Coping With The White Russians

White Russian: old fashioned glass, add ice, 2oz vodka, 1oz Kahlua, finish with chilled 1% milk… glass size and ice optional, adjust alcohol to taste.

Vodka is best stored in the freezer. Colder the better.

Healthy alternative to pop: fill a glass to within an inch of the brim with club soda, then add your favourite juice.

Some Rules To My Recovery:
1. Take the pills
2. Don’t drink, or use street drugs
3. Get decent sleep
4. See my doctor regularly

I’ve been drunk everyday for the past ten days. I’ve been drinking just enough to get a decently warm buzz, generally just enough to shut my brain down for an evening, or to keep it shut down for a day.

There are two basic reasons why I’ve broken one of my few recovery rules: I’ve been having cravings for a specific drink for a month, and; I lost the ability to use this blog as a means to my recovery — I couldn’t find the time to write, so drinking made sense.

When I first moved back here, six years ago, I promised myself I wouldn’t drink. I’ve been a binge drinker for most of my adult life. I grew up in the poorest (non-reservation) region of Canada (illiteracy rate of 30%, unemployment rate of 40%), so drinking was just something we did in high school. When I started college, using the government support program, alcohol was my second largest expenditure after rent.

When I moved to Toronto in 1998 I was drunk every weekend, after a year it had spread to most weekdays. Basically my weekend binges spread to Thursday, with alternating Monday and Wednesday sessions.

At the time I never thought of my drinking as a crutch, but now I understand the only decent sleep I ever got during those years were the nights I was drunk, or the two days afterwards when I was hungover… this was years before I started my recovery.

I stopped drinking again in 2001, when I started my two year slide back into homelessness and abject poverty. No money, no drinking. I also ended up living in a “dry house” in 2002, it’s a safe place for recovering addicts. It was managed by a friend of mine, so if I wanted to keep living there, I had to be dry.

I’m not an addict. Which, of course, is exactly the kind of slogan addicts carry like a shield. But I’ve done a pretty decent impression of one over the years.

When I moved back to my home town, after hitting rock bottom for a number of reasons — none of which directly involving alcohol — I just accepted the fact that drinking and prescription pills are a stupid combination. So I said “no thanks” when my step-father (repeatedly) offered me wine at dinner. Or when a friend took me out someplace.

After three years without a drop, I finally walked up to my parents’ liquor cart and made myself a drink at Christmas. Basically it was just two fingers of Bailey’s over ice, and it nearly knocked me out.

Over the couple of years since then I’ve had the occasional drink, but this year has been different. On Christmas Eve I plowed back six drinks, at my brothers wedding in February I had eight — all White Russians, by the way. It’s my weapon of choice. Six weeks ago, at my mom’s birthday dinner, I had three more.

I’ve been craving them almost everyday since then. It got so bad that last week I finally bought the ingredients for a White Russian from the liquor store, and I’ve pretty much been drunk ever since.

Alcohol allows me to be distracted easily, but at the same time to concentrate on things which really don’t matter. And I’ve needed some distractions lately.

The need to find a release makes sense to my psychiatrist, even though he totally disapproves of my using the one generally associated with manic depression — those of us with this disease self-medicate more than those without it. He reads this blog, he knows how important a tool it is in my recovery, so he has also noticed the significant drop in my involvement in this blog.

It’s not just the drop in postings, but also the lack of responses to comments which started over a month ago.

So, when your primary recovery tool craps out as an option, the old standbys are always there, ready to take over.

Basically two weeks ago I was ready to explode. My shoulders, lower back, left hip and ankles were in constant pain from stress. I was exhausted from travelling to see my girlfriend in the hospital, and from missing so much sleep from the stress of making sure my girlfriend, and our unborn son, were safe.

That weekend I finally managed to talk to some friends about what was going on, and a lot of the stress was relieved. But I had already made the decision to buy the ingredients. And when my disability cheque came in three days later, I made a trip to the liquor store.

The next day I wrote, for really the first time, about the stress I had been under, and posted it to my blog. A few hours later, just before my Friday appointment with my psychiatrist, I poured everything out to my mother. Then, later on, I did it again with my psychiatrist.

So, after going several months gathering all of this stress unto myself without any serious release, I had poured it out to two friends, to the people who read this blog, to my mother — who was holding back tears from watching me force my life out of my head — and then to my shrink.

So most of the stress, and reason for my wanting to drink, were gone… but I’ve continued to drink.

Because the stress isn’t gone. I’ve just released my brain from having to carry it all by writing and talking about it all. It’s the same as talking things out… we never know if there’s one issue screaming around our head, or a thousand, until we actually take the time to make sense of it all.

But the stress doesn’t go away when we’ve gained some understanding of what’s going on, that’s just the first step. Now we have to actually do things to make the stress stop. Or lessen. Of course drinking a White Russian once I wake up, then another two to six during the day, isn’t going to do anything to help me confront the stress in my life.

