§ Recent Changes §
I’ve written at least 3 or 4 posts since the Destiny one that I thought I had set to auto post on certain dates, as well as a handful of drafts with ideas, etc. that I wasn’t ready to post and it appears that none of that worked. They obviously didn’t post and the drafts have all disappeared. I know it wasn’t a hacker or someone trolling me… which means I either did something stupid, I don’t remember like deleting the posts or my memory is getting worse. My guess is that latter…
On any note, here’s only a little of what I had written since I can’t for the life of me remember 99% of it. First we’ll start with some of the medical cause it’s always on my mind.
§ Medical §
With the stigma of mental illness, we’ll start by ‘rehashing’ some old posts with new information. I’m too lazy to check the date, but I’ve occasionally talked about another person over the last year or so and have mentioned that they were diagnosed with schizophrenia… I still haven’t asked for permission to talk about ‘them’ specifically, but anyone that knows me personally may be able to venture a guess at who I’m talking about… (please don’t guess publicly). If you haven’t figured it out already, knowing that I’m not only related to him, but we’re close enough for me to be concerned as well since it can be hereditary. Well, the good news so far is that although it took a few months, his doctor’s managed to find the right mixture of medications and doses that not only does he not show many signs of the illness, but he’s actually changed and became more sociable then he had been prior in his life. It’s a struggle every day, not just for him, but for all of us involved, and it’s gotten to the point that most of my medical issues are ‘put on the back burner’ as they say. I don’t mean this is a “Hey, I’m sick too, pay attention to me…” or anything along those lines since I’m sure I could come up with better reasons for people to pay attention to me and trust me, I hate being sick and dealing with all the issues I have.
Keeping that in mind, this is my blog after all, so might as well update you on a bunch of my fucked up problems too… It’s been about 4 or 5 months since I started seeing a psychiatrist (again) and it seems to be helping although we haven’t really talked about anything specific really. For example after I originally got sick my doctor (oncologist) advised to me to go because of the inherent depression and/or denial most Cancer patients initially feel and that doctor (psychiatrist) said in our very first meeting something along the lines with: “Let me start by saying, I don’t have cancer so I can’t pretend to know what you’re going through and if it’s something you want to talk about, we can, however I suggest, at least for now, we focus on non-cancer related issues because it ‘may’ help in the long run.” And for some reason, that statement just clicked and although we didn’t ignore the cancer, instead we started out talking about my experiences in the Military and moved on to some other general topics, giving me a feeling of ‘normalcy’ instead of the typical ‘Why me?’ that a lot of people go through. Fast forward to the current doctor and none of the medical stuff has really come up… (yet). We did the typical start where they ask the basic questions about your past and shit (for paperwork, not really for ‘where do we start?’ kind of thing) so we talked about the military for like 20 minutes total, some other ‘big’ events in my life, yadda yadda yadda… and the main focus most of the time is about a 50/50 split between a girl or about the fact that over the years, I’ve pretty much stopped going out and socializing, never have any friends over… barely have any contact other than the occasional conversation online or going to/from different doctors. There’s been times where I was just like “Fuck it, I’ll just go to a bar and see who’s around” but either something comes up (no money, too much pain) or I get there and the fucking place is empty so there’s no one to talk to anyway and I’m not going to spend $2.50 – $4.00 per beer when I could buy some and drink alone at home drowning my sorrows… which defeats the purpose.
Not that anyone would care, the girl mentioned isn’t a potential girlfriend or anything remotely interesting… and I’m only clarifying that because I slipped up and just mentioned my blog to her so there’s a chance she may read this.
Enough of the ‘head shrink’ type of stuff and we’ll move on to the fact that I’m pretty sure my memory is getting even worse and I’ve started to notice other issues I hadn’t seen before. Thankfully I’m not hearing voices or anything along those lines, but I’ve noticed a few times while talking for example I would either slur my speech or outright screw up a word. I’m not talking about a simple Freudian slip, but saying something like I did on a recent phone call where I asked a friend “Can you come over and help me move a pen” when I meant a fucking couch. But the more common thing I’m noticing is my hand-eye coordination which doesn’t seem to be affected while I’m typing for example, but there’s a game on my iPad that I play a lot when I get bored but I’ve noticed that when I reach to touch a box I swear my eyes see my finger over the correct thing, but when I touch the screen I’ve either hit the box on the right or above the one I want… I’ve tested the sensors on the iPad and confirmed it’s not the device malfunctioning but it’s my sight. I can’t even play the game with my right hand anymore because my hand will shake too much that I can’t keep my finger steady (I’m left-handed) and it makes it so I can’t play while laying on my left side which most of the time is the more comfortable position for my back and leg. Thankfully at this stage it only appears to be an issue when I’ve been awake too long so it might just be as simple as that, but having insomnia for around 15 years now I’m unsure what is ‘sleep deprivation’ or potentially something scarier.
As I stated, thankfully I’m not at the point where I’m hearing voices, but I do hear some noises that I have no real proof if they’re real or not since most of the time when I ‘think’ I heard something, it’s usually something in the distance and never really gives me a ‘that could be someone talking’ type feel, it’s more like a tapping noise or other sound that can usually be explained away.
Enough depressing crap, let’s move on to something new that I’m doing to help keep my mind off the above…
§ Replacement to College §
I finished college years ago at this point, but while working on a new project last week I got stuck trying to deal with some database injection among other things. It turned out that the imports I had written worked fine but due to some PDO limitations I couldn’t do everything required via AJAX and had to rewrite parts of the database to accommodate the changes. While doing research on the problems I decided to check some of the tutorial sites I’ve used in the past like Udemy and although none of the free stuff they had would give me the required knowledge I had some coupon codes that allowed me to purchase over $2,000 worth of courses for a very sizable discount. Udemy isn’t just for programmers, the have all sorts of courses covering Photography, Learning languages, Health & Fitness, Music and more… some are even free. With full disclosure, Udemy has not sponsored or endorsed anything said here, but if you click this link, and sign up you can receive $5 in credit towards your first course.
§ Closing §
There’s a lot more that I had written and amazingly there’s still some that I remember, but it’s almost 5am so I’m going to post what I have so far and create some voice memos to remind me of the other topics and will hopefully remember to write again soon.