Timber!

75 days ago, just hours into starting a new bipolar med, I stood up, blacked out, fell Timber! onto the tile floor (which I cracked with my face because GO BIG OR GO HOME), shredded my face on my shattered glasses, bit most of the way through my lip, loosened some teeth, got a concussion, landed in the ER, came home covered in stitches and glue and filled eyeballs-to-spine with a not-for-amateurs headache, and still found a way to take time out of my busy schedule to take a selfie.

Fast-forward 75 days to today, where I still have scars on my cheek and under my eyebrow and the right side of my upper lip is still so thick with scar tissue that I have a hard time drinking without drooling. And I clearly still need to get in the regular habit of shaving my neck. But I'd do it all over again instead of putting myself through the last hour I spent trying to find a way to put these two photos side by side with reasonably matching head sizes for a single before-and-after image. After googling and clicking and uploading and downloading and iPhotoing with absolutely zero success, I finally just opened the pix side by side in Finder and took a picture of my screen. I might as well have just drawn it all with ox blood and soot on a cave wall.

Ironically, that new black-out-go-boom bipolar drug seems to be the magic bullet I've been looking for since forever; after the requisite miserable ramp-up period, I've had over a month of overwhelmingly good days. Minus a few blips here or there. And that hasn't happened in probably four years. So if you're so inclined, raise a glass and yell Timber! in my scab-reduced honor today. I'm going to the gym. Because for the first month in many years, I'm able to do so. 

Timber!