Without even knowing about the drinking, my psychiatrist, during our appointment last week, decided I needed to have weekly appointments again. We’ve been on twice monthly visits for a few years now… the last time we were seeing each other weekly was back at the beginning of my recovery.

That’s how screwed up I was… am. I told him about the drinking during today’s appointment. It makes sense to him I’d be searching for alternative recovery tools, since I basically lost the use of this blog. But, again, it’s not a method of dealing with my life that he particularly approves of.

…the problem with having to deal with stress, is finding the time to deal with the stress. And every time I think I’ve dealt with something, some other thing pops up. My girlfriend decided staying in the hospital would be the right thing. But only after I yelled at her. I don’t yell. I cannot remember the last time I ever yelled at anyone.

But yelling worked. My psychiatrist thinks, because her entire family yells at each other all the fucking time, it’s because I was finally speaking in a language she understood. So that stress was gone. But I still had to travel to Ottawa three times last week, and another three times this week.

That’s fifteen hours and 720km in a car, being awake at 5am, getting home after 7pm and spending all day standing around a hospital.

Plus my landlord, way back in September, handed me $550 worth of hydro and gas bills he’d been hoarding since last March. So, after cutting him three cheques (Oct: $150, Nov: $250, Dec: $150), I’ve been broke like I used to be when I was on social assistance.

And now my girlfriend is home… on a “twenty-four hour pass” from the hospital. She’s here for an overnight stay so she can attend her son’s fourth birthday party. I don’t like that she’s here, but I understand why she needed to be here, and I even support it. But it’s an additional stress.

She got here just after dinner on Friday, and she’s going back up on Saturday night. I spent most of the evening doing what I could for her. We had pizza and watched a zombie movie. But she told me her father had driven like a lunatic coming here from the hospital, which stressed her out. Then they stopped at a Toy’s R Us, to buy her son a present, and she ended up walking for half an hour… which is exactly fifteen minutes more than the doctor told her it was safe to walk.

Of course they also told her not to drive anywhere.

And when she got here she got into a phone fight with her mother, and her ex-husband about her son’s party. After she got off the phone with one of them I told her no more phone calls while she was home. The party is being organized by other people, all she has to do is show up at 2pm and hug her son.

So maybe it’s best to just keep up with the drinking… my alcohol will run out by Monday anyway, and I can’t afford a refill. Which is probably for the best.

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But He Made It Out… With A Bullet In His Back

Jailbreak, jailbreak
I got to break out
Out of here
Heartbeats they were racing
Freedom he was chasing
Spotlights, sirens, rifles firing
But he made it out…
With a bullet in his back.
“Jailbreak”; AC/DC, ‘74 Jailbreak’ (1984)

This past Sunday night I finally sat down with friends, for the first time in almost a year, and spoke out loud about what I’ve been going through since April.

I spoke about the pregnancy, about my relationship with my girlfriend, about how I’ve sacrificed friendships and how my recovery has stalled.

I cannot remember the last time I’ve been with my friends. Any of them. I’ve been in such a panic, I’ve been so focused on supporting my girlfriend because of her high-risk pregnancy, I’ve been paralysed.

For the first three months of her pregnancy the fear was miscarriage, she had two before having her son four years ago. So twice a week we were travelling to emergency rooms in the very early morning. I was convinced each week would bring the end of our child.

I had spent the previous four years of my life trying to avoid situations where depression was the only outcome, and for three straight months I was living inside a string of depressions. Every single time I thought we had reached a point where things were getting better — three or four or five days without my girlfriend feeling pain, or finding blood in her underwear — I was crushed on day four, five or six when we ended up in the emergency room at 3am waiting for the doctor to tell us if it was a miscarriage or another false alarm.

And it was another false alarm after false alarm after false alarm. For three months, twice a week or more, there was another image thrust into my head of our baby being flushed. There was never enough time to come to terms with the baby being out of danger, before being jammed into another scenario where his life could be over. There was never enough time to be thankful for the continuation of the pregnancy, because the threat to its continuation always came back.

Except in July I was told the threat of miscarriage would be reduced to almost nil if my girlfriend underwent a surgical procedure called a “cervical cerclage”. And it was my girlfriend who told me about it. If she had the procedure in week fourteen of the pregnancy, the baby would have a serious shot at getting to full term.

I was very proud of my girlfriend, and incredibly thankful she’d be willing to live with the pain of the cerclage if it meant our baby’s survival. All she’d have to do, in order to make it work, was follow a few unbreakable rules — no driving, no walking, no lifting, no unnecessary standing and no stress.

And after going through the procedure she broke every one of the rules. She had replaced the constant fear of miscarriage with the constant fear of the cerclage breaking because she decided her boredom could only be alleviated if she drove around the county. Or because someone needed their shifts covered at the store, so she’d end up standing behind a counter for eight hours.

