An Open Question Re: My Sanity
Recently (read: within the past three months), I was talking with several friends about my time in the hospital in Michigan and about some of my experiences there. One of the medicines that they tried to help with my headache was some kind of steroid that, apart from not doing anything to the headache at all, kicked in my fight-or-flight response. Since I was in the hospital and paying very close attention to everything I was thinking, feeling, and experiencing in case there were side effects, I immediately noticed that I went from occasionally thinking "Man, this is boring. I wonder when I'm going to go home." to "I gotta get outta here. I gotta get outta here. I gotta get outta here." I realized that this wasn't normal, so I started thinking back, trying to remember when it was I first started feeling this way. I traced it back to about a half-hour after I had my first dose of this steroid. So, I went to my nurse and talked to her about it. I explained what I was feeling, how I thought it was related to the medicine. She said that they'd try one more dose, see what happened, and if I was still having that feeling, that they'd take me off of it immediately.
When I mentioned this to my friends, they thought it was weird that I would analyze my feelings like that. I, honestly, thought it would be strange not to in such an environment. All of a sudden, you feel like you've been cornered, why would you not take a second to figure out why you're feeling that way? Especially in a hospital where you're being subjected to heavy doses of potent medications by IV (push or drip, depends) four times a day.
Also, in the nearly three years I've been in constant pain, I find that when I have to lie down for extended periods of time because I'm in too much pain to do anything else, I invent things. A classic example of this is my zombie apocalypse survival plan that I've come to call "The Greenbrier Plan." It's not specifically for zombies, either. I've basically developed this plan of action for getting my friends & family together in a fallout shelter (located under the Greenbrier Inn, hence the name) to survive a total collapse of society and/or government. I spent days, lying in bed, thinking about what to do in order to survive a zombie uprising, global nuclear war, or a collapse of the Federal government, because it was either that or focus on the pain I was in. So, I asked myself a series of logical questions about what kind of supplies we'd need; what we would do for food, fuel, clothing, and ammunition; how we would begin to rebuild a civilization; how we would systematically establish a safe zone above-ground & enclose it in a fence; how we would raid abandoned towns & communities for supplies; how we would begin broadcasting a radio signal to other survivors to attract wanderers and establish trade relations between other pockets of humanity. You know, standard survival stuff.
That, of course, led to me thinking about and planning out a first aid kit to put in my car, in case of emergencies on the road.
Then, when I ran out of that kind of stuff to think about, I moved on to what I would do if I won the lottery. So, now, in my mind I've got this lovely two-story craftsman-style house up in Asheville in the neighborhood around Edwin Place & Kimberly Avenue. I've re-done it on the inside to look like it's brand new old stuff, period cabinets & fixtures, new old-styled appliances and things, and things like a media center computer that looks like an old vacuum tube radio. A future that never happened, sort of. Because it's my house and I'll live in my own little world if I want to.
This is relevant because I recently read the "Superman: Red Son" comic, which is a what-if story where baby Kal-El crash landed not in Smallville, Kansas, but in a farming collective in the Ukraine. It's a neat story, but the reason I mention it here is because Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) was a P.O.W. in a North Vietnamese prison camp who spent something like two years building a prison inside his mind for his captors. If it would take two days to dig a ditch, he mentally spent two days digging it, pausing for breaks and everything. He spent all this mental energy building a world inside his own head to help him deal with the reality around him. At first, it sounds borderline insane, but the more you think about it, the more it sounds like just an extremely unusual coping mechanism. But, he survived the camp and went on to lead the Green Lantern Marine Corps.
That seems like kind of the same thing I've been doing: constructing little worlds inside my head to help me deal with the real world outside it. I can't do anything (reinforced for me today when I could barely help my mom tape a roll of paper down over the floor so she could start painting), so I do things inside my head where I don't have this handicap. In fact, I've started keeping a legal pad by my bed so that if I ever have a particularly good idea while I'm lying down, I can write it down and get it out of my head to make room for more.
So, if you've read all this, thank you. And I'd like to ask you a question: am I insane?
When I mentioned this to my friends, they thought it was weird that I would analyze my feelings like that. I, honestly, thought it would be strange not to in such an environment. All of a sudden, you feel like you've been cornered, why would you not take a second to figure out why you're feeling that way? Especially in a hospital where you're being subjected to heavy doses of potent medications by IV (push or drip, depends) four times a day.
Also, in the nearly three years I've been in constant pain, I find that when I have to lie down for extended periods of time because I'm in too much pain to do anything else, I invent things. A classic example of this is my zombie apocalypse survival plan that I've come to call "The Greenbrier Plan." It's not specifically for zombies, either. I've basically developed this plan of action for getting my friends & family together in a fallout shelter (located under the Greenbrier Inn, hence the name) to survive a total collapse of society and/or government. I spent days, lying in bed, thinking about what to do in order to survive a zombie uprising, global nuclear war, or a collapse of the Federal government, because it was either that or focus on the pain I was in. So, I asked myself a series of logical questions about what kind of supplies we'd need; what we would do for food, fuel, clothing, and ammunition; how we would begin to rebuild a civilization; how we would systematically establish a safe zone above-ground & enclose it in a fence; how we would raid abandoned towns & communities for supplies; how we would begin broadcasting a radio signal to other survivors to attract wanderers and establish trade relations between other pockets of humanity. You know, standard survival stuff.
That, of course, led to me thinking about and planning out a first aid kit to put in my car, in case of emergencies on the road.
Then, when I ran out of that kind of stuff to think about, I moved on to what I would do if I won the lottery. So, now, in my mind I've got this lovely two-story craftsman-style house up in Asheville in the neighborhood around Edwin Place & Kimberly Avenue. I've re-done it on the inside to look like it's brand new old stuff, period cabinets & fixtures, new old-styled appliances and things, and things like a media center computer that looks like an old vacuum tube radio. A future that never happened, sort of. Because it's my house and I'll live in my own little world if I want to.
This is relevant because I recently read the "Superman: Red Son" comic, which is a what-if story where baby Kal-El crash landed not in Smallville, Kansas, but in a farming collective in the Ukraine. It's a neat story, but the reason I mention it here is because Hal Jordan (Green Lantern) was a P.O.W. in a North Vietnamese prison camp who spent something like two years building a prison inside his mind for his captors. If it would take two days to dig a ditch, he mentally spent two days digging it, pausing for breaks and everything. He spent all this mental energy building a world inside his own head to help him deal with the reality around him. At first, it sounds borderline insane, but the more you think about it, the more it sounds like just an extremely unusual coping mechanism. But, he survived the camp and went on to lead the Green Lantern Marine Corps.
That seems like kind of the same thing I've been doing: constructing little worlds inside my head to help me deal with the real world outside it. I can't do anything (reinforced for me today when I could barely help my mom tape a roll of paper down over the floor so she could start painting), so I do things inside my head where I don't have this handicap. In fact, I've started keeping a legal pad by my bed so that if I ever have a particularly good idea while I'm lying down, I can write it down and get it out of my head to make room for more.
So, if you've read all this, thank you. And I'd like to ask you a question: am I insane?