A Murphaic Victory

Hello blog,

I know I neglected you all last week, but I was busy doing stuff and needed to rethink my direction with you. Still thinking, but I don't think it's fair that you should suffer because of my reassessment. So, until then, you shall continue to develop a use for one thing or another.

VICTORY! After a couple months of writing about all of 2008 (easily the worst year of my life) I am finally finished! I was extremely stressed the entire time and was nearly convinced that I would either relapse and ruin over four years of sobriety or end up in a mental institution. I am happy to report that neither of these occurred! Honestly, I'm kind of shocked. In fact, I was so shocked and happy that I actually wrote about the whole thing at the end of the chapter. Here's an excerpt from that:

Secondly, I’m telling you this because I…am…DONE! 2008. No more! I am free from the hellish quagmire of pain and misery that nearly killed me multiple times, that destroyed my body and put me through the whole new hell of recovery that you will read about through the rest of this book. If any part of my life was bound to totally undo me and send me to a mental institution with a very clean, snug jacket clasped around me, 2008 was it. But it hasn’t. I’ve come very close to relapsing (in a drug sense, you’ll read about that too in a bit), to crying and never stopping, to slamming my head against a wall until my brains resemble scrambled eggs, to curling up in a ball and never coming undone, to never speaking again, to losing my very essence to complete madness. I’ve been assaulted by memories rising out of the dark crypts where I buried them so long ago, I’ve yelled at myself both in my head and out loud, I’ve told myself to shut up, to stop writing, to give up and give in. But I DID NOT!

Whenever people tell me I’m strong and they could never go through what I’ve been through, I tell them the same thing: “I’m not really any stronger than you are. You really only have two choices. Be strong or die. Most people’s self-preservation instincts can pull them through some of the craziest stuff. I hope you never have to find out though. I hope you’re allowed to keep on believing that you could never make it through what I’ve made it through. I don’t want you to go through what I went through.” I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Still, I always diminish my strength because I believe that people are far stronger than they think. If you had asked me if I was strong enough to survive even half of what I’ve been through in the last seven years, I would have laughed and said “No way!” But I have. We underestimate ourselves. There is so much potential strength lurking in every single one of us. You, yes you, can almost certainly make it through what I did. I hope you never have to find out. But I believe in the power of the human mind and its astonishing ability to guide us through times of intense trouble. Sure, we have little hiccups along the way, like my panic attacks or nervous breakdowns, but those occurred after the main body of the danger. In the midst of it, you lose sight of almost everything except one: survival.

That being said, I’m a lot stronger than I would have guessed. When I started writing about my diagnosis, I told myself that if I made it through 2008 without relapsing or ending up in a mental hospital, I would be some kind of uber Superman. I’ve tried half a dozen times before and never made it into the year 2008, the year of hell. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure how I did it. Baby steps I guess. I didn’t look too far ahead, I just focused on one problem at a time. That’s what it takes sometimes. Baby steps.

Of course, my life seems to be watched over like a hawk by Murphy's law. Murphy doesn't like me very much. A couple weeks ago I started having shoulder pain shortly after getting a vaccine and having the nurse hit a nerve bundle. That pain dissipated, but I realized that a much deeper, sharper pain was emerging in my right shoulder. Then it became mirror (with a lesser intensity) on the left side. I have severe bone degeneration in my shoulders, have for years now. And although my range of motion is pathetic at best, pain has never really been an issue, so I haven't seen any reason to get them replaced. But now, I fear that might be my course of action. I saw my general practitioner today and got some x-rays. He looked at them and told me he hasn't seen any joint look that bad from degeneration ever. I told him I would probably make a good case study then. "It looks like it's melted," he told me. This is the image that popped up into my dismayed head:

Yes, my shoulder resembles a melting clock from Salvador Dali's "The Persistence of Memory." The socket is intact, but the head (the "ball" of the ball-and-socket joint) of the shoulder is just a total mess. There's bone spurs and collapse and cracks and fractures running through both shoulders. The right one looks only marginally better than the left. My doctor recommended we try a couple different type of shots, but if the pain persists, I'll have to get one or both of my shoulders replaced. Needless to say, I'm rather upset about this. About a year ago I had my left knee partially replaced (transplanted technically) and I very foolishly made the declaration that "this is probably going to be my last surgery for a while." Murphy must have heard me, because it's not even a year later and now my shoulders are going. The only good thing I can think of is that at least this will complete the set. Eight major joints and none of them mine. There's a lot of words going through my head now, and hardly any of them are printable.

A totally normal left shoulder x-ray

My left shoulder x-ray as of April 11, 2014. Where the arrow is pointing, you can just make out a
thin crescent shape going from the bottom left of the ball to the top middle of it. Everything inside
of that has collapsed. The digital picture looked about twice as bad as this one. There are also a number
of cracks in the bone that can be made out in addition to decreased bone density (more transparent)
compared to the normal x-ray seen above. 

Your relieved, concerned, and irritated master,
Andrew