{"id":71,"date":"2008-04-18T08:53:45","date_gmt":"2008-04-18T13:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.greatsociety.org\/?p=71"},"modified":"2018-10-31T15:25:09","modified_gmt":"2018-10-31T19:25:09","slug":"one-year-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/?p=71","title":{"rendered":"One Year Later"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/o>It\u2019s been one year since my brain surgery<\/a>. <\/span>As you can read in that old article, I had Trigeminal Neuralgia, which made me wish for death every single day for over a decade. <\/span>Luckily, I was too much of a coward to kill myself. <\/span>But, whew, there were days, baby\u2026<\/p>\n

<\/o><\/p>\n

The article gets it wrong. <\/span>The initial injury may have done something to speed up the process, but what was really happening was that my body was fucked up. <\/span>A vein was wrapping around the nerve. <\/span>This is something we all have — this particular vein and this particular nerve occupying the same space. <\/span>But then they touch and it\u2019s like crossing the streams, Igon. <\/span>And, in my case, that vein was getting all cozy with the nerve Giant Anaconda Movie of the Week style. <\/span><\/p>\n

So the brain surgeon cracked open my skull, shifted my brain around, and came at my face from behind. <\/span>With hammer and chisel, he removed the vein from the nerve, splinted the nerve with tissue from the muscle in my neck (which is still a little fucked up) and cured me. <\/span>Most likely forever. <\/span>There\u2019s always the chance that Satan lives in my body but, in almost every case, this is a permanent cure.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s taken me this entire year to really get that through my head, though. <\/span>I didn\u2019t get my energy back until late October, and my neck is just now returning to normal, and it took till the first of this year to dump the outrageous cocktail of drugs I was taking to \u201ccontrol\u201d the pain. <\/span>I use the word control loosely, because I was still always in pain.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m still not used to being pain-free. <\/span>The ritual of the pain remains ingrained in my soul. <\/span>The fear that it\u2019ll return haunts me. <\/span>Letting go of all that is a monumental task\u2026 But I\u2019m getting there. <\/span>This anniversary is sort of what I was waiting for. <\/span>A year without pain (though confused and troubled, marred by two family deaths and mounting debt, a hard recovery and self-doubt) is all I needed to reboot. <\/span>I find myself looking at tomorrow, and the days to come, with a renewed energy.<\/p>\n

Well, I\u2019m speaking figuratively. <\/span>Spring is here and the trees are doing their thing, so I really only have enough energy to suck down Alavert and blow my nose and stare at the flowering beast outside my bedroom window with murder in my reddened eyes. <\/span><\/p>\n

To help turn your stomach, here\u2019s an article I wrote nine days after the surgery<\/a>, which includes a picture of the wonderful scar and stitches. <\/span>I\u2019m actually disappointed, because you can barely see the scar today. <\/span>It\u2019s a beautiful piece of work\u2026 But I wanted the big Frankenstein\u2019s monster scar. <\/span>My figuring is that it would help me get laid. <\/span>I need all the help getting laid that I can get, because I\u2019m a 30-something bachelor with a warped view of the world who prefers to spend warm, sunny days inside with bad science fiction. <\/span>The only reason I ever knew the touch of a woman in my glorious 20\u2019s was because our dorms didn\u2019t have cable, the 1990\u2019s Internet wasn\u2019t anything worth speaking of, and I was a lush. <\/span><\/p>\n

So what\u2019s on tap for this year? <\/span>I just hired a PR girl to deal with our latest book, I\u2019m going to work like a dog to pay off my enormous debt, and I\u2019ll try and squeeze out a lengthy vacation towards Christmas. <\/span>Now fully recovered, I\u2019ll do things I couldn\u2019t do before: <\/span>Eat food, drink water, roll over in my sleep, breathe, blink, and smile.<\/p>\n

There. I’m being sarcastic. I’ll do things I couldn’t do before — like live. Live, live, live.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s been one year since my brain surgery. As you can read in that old article, I had Trigeminal Neuralgia, which made me wish for death every single day for over a decade. Luckily, I was too much of a …<\/p>\n

One Year Later<\/span> Read More »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[89,90,88],"class_list":["post-71","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","tag-pain","tag-ptsd","tag-tn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=71"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1183,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71\/revisions\/1183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=71"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=71"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=71"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}