistocracy. I worry that the gloriously revolutionary American Experiment will fall way too early in its young life at the hands of a predatory, self-serving demagogue who stupidly let himself become a political puppet in a game of nuclear chicken that could precipitate national, international or global destruction. I also worry greatly that our educational systems and standards and our national and local infrastructures and our economy and our safety and even our civility will collapse in the process or the aftermath.

On a personal scale, I worry that friendships will end and loved ones will die and control will collapse and accidents will cripple and ideologies will interfere and dreams will fail and fortunes both monetary and emotional will fall and I know these worries are universal and though they can easily isolate us they can also unite and inspire and ultimately augment us, but they still compel me to hold my family and friends close and keep my guard up and my emotions girded and my world as calm and controlled and constant as I humanly can.

So much can change in 365 days. Three years ago I wrote international ad campaigns for a prestigious agency in Chicago. Two years ago I was in a locked psych ward, so pharmaceutically emotionless I couldn't even cry. One year ago I was somehow holding onto a job I wasn't even good at but I was apparently charming or earnest or possibly overlookable enough that I survived months of staff reductions. Now I'm proudly living with—and providing reciprocal care for—my septuagenarian parents, working happily as an online product copywriter for a gloriously high-end international retailer, regularly singing and dancing and acting and sometimes just smiling and waving in shows for three different theater companies, discovering the unimaginable joy and love and pride of playing uncle to two intelligent and kind and talented and responsible and remarkably tall young adults who thankfully possess an inherent and reciprocal and mutually straight-faced understanding of my meandering and maybe-just-a-little-bit-perhaps-over-the-line sense of humor, and still clinging confidently to the hope that I will soon find the right psychotropic cocktail to regulate my bipolar depression plus find a boyfriend who loves theater and Hy-Vee brownies and running and tattoos and underpants jokes and freakishly conspicuously indulgently long sentences and living in Cedar Rapids where hopefully our entire families are.

So I face this new year with great but guarded trepidation tempered by a glorious spectrum of hope and joy and gratitude and love and oh-my-god too many shoes and a fervent hope that the coming months are filled with peace and diplomacy and respect and common sense and a governance guided by a deep, profound, nuanced, reciprocal knowledge and understanding of who we are, what is fair, how we're responsible, and the selfish and bellicose and irreversible and potentially catastrophic options we should never even pursue.

And—you're welcome—to end this post and start this year on a far less cataclysmic note, I can report with complete confidence that (at the very least) the first months of 2017 will be filled with staggeringly long, shamelessly self-indulgent, thesaurusly verbose, hopefully thoughtful, possibly funny, relentlessly selfie-enhanced posts.

And since tonight's get-together didn't happen, the dawn of our new year will also be filled with Hy-Vee brownies. Lots and lots of Hy-Vee brownies.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Timber!

Seven years ago today—three years after leaving the hospital and just hours after taking the very first dose of yet another new bipolar med ...