Every single time she went for a drive I counted seconds, minutes and days off our kid’s life. Every rule she broke, and every time she broke it, meant the cerclage was weakened. It meant a miscarriage was more likely.

And it has almost happened. She’s in the hospital right now with a baby which will be born almost two months premature because the cerclage has slipped away to almost nothing.

So, again, I was in a panic. I have been in a panic. But more than panic, in addition to the panic, I’ve been fighting against my girlfriend for seven months. I’ve been unable to recognize the forest because I’ve been beating my head against a tree while being pelted with rocks by the woman carrying my son.

My girlfriend is currently a patient in the high risk pregnancy department of the Ottawa General Hospital. She has been there since Tuesday, October 21. So ten days. She’s there because the doctors are convinced if she were to leave, and come home, the cerclage would fail and our son would be born too quickly, and without the tools necessary to live. His chances of surviving, they tell her, are much better with her surrounded by nurses and doctors.

But when they tell her “we strongly recommend you stay here in the hospital”, she hears “it’s okay to go home”.

And she’s planning to come home in four days. She also planned on coming home a few days ago, she told me over the weekend she was coming home on Tuesday, depending on how some test results.

When she told me I yelled at her. It was the first time I’ve really been angry with her. And it has been a very long time since I yelled at anyone. But I’d had enough.

So I yelled. “…you are not coming home. There is no fucking way you are coming home. You are staying in that fucking hospital until this kid is born. Our kid has a much better chance at surviving if you’re there. You are not coming home.”

She wanted to come home because her four-year old son had the flu. Now she wants to come home because she’s bored.

Several doctors have told her the best chance for our son to have a healthy life is for her to stay in the hospital. Basically what we’re doing is giving the kid as many days and weeks as we possibly can. He’ll be premature, right now it’s about timing. Thirty weeks is better than twenty-nine. The cerclage is far too damaged now to last much longer. If she comes home it’ll disintegrate in days, not weeks.

If she stays where she is, maybe we can get to thirty-one weeks.

But the panic surrounding me isn’t about the baby, it’s about her. I’m not panicked about the kid being born with or without properly formed lungs, the panic I feel is about my girlfriend changing her fucking mind every other day about whether or not she’s going to stay in the hospital.

I’m spending everyday trying to think of things to say which might convince her to stay. I’m calling her three times a day just to keep her spirits up, I’m travelling to Ottawa three times a week to spend eight hours with her to keep her spirits up. But I’m really spending every second thinking of how I can convince her to stay in the fucking hospital.

I’ve gone from spending hours in hospital rooms and corridors wondering if our kid would last the night, to watching my girlfriend burn through what seemed like a gift because she couldn’t sit still, to listening to her complain about boredom and how she’d rather be home folding clothes than be in the hospital where our kid has the best chance at being safe.

…my grandfather took me out for lunch last week. He asked about my girlfriend. After I gave him my standard answer, he leaned over and asked if I had anyone to talk to about what was going on. I almost fell apart. I told him ‘yes’, but I don’t. Not out of choice, but because I’ve been so consumed with making sure my girlfriend and our son survived another day, every other relationship has disappeared.

My recovery has been compromised, my diet has turned to shit, my blood sugar is sky high, I can’t put two nights of sleep together, I’m constantly in pain — I haven’t been able to lift my right arm above my shoulder for weeks, but I can’t speak to anyone about my problems because when I start to think about my problems I feel guilty because my girlfriend is going through so much more.

But I did manage to speak to someone. I had to force myself, but I did manage to invite myself to my friends’ home, and they were happy to see me. And, eventually, I was able to unload a lot of what’s in this post to them.

And they made the point that out of the eight months I’ve been dating my girlfriend, seven of them have involved this pregnancy. I’ve been thinking about that, but it never occurred to me someone else might be as well.

My friend, who gave birth to a girl eighteen months ago, also made the point she’d be tying her legs together if it meant giving her kid another week inside.

I don’t know how much longer I can do this. I don’t know where I stand with my girlfriend. I don’t even know if what’s going on between us can be called “dating”.

I do know that if she comes home on Tuesday our relationship is going to fundamentally change. Because I can’t keep doing what we’ve been doing. I’m just not sure what happens next… whether or not she does come home.

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Victory Is Both A Name And A State Of Mind

Things didn’t get worse last week, which means they got better. According to the doctors at the Ottawa General Hospital, this was supposed to be the week my son should have been born. He would have been almost two months premature.

But after our appointment on Tuesday, after the doctor completed my girlfriend’s physical exam, and checked the ultrasound report, he told us the pregnancy should continue another three weeks. The cerclage is still doing its job, it’s still the only thing holding the baby in his mother’s womb. My girlfriend’s cervix is now shaped like a really shallow funnel, the baby’s… sack, for lack of a better term, has almost completely filled the space behind the cerclage.

