Posted by Psilocybin at 8:29pm Apr 7 '13The morning of December 28, 2012, I was out of bed and running around. I was adjusting to the Fifth World, which had begun one week before, with no apparent differences from the Fourth World.
Then, in my room, I started thinking about parental tyranny. The blood rushed to my head and I started to become angry. Angry enough, in fact, that I jumped on the rug in my room. (When you're active in the youth rights movement, you hear a lot of stories about parental tyranny. It all happened so fast that I don't recall which particular incident I was thinking about.)
When I jumped, I slipped and landed back on my spine. I felt an intense pain from the impact -- a pain in the lumbar region of my back. My first thought was, "Oh, great, paralyzed from the waist down!"
Then I discovered I could still walk. But it hurt. I crawled into bed.
I spent the next five minutes screaming Tracy's name. (Tracy is a staff at my group home.) After five minutes, Tracy and my housemate Kevin came running in my door. I told them about my pain and they called Pia (who runs my group home along with her husband Stan) on the phone.
Pia came in and I discussed my pain with her. I told her I wanted to go to CIWP instead of see a doctor.
La Netta picked me up as usual, but I was in intense pain. We had to trade vans in the middle of the day, and after I got into the new van, La Netta told me there were napkins I had left in the old van that I had to pick up.
"With this back", I said, "I'm in no shape to go all the way back to the other van and lean over to pick up napkins."
"Well, if they see the napkins we'll get written up", said La Netta.
Luckily eor us, Carl volunteered to pick up all the napkins.
I spent the rest of that day in pain, lying down on my back in the office.
The next morning was a Saturday. A staff came in and asked about my back. This time, I told my staff I wanted to see a doctor.
The staff called Stan, who arrived a few hours later to take me to the hospital.
Inside the hospital, I saw a man who may have been in his pajamdras. When I asked Stan if those were pajamdras, Stan said he wasn't sure.
I was finally called into the hospital's emergency room. I was shown a bed, and sat there.
The woman in the adjacent bed spoke of "t-ngling". I growled.
Stan showed me the gown. I put a gown top on, and then Stan told me to "change into these pajxmxs". I growled, and Stan apologized.
Stan again told me to change, and I said I was not going to wear pajamdras! Stan said they weren't pajamdras, they were just a gown bottom. But when Stan picked up the garment, he realized it was just another gown top, and they had given me two.
I finally saw a woman by the name of Dr. Strauss. Dr. Strauss felt my spine. She said my spine was not bent out of shape. What I had was a giant bruise on my back.
For this, Dr. Strauss gave me an icepack to lie on. She also prescribed ibuprofen.
She gave me a medicine cup filled with orange liquid to drink. I told her I had phlegm in my mouth, and also had to purge.
"Go to the restroom there, and come back when you're done", said Stan.
I walked into the restroom in the ER, and spat out all my phlegm. Then I purged off Stan's word "pajxmxs". I next purged off the pajamdras the man may have been wearing, then did the word "t-ngling".
I walked back out of the restroom, and swallowed the medicine. Dr. Strauss said I should see the doctor again if the pain doesn't go away within a week.
I spent the next week taking ibuprofen and lying on the pack. Forget about visiting 4K.
A week later, the pain still hadn't worn off, so I saw my usual doctor, Dr. Duran. Dr. Duran renewed my ibuprofen prescription, and this time he added something called baclofen. He told me baclofen was a muscle relaxant.
Before long, I was well enough to talk with people over Facebook. I relaxed and used Facebook to have bubbly IM conversations with Lamesha and the rest, even [private] and [private].
But bubbly I was feeling. The constant dosing with ibuprofen and baclofen, mixed in with cough syrup, leaves me with medicine-head. I have been on a constant high and been feeling weak-brained when on this regimen. I didn't even check in to see if I had gotten any responses on my Inner Bruise thread. The medication that takes away the pain merely puts me on a high hallucination reminiscent of opium. I still feel a deep love for Lamesha, Stan Man, Jolene, Ken, Kevin, Tiffany, John Hensle, and all my other friends. But I, [private] a.k.a. James Landau, am not the same. Putting me on more medications to counteract the medicine-head would only add to the pharmacopoeia so much that I'd spend about ten minutes scraping the lettering off my pills and need about an eighth a gallon of strong juice to mask the terrible taste of the pills every time I took them. So that's out of the question. I now have a [private] back to go along with my screenname for my private posts and a regimen of zonk-me-out drugs to go along with my screenname for my public posts. I figured it was time I let you all know what's going on with me.