Monday, July 28, 2008

It's a long journey from A to B

My leg hurts. I haven't taken my medication in 3 days. The tightness in my joints is slowly building up. It's a cycle that I get into. I take a hit for pain, but I don't feel like walking across the house for my medication. Right now it's lasted for the last two days, but today I will take it. I have to.

I really want a shower. I feel dirty. The TV is spewing ideas in my face that mean nothing and I'm trying to write a paper, but I should be showering. I'm going to be staying at my friends house tomorrow, so I won't be home until wednesday night.

My brain is jumping around and won't focus. It wants to work on the paper, but also think about everything else. I've always been this way: a day-dreamer to the greatest degree. My mind won't focus and it wants to do summersaults and cartwheels instead of typing a work cited page. 

I'm wearing a long-sleeved flannel shirt that I bought a week ago at the Salvation Army. I like it a lot. It's warm enough to wear on the train and in class, but not as heavy as my regular canvas jacket. It's making me sweat right now. Sometimes I wear long sleeves shirts, not because I have anything to hid, but just so I won't have to see the scar from the surgery. I feel like it brings up too many memories for everyone around me and they get more suspicious of what I'm doing when they see it. They pick through things I've said, movements I've made, and they're all connected to that scar. If I hadn't gotten the abscess they wouldn't know now as much as they do (which is really only a slight hunch they have). I don't like seeing the surgical scar. It's not mine. It's weird but I miss how the skin right there used to look. Puckered into a little hill, or pushed into a valley. I knew it was mine. I had done it. This arm doesn't feel like mine. This arm is someone else's and with that, the mistakes I've made must be too. This can't be me.

4 comments:

Gledwood said...

i found the drs' notes re the "barb burn" i got on the back of my leg. the dr said he had never seen an injection infection come up in burn-like blisters like that and was stumped until i said "could it have been barbiturates?" (was nearly crashing into lampposts etc on the day of the hit. (barbiturated heroin))... you should have seen the look on the nurse's face when i was introduced as the local barbiturate injector; in the end i gave up protesting it was mixed up in my gear, i've never seen a barb pill in my life! and let her get on with pulling faces as she drained off the brown liquid...

i hope your thing gets well soon... don't go down the abscess abyss!!

Lucinda said...

I was on immunosuppressants at the time, so the infection was just simply taken as, "Oh, you got a cut and didn't wash it." (funny place for a cut, but people don't think that way). Yeah, I don't know, I'm over it on some level of, mostly because I really didn't care in the first place (I honestly was only annoyed that I had to be in the hospital for 10 days, which was unbearable). Everyone else seemed to be so over dramatic about the scar, as if I had become a monster because of it. I guess it bothers me because I don't expect it to be there, but it is.

Gledwood said...

the mark on me was at worst x3 the size of my palm

what remains now is purple and about one palm or a bit smaller...

10 DAYS in hospital that's a long time

also don't you have to pay for that or get health insurance to cough up?

there was a thing comparing American and British healthcare on the radio

put it this way I'm so glad I'm not American!!!

Lucinda said...

Were you injecting into the muscle on your calf? That sounds quite nasty and painful.

The funniest thing was that the bacteria that infected me is usually found in your mouth (don't lick your needles kids...), so all of these residents kept coming in to see me because no one had seen an infection with this kind of bacteria. In fact, most of them had never even heard of this kind of bacteria.

On the 9th day I told the doctor that if he didn't let me out I was going to "shoot him in the face." Haha, I was going crazy.

It was all taken care of by health insurance, I have a really good plan.