But, the doctor said, he’s seen worse. We’re still on a day-to-day schedule, things can still go wrong — the cerclage could still fail, the contractions could get worse, the water could still break — but the chances things could go wrong are all within the margin of error. So the baby could be born sooner, but right now it looks like it’ll happen later.

Which is great, because in three weeks it’ll be Week Thirty… which is seven months and two weeks. And then it’s only two short weeks until Month Eight. And being borne one month premature is a lot better than the two or three months we were expecting not too long ago.

Every extra week in the womb is a serious reduction in the complications involved in a premature birth. We’ve been literally counting days since we found out my girlfriend was pregnant, so our doctor giving us an extra twenty-one is a new reality which hasn’t really set in yet. At least not with me.

We’ve got appointments with the Ottawa General Hospital’s high-risk pregnancy department every Tuesday from now until the baby is born. And we’re supposed to be prepared for my girlfriend to move into the maternity word at the end of each appointment, depending on the doctor’s evaluation of the cerclage. But a huge amount of pressure has been lifted. I think.

I’ve felt numb for a little while. Maybe longer. After my girlfriend came home from the appointment last week — she went with her father, I stayed to look after her son — she was panicked, and it was infectious. The doctor had told her, based on the continued deterioration of the cerclage, to expect the baby to be delivered soon. Really soon. Which freaked her out, which freaked me out.

But on Tuesday I asked the doctor a couple of questions based on what my girlfriend had told me about the previous appointment, and right away I could tell he was looking at me with his patient “you’re a first time father-to-be” face. It was pretty much then I realized my level of panic might be justified based on what I thought was going on, but not entirely based on reality.

So this is my understanding of what he explained… the cerclage could fail completely. It would be unusual, but it might happen. But even without the cerclage we would still have hours to get to the hospital — which is a lot better than what I had understood. Based on everything I’d heard up to that point I figured we’d have twenty minutes from strange pains in my girlfriend’s stomach, to the kid asking where his breakfast was.

If the cerclage holds, but my girlfriend goes into premature labour and her water breaks — another unusual scenario, we’d still have time to get to the hospital because the baby can’t get through the cerclage. And, of course, if she simply starts having contractions we’ve got time to get to the hospital.

When I asked about ambulances, and speed — because we’re an hour from the hospital — he suggested we could use the air ambulance to get from our little hospital to Ottawa. But that was the point where I realized I was being “that guy”.

In that moment I realized… we’re not unique. Of course people other than my girlfriend and myself have gone through this before and, since there haven’t been a lot of news stories about women dropping kids out of their uterus while walking through a mall, the survival rate must be pretty high.

Worst case scenario would be the cerclage failing completely, the water breaking and the contractions starting all at once. But what happens then… is my girlfriend gives birth. Taa daa.

For some reason, in my head, this scenario meant either the kid was automatically dead, or the baby would tear through my girlfriend’s spine and pop out of her back like that thing in Alien. But, according to the doctor, all we have to do is what almost every other pregnant human couple living in Canada has done for the past 60 years… we drive to a modern, shiny, socialist hospital where a team of specialists carefully removes my son from his mother.

It sounds like a crazy dream, but apparently it works pretty well.*

Something good did come from spending a week thinking my child was in a life or death situation. Thanks to the panic I was feeling we finally gave the boy a name.

I didn’t have much of a list to chose from. My girlfriend had thirty names, but half of hers came from novels about vampires… she’s a huge fan of Laurell K. Hamilton’s books. She even had my biological father’s name on her list, because it’s also the name of a character in a vampire novel.

We ended up going with family names. So our kid is named after my grandfather, and her father: Victor David.

I wanted to have names that meant something to us. I would’ve gone with Victor even without the family connection, considering what the kid has been through so far I think it just fits. And my girlfriend’s dad is a good man. I do have… lets call them ‘issues’ with my grandfather. He was distant, he was missing for a good part of my life, but he also led an incredible life. And he’s a good man.

Plus, chances are way better now I’ll be in the will.

I still think ‘Cooler’ would have been an awesome name for the boy. But my girlfriend didn’t want him named after my cat.

* …and it’s all free. All of it. Just saying.

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Next Week Our Baby Will Be Born Two Months Premature

If the doctors are right my son will be born next week. The surgical procedure they performed on my girlfriend, called a cerclage, has almost entirely failed.

A cerclage is a stitch, or clamp, placed in or around around a woman’s cervix, it’s meant to prevent a miscarriage due to an incompetent cervix. Ideally it would have lasted until our son’s natural due date of January 10, 2010. But no one really believed we’d get there. The idea has been to get to the mystical twenty-sixth week, when the boys’ lungs will have developed enough so he can survive outside the womb.

