ANNUAL ANNIVERSARIES AWARENESS & APATHY

Quite a number of dates that I commemorate are about to occur.  August 5 will mark 11 years since the stroke and 10 years at my current job.  It was also the beginning of my financial death spiral which has turned into total disaster this week.  I don’t remember the date but sometime during the next week will be several years since the woman who was my best friend online and my mentor died from her 6th stroke.  August 17 will be 2 entire years since my mother died.  This past Monday was the date we took her to the hospital not knowing her life was over.  Then August 22 is my wife’s birthday.  My dad’s birthday is one month later on September 23.

You may think I’m preparing to wallow around in self pity with all that on the horizon.  Or at the very least that I get rather sentimental.

Neither would be correct.

My life began on August 5, 1998.  I was 43 at the time but all that was wiped out by a lack of oxygen to the brain.  Aside from the memory damage and the pain there were profound emotional and mental changes that took me years to come to terms with.  The biggest change was the complete disappearance of my faith.  It made no sense whatsoever so I kept studying religion to figure out what happened.  I also became a guinea pig for more drugs and heavy duty narcotics than I can remember.  The drugs did more damage to my body than the stroke did.  If the side effects for something include the words “sexual side effects” then believe me you don’t want to take those drugs.  “Weakness in the extremities” is also quite a bad side effect.  And, of course, we had to throw some Prozac in there somewhere which literally made me want to kill myself.

Karen the stroke survivor became my mentor and best friend soon after.  Barely able to speak and only able to type with two fingers, she created an entire online empire to help stroke survivors.  She had already suffered 5 strokes in her brief life but she would not quit or give up even an inch in her fight against what they had done to her body and her life.  She inspired me to become active in trying to help other survivors.  She’s the reason I started blogging and the reason I continue to this day.  I never met her in real life but she’s the most inspiring human being I ever encountered.

Unfortunately, her death at her 6th stroke occurred during a time where my memory is very hazy.  That’s why I can’t come up with the year for the life of me.  I’m very sad that she’s gone but I know in my heart that I am a much better person for having known her.  Her influence in my life was far beyond anything I had ever experienced before including my religion.  I know there are many more people that she affected just as much or more.

My love/hate relationship with my job began exactly a year after the stroke.  It didn’t take me long to realize that I could be very happy managing my own store.  Unfortunately, my health and the drug trial and error process combined with several managers who were threatened by my ambitions led to a series of denials of advancement.  By the time I actually did get promoted 3 years ago it was such a pyrrhic victory that all I managed to do was get more work dumped on myself for no money.

The job is, however, the catalyst that got me to change my name.  Frank is my first name but I was always known by my middle name.  The manager at the time paid no attention to that and called me Frank.  I had changed so much that I liked the idea even though I previously hated the name.  When I realized how much confusion that would cause with people who used to know me I went with it wholeheartedly.

July 27 began three weeks of the worst suffering I have ever witnessed anyone go through.  My mother’s pancreas malfunctioned and literally dissolved itself and other internal organs.  The doctor described it as having 3rd degree burns internally.  No one should have to suffer anything like that.  The horror she went through should be enough to convince anyone that there is no god but all her religious friends kept saying how wonderful god was and that he was just calling her home.  It was sickening.  I would rather someone blow my brains out than be made to suffer that agony.  I actually handled her death better than the rest of the family.  Take that whole fairy tale life after death business out of the equation and it becomes so much simpler and easier to handle.  You didn’t exist before you were born and you don’t exist after you die.  What’s so hard to accept about that?

I can’t believe two years have already gone by.

Birthdays won’t be any big deal, we can’t afford to celebrate them so the most that happens is a computer generated greeting card.

So I take note of these days and I usually write a blog post like this.  A lot of changes took place in my life over the years and they seem to converge in the month of August.  I don’t actually feel much about any of them.  Emotions are alien to me for the most part.  Apathy isn’t really an accurate word for my mental state but it’s probably how I come across.

Perhaps these are just reminders that if you can survive all this you can survive whatever is yet to come.

Technorati Tags: death,life,stroke,mentor,dates

This entry was posted on 30. July 2009 at 04:57 and is filed under wild guesses, interpretation, communication, listen, signs, religion, emotion, hearing, stroke. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

| Print