First off, I have to apol­o­gize in both ret­ro­spect and advance if I have been snippy, stressed, or overly emo­tional.  I have been on some steroids recently that affect my blood pres­sure and stress lev­els, among other things.  If you take noth­ing else away from this post, remem­ber that I am not cur­rently act­ing like myself and keep that in mind when deal­ing with me in the next week or two.

I do not usu­ally share a lot of per­sonal details on this blog.  Emo­tional states other than “happy” are typ­i­cally left to my offline life.  So why am I break­ing that tra­di­tion here?  Because some of this is so ludi­crous and embar­rass­ing it feels ther­a­peu­tic to share and make fun of.  Be warned that the rest of this entry con­tains emo­tions as well as one thing that can be filed under “too much infor­ma­tion.”  More infor­ma­tion than you require, even.  If this scares you, you can skip to the last para­graph and be none the worse for wear.  You have been warned.

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Since Sep­tem­ber, I have had some weird med­ical stuff going on in my body that has been dif­fi­cult to diag­nose and dif­fi­cult to fix.  The exact details are both gross and unim­por­tant.  The impor­tant thing is that, after bounc­ing around through sev­eral doc­tors, I am basi­cally all bet­ter except for one thing that just won’t heal.  This leads up to last week’s doc­tor visit.  Remem­ber when I men­tioned “too much infor­ma­tion?”  It’s not too late to stop read­ing.  Really, if you’re even start­ing to hes­i­tate, just skip to the last para­graph.  Let us just say that it was an uncom­fort­able and humil­i­at­ing expe­ri­ence involv­ing being naked and face-down on a table while being exam­ined with an anal-probe, not unlike a 6-inch plex­i­glass dildo.  Under the right cir­cum­stances, such a prob­ing might not have been unpleas­ant, but it felt pretty bad then and there.  And hon­estly, I think the emo­tions that flooded in with the wip­ing up after­ward may have been worse.  I haven’t been wiped by an adult since I was a baby in dia­pers — cer­tainly never as an adult.  So already, before pre­scrip­tions, there were some bad emo­tions float­ing around.  Embar­rass­ment, vio­la­tion, use­less­ness, mor­tal­ity, and likely oth­ers murky enough as to be dif­fi­cult to name.

As treat­ment, I started tak­ing the steroids [up my ass, by the way, the steroids go inside my but­t­hole!], and I was kind of punchy for the first cou­ple of days.  Maybe a bit more ani­mated.  As best as I can tell, a dis­cus­sion I had walk­ing home on Sat­ur­day about some self-destructive habits I had as a late-teen/early-twenty-something led to an extremely unpleas­ant dream Sat­ur­day night/Sunday morn­ing.  Then on Sun­day I really noticed I was start­ing to feel amiss.  I was extremely short-tempered and any num­ber of lit­tle things caused me to snap.  Totally out of char­ac­ter.  I have always been the calm, ground­ing touch­stone for peo­ple around me.

Do you know that feel­ing when you are about to speak in pub­lic, the butterflies-puking-in-your-stomach feel­ing?  That was today.  All of today.  From wak­ing up to right now this sec­ond, as I type this.  I have been on edge, but self-aware enough to tem­per out­bursts.  In fact, I had a quick dis­cus­sion with my boss this morn­ing, alert­ing him to the fact that I may not be act­ing like myself.  Even though it was only a minute or two and pretty straight­for­ward and matter-of-fact, I felt I had to exer­cise a lot of self con­trol to stop tears from welling up toward the end of that.  Tears!  For a lit­tle bit of chit-chat that amount to the first two sen­tences at the top of this post.

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The good news is that I think I am self-aware enough now that I can con­trol my overblown stress and feel­ings.  Even though it may feel a bit emo­tion­ally and phys­i­cally unpleas­ant, there’s no ben­e­fit to unleash­ing that on unsus­pect­ing bystanders.  The other good news is that despite the side-effects, the treat­ment seems to be work­ing, and that in and of itself is totally worth it.  The side-effects pale in com­par­i­son to being sick for 10 months.

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Tagged as: apologies, apology, medical, sick, sorry, tmi