He made it to the twenty-sixth week marker six days ago. On Tuesday, during our regular hospital visit at the Ottawa General, the doctors told us the cerclage had slipped from 13mm to six. If you point your fingers downwards, and squeeze them together, that would be the cervix… the cerclage should be located between the top and middle knuckles. 13mm would be between the top of your fingernail, and the bottom knuckle.

The cerclage inside my girlfriend, which is the only thing holding our baby inside her womb, is now located about halfway between the end of your finger and the top of your fingernail.

If there’s any change, or increase in the pain my girlfriend experiences, we are to get in a car — preferably someone else’s — and get to the hospital as soon as possible so they can monitor what’s going on. If she experiences more than five contractions in a day we’re to call 911.

Either way I’m calling the paramedics.

We have another appointment this coming Tuesday, for however long our kid stays where he’s supposed to we’ll be having weekly checkups from now on. But I’ve spoken with my girlfriend and we’ve agreed that she’ll be staying in the hospital starting on Tuesday.

For months the doctors have been telling us… telling my girlfriend she must, absolutely, not drive, not walk, not take baths, not get into stressful situations in order for the cerclage to work properly. Just last week, over two days, she drove almost 200km. And she was still insisting on confronting her mother’s insanities, and walking into town.

Every time she has squatted down to pick up her son I’ve counted ten minutes off our kids’ life. Every time she got in a car I counted off another thirty minutes. I don’t want to count hours off our kids life every time my girlfriend decides to spend an entire day standing around watching her father cut wood, but it happened.

This isn’t an irrational boyfriend flipping out, or being controlling, this is the medical commandments of the doctors and nurses of the high risk pregnancy department at the Ottawa General Hospital.

I did my best to make sure she stuck to the rules. I walked to the store for her groceries, I made sure her soon-to-be-ex-husband (STEBH) picked up their son on his visitation days, I inserted myself in between my girlfriend and STEBH at every opportunity to keep her stress level to a minimum.

But it didn’t work. I don’t know if the cerclage slipped as far as it has because she broke the rules so often, but I do know if doctors tell you not to touch something because it’ll get infected, and after you touch it twice a day for a month it gets infected, there’s probably a connection in there somewhere.

The thing is… I’ve been angry with her for weeks. It came to a head last week during her three day, 200km excursion. She had several options, but she chose the one with the most travel time.

The other thing is… I can’t be angry with her. My being angry is stress on her. Stress is not allowed according to the doctors. So all summer, whenever she decided she needed a walk through town — something which always leaves her exhausted, and caused her an incredible amount of pain — I’d suggest, never demand, that taking a walk in our large backyard might be preferable.

Or when she drove her son to school because it was raining, instead of letting the babysitter take him under an umbrella, I’d suggest that her kid was not made of sugar, and would not melt in the rain.

But last week I had enough. She drove all over the fucking county, but I didn’t yell, or throw a fit, I just shut down. She apologized that night, but I think I just ran into a wall… or finally acknowledged the wall I had been leaning against, thinking I was still running. Whatever, I stayed shut down for a couple of days. Until I realized I was causing her stress.

Since then she’s been following the rules. And now, with the doctors telling us about how low the cerclage is, and how the baby is coming within the next week or two, I think the full gravity of the situation has finally dropped on her. Hopefully, hopefully, if she stays still, gets admitted into the hospital on Tuesday, we can buy a couple more weeks so our son can develop further inside her womb.

But, as of right now, this thing is happening in a matter of days.

And I don’t think anyone is ready. I’ll be moving into the hospital for, probably, three months, to be with the kid while he grows up in an incubator. My mother has volunteered to spend a couple of days a week with him. My girlfriend will be there, but so far her parents have refused to get involved.

We have a crib, a space for him in my girlfriend’s apartment, we have people knitting him jumpers and hats, we even have the start of an education fund.

But first things first… tomorrow we give the kid a name.

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Cleaning Up After Nine Months Of Neglect

My apartment is slowly becoming less filthy. For most of this past year, and the last few months of 2008, I was living on two-thirds of my prescribed dose of anti-depressants thanks to a pharmacy screw up.

It took me far too long, but a couple of months ago I finally realized I was taking the blue pill, not the purple one. It’s like living in a large room with one lamp, then remembering there are track lights. All that time living in the dark, forgetting where my stuff was, and all I had to do was flick a switch.

Well my switch is flicked. I’ve been back on the purple pill for a month now, and I feel better than I have in a long time. Not perfect, but better. More able to see what’s going on around me. And able to make healthy decisions. Like finally changing my sheet and pillowcases.

…this is going to get a little graphic.

In 2003, when I accidentally erased three years worth of edits to my book, I went into a depression coma. I grew my first beard and I slept on the same sheet for four months. The idea of changing it never occurred to me. I never saw the growing, black stain of dirt and sweat. Even when it ripped, I never saw the hole. When the stain spread to the mattress, it just was. It looked to me as if it had always been that way, or like it was supposed to be that way.

There were other mitigating factors to the deepening depression, plus I was right at the beginning of my recovery. I don’t think I was even taking an anti-depressant at that point. But those, and other incidents of giving up, came as the result of a sudden, devastating shock.

This time it was a slow, incremental fade… as though someone were turning down a dimmer dial rather than pulling a plug. I was able to function outside, talk to people, push through what I thought were difficulties of my own making to face the people I had to face. But I couldn’t break through the barriers between passive and active. I could respond to friends and acquaintances I met randomly on the street, but didn’t have the energy or willingness to search them out.

As it got harder and harder to function, I blamed myself and leaned further into the wind so I could keep walking.

I’ve been able to maintain a diabetic friendly diet, but I’ve also regularly run out of decent food, and I haven’t kept track of my blood sugar levels for months. My laundry situation is I’ve only done two, maybe three, loads this year. I only changed the flypaper hanging from my ceiling when someone commented on how there were no spaces left for new ones.

And I went six months on one sheet, and one set of pillowcases. Occasionally I could see how dirty they were, and there’d be a minor acknowledgement as to how ridiculous it was I would be sleeping on them that night, but the idea of changing them would only make a brief appearance.

And it took months to even realize what was happening.

And I think there was a general confusion as to what was happening, even if I couldn’t specifically see what was happening. Like being unable to feel the water around my knees, but being aware of how walking was becoming significantly harder. The idea it could be the medications fault never came to me. I was using the same pharmacy, with the same pharmacists, and my prescription never changed.

So it had to be my fault. If there was any fault to be laid. Which was not something, again, which really occurred to me. What is, is… what is, has always been. The lights haven’t dimmed, because it has never been brighter than this. My sheets aren’t dirty, this is how they’ve always been.

When the levels of medication in my body started to slowly fall, the walls and horizons slowly pulled inwards. It’s like when I first put on my glasses and looked out the window of my apartment. Instead of being a mushy grey, the sign on the gas station down the street was actually white, and I could read the words. As my eyes deteriorated, my horizons narrowed and shrank. Every year, without noticing, my horizon was a foot or ten closer to me. With the glasses everything cleared. My horizons were back to where they had been.

And now I can see the thick coat of fine, grey dust covering everything in my apartment, and the sand, lint and grit covering my rugs and floor.

It’s not like I’ve ever been a decent housekeeper. I’ve always needed my surroundings to be in a certain state to be motivated into cleaning them. Generally, since starting the anti-depressant, every shirt has to be dirty before I’ll relent to a laundry day. But over the past six months, and previous to starting the medications, I would just pick as much of the mustard stain off the shirt as I could before putting it on.

In the fourteen years previous to the anti-depressant there were a few times where I went a year between doing a laundry. Because it never occurred to me to do otherwise. Or, when it did occur to me that I needed to get my stuff clean, I was unable to take the next logical step, or the steps needed to get things done were too high.

And now I’m five weeks back at the dose I was prescribed. And I’m slowly cleaning my apartment. Bookshelves, and their books, have been dusted. Tomorrow is laundry day. And I just found the chequebook I’ve been searching for most of the summer… it was on top of a pile of books, on top of my television, right in the middle of my living room.

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Proof Of The Life Of Brian And How It Saved Mine

I have a large collection of Blues music, but it came to me mostly by accident and from only one source.

At the beginning of my College journalism program we were assigned a local celebrity. We had three months to research and write about their life. The 2500 word final product would count for some ridiculously high percentage of our final, first semester grade.

I was assigned Brian “The Source” Murphy, a local FM DJ. Brian had been working for Ottawa FM radio stations for as long as I had been alive. He was also just months removed from having been fired from his job of fifteen years. He had built the record library of the most successful FM station in Ottawa, “Chez 106″, then built a huge and loyal following as host of a six hour blues show every Sunday.

He had the stereotypical blues-man’s deep, gravel filled, voice and a methodical and slow manner of speaking; he was constantly broke; he dressed in the same clothes pretty much everyday — blue jeans, cutoff jean vest, poor boy cap, various buttons; he had the long, thinning ponytail held together with a plain elastic, long sideburns, and the scraggly goatee; he had a wonky eye and wore large glasses.

According to everyone I spoke with, he also knew more about rock, pop, blues, jazz and ragtime music than most people know about their own genitals.

But the station decided it cost too much money to have experienced employees. So, four months after receiving a plaque for his many years of service to the station, and without letting him say goodbye to his fans, they axed him.

I only conducted one interview with Brian, but it lasted eight hours. We sat in the basement of his small home and, surrounded by thousands of records, thousands of CD’s, thousands of reel-to-reel’s, thousands of cassettes, he basically schooled me in blues culture.

I only brought three hours worth of tape for the interview, but every time we filled one, he’d pull out another fresh tape so we could keep talking.

Brian was obviously depressed from having been dumped by the station he helped start. I was the first ‘reporter’ he had spoken to about what had happened. Brian was 53 when I interviewed him, he had been working in music since he was 16.

After being dumped by CHEZ he had tried to get in with a new FM station called “The Bear”, but management decided Brian’s voice was too associated with his former employers.

So when I met Brian he was putting together mix-tapes of blues music for downtown restaurants to play in the background while people ate. Brian’s mixed tapes are legendary in Ottawa. During his years as a DJ he attracted hundreds of fans, to whom he would regularly send out tapes. Each one was a history lesson, all of the songs related to each other somehow.

I found someone in my village who had been on the mailing list almost since the beginning. He loaned me some, including some recordings of Brian’s show, but only if I put up my lungs as collateral.

I didn’t get on the list, mostly because Brian didn’t really like how I portrayed him in my article, but when the interview was nearing its end Brian started handing me copies of his mixed tapes. Blues, to me, at that time, meant George Thorogood & The Destroyers, Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Led Zeppelin. I remember, when I told Brian this, he looked like he wanted to cry or hit me.

So he started handing me tapes, and trying to teach me what Blues music meant. Brian wasn’t a ‘music fascist’, but he understood — and wanted everyone to understand — the history of what we listened to. He was a teacher who, when he overhears a student say something equally retarded, like how the 2008 Ford Mustang is the coolest muscle car ever, will sit the student down and tell him stories about the 1971 Plymouth “Hemi” Cuda convertible.

One of the last questions I asked Brian was, “why haven’t you left?”. Why are you still living in a city where no one will hire you? Why haven’t you gotten the fuck out of here?

But he couldn’t leave. He was trapped. He rambled for a few minutes about keeping in touch with his fans. I can’t remember if he had any family. I think there was a failed marriage, and there may have been a kid, but I doubt my memory on both. He wasn’t lying about wanting to stay where people knew him, but the truth was moving away from Ottawa scared the shit out of him.

Brian didn’t get much of a severance from CHEZ. His only source of income when I met him was making those ambiance tapes for a few small restaurants. For a few years there was a small Blues club downtown, I think he made tapes for them for a little while. I know he started selling off his incredible record collection. From floor to ceiling, from wall to wall to wall, he had more than seven thousand records in his basement, including hundreds of rare and unique blues and jazz LP’s.

It feels a little cruel, but looking back he reminds me, just a little, of Steve Buscemi’s character in Ghost World. Cruel because, while “Seymour” could tell you everything there ever was to know about the song you were listening to, he never sold or traded his treasured records for food and rent.

The feature article I wrote about Brian was published six weeks after the interview, almost in its entirety, and with a large photo of him in his living room with a huge cardboard display cutout of Elvis Costello. I never called or visited Brian again. I heard from someone he wasn’t happy with my take on his life, and I have difficulties approaching people on the best of terms. So having my first serious published feature critiqued by the person featured was more than enough road block.

While I’ve never been sure he didn’t like it, the idea he didn’t has always bothered me. But I do believe I captured what he was going through, and what he had done, fairly.

‘In the vacuum created by the whims of public demand for generic sound-alike radio stations, and money conscious radio management, Murphy searches for meaning in his life. When he finds a piece and is forced to give it up, it’s a piece of himself that is lost. The only things left to him are his name, voice, reputation, his incredible collection of records and CD’s and a lot of bills.’

The article I wrote on Brian was my saving grace. My teachers, before I submitted the piece, were ready to kick me out of school when the semester was over. I had no income, I was untreated, I was self-medicating with Lithium, I was living in a room at the YMCA, my girlfriend of three years had just broken up with me.

I was showing up an hour late for school, everyday. I was a mess. I wasn’t suicidal everyday. But often enough that the remnants of one bout bled over into the next. I think Brian and I had a lot in common when we met.

But after submitting my piece on Brian everything changed. I was given a second chance. Inevitably I graduated, and was able to start a career.

‘Murphy’s voice never floated across the airwaves like the helium inspired voices today, rather it punched its way through the static and brought with it the message of; this is the music, this is how it started, it’s quite a ride so hang on and I’ll pull you through and show you what I can see. It’s big, it’s blue, but baby it’s beautiful, and it’ll suck the helium straight out of you.’

I still have eight of the twelve mix-tapes Brian pushed into my hands, and I’ve been listening to them almost non-stop for the past two weeks.

Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Aretha Franklin, Albert King, Ben Webster, Duke Ellington, Moe Koffman, John Lee Hooker — even Clapton and Offenbach, every cassette Brian sent out included carefully typed out liner notes, and a request that you include a photocopy of them if you made a copy for a friend. As much as it was the songs Brian loved, their history, and the history or the artist, was just as important.

Brian and I didn’t talk during our time together. By the end of the eight hours he had no more of an idea as to who I was then he did three days before I had called about the interview. There was no back and forth. It was an interview. It was my job to get him to talk about himself. And for the most part he told me stories about himself, about the people he had met, and most of them were practised from years of retelling.

But I had a heavy heart when I found out, in 2005, he had died. The only obituary I can find — written by Chris Cobb, my college ethics teacher, and a close friend of Brian’s — doesn’t mention a specific cause, but Chris did link Brian’s death to his slow deterioration after his dismissal from CHEZ.

I was searching for something non-pregnancy related to write about, and Brian kept popping into my head.

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Home Again Home Again Jiggity Jig

My girlfriend came home on Tuesday night. She spent six days in the Ottawa General Hospital for observation and tests because there’s a very real possibility of her pregnancy ending before our child can survive outside her womb.

That risk hasn’t gone away. If anything it got worse during her time in the hospital. The doctors now believe it is a matter of weeks, not months, until the baby is borne. The official due date is January 10, 2010. Unofficially it’s now late October or early November.

Two months ago my girlfriend underwent a procedure called a “cerclage” — which is a surgical stitch or clamp placed around the cervix. Some women have what’s called an “incompetent cervix”, it basically means the muscle is too weak to hold the baby in place. So when the baby grows, the pressure on the cervix becomes too grate, and the result is a miscarriage.

Basically, it’s the premature opening of the cervix.

My girlfriend lost two children, one in the second trimester, and the second towards the end of the third, before having her son — who survived to full term thanks to a cerclage.

Even with a cerclage there are risks. In our case, the cerclage has slipped. To get an idea as to what’s going on, hold your hand straight out with all of your fingers pointing down and squeezed together. That’s the cervix. Now wrap the thumb and forefinger from your other hand around your fingers between the top and middle knuckles. That’s the cerclage where it’s supposed to be.

Now slide your forefinger and thumb down to your bottom knuckle. The cerclage keeping my son safely inside his mother is approximately between your bottom knuckle and your fingernail.

To make things entirely worse, all of that empty space between the top of the cervix and the cerclage has now been filled with the baby’s sac. The baby itself is now too big to slide through, but the sac of fluid surrounding him has slid into the space, and is pushing down on the cerclage.

The hospital visit was also meant to give my girlfriend a quiet, stress free place to give her body time to heal. The cerclage itself is very painful, especially when it’s sliding around inside her. But the baby is making things worse for itself by being extremely active.

But it turns out my girlfriend is allergic to quiet. She was going stir-crazy by the second night. She was combative with the nursing staff — albeit, in some cases, with good reason. She was alone in a room, on a ward filled with newly borne babies and happy families.

So on the sixth day, as soon as the last doctor told us being home wouldn’t cause any more damage — as long as she stayed close to her bed and away from stress, we brought her home. She’s been sitting reclined in her chair, watching The Wire and eating walnuts ever since.

Personally, I think she should still be in the hospital. I’m pretty sure the doctors wanted to keep her as well, I’m almost positive they expect her back sooner rather than later. I got incredibly frustrated with my girlfriend every time she talked about getting out and going home.

We are going back in ten days for a steroid shot which will help our kid develop lungs. That’s the basic necessity at this point… our kid has to grow lungs. His heart is strong, his head and stomach are now two weeks ahead of schedule. The pregnancy is four days into its twenty-second week. The bare minimum number of weeks, where the kid will have just a shot at living, is twenty-six.

So this is a four week race where my girlfriend can’t move.

So far I’ve managed to take care of most of the day-to-day stuff. But her friends are pitching in, mostly in taking care of her three-year old son. I haven’t explained much of this to her soon-to-be-ex-husband (STBEH), but I have explained to him that I’ll be very pissed off if he upsets my girlfriend at all. So far he’s been on time and helpful.

The past few days have been fairly smooth all around. I think my girlfriend is starting to get a little stir-crazy again. So tomorrow I’ll be taking her for a walk around the yard.

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Diabetic Polyneuropathy, My Girlfriend Goes To The Hospital To Save Our Baby And A School Bus Hits My Parents Home

Six months ago I started to notice my feet and lower legs were getting numb. Not a total loss of feeling, but numb in the way your arm gets numb after cracking your “funny bone”.

After consulting with my family doctor in the spring, I underwent a procedure a few weeks ago where fifty electrical shocks were shot down each leg to test the nerves connecting my hips to my feet.

On Monday I met with the doctor to go over the results, and he has concluded what I was feeling — and not feeling — is a direct result of the diabetes I was diagnosed with last year.

I’m still not sure if the test is called ‘EMR’ or ‘EMD’.