how can i breathe with no air

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

what a strange fucking day.

asthma attacks are brutal. just yesterday, I wrote “i cheated last night and had a cigarette & spent the day wheezing.” unfortunately, I exacerbated that by moving books around and kicking up dust, and I couldn’t catch my breath enough to fall asleep. this winter, I’ve usually been able to keep the attacks at bay by relaxing my body and using mentholated gel on my body to relax my lungs, but it was rolling around to 1:30 and nothing was working. I hopped into the shower because sometimes the humid hot air helps, and I saw myself in the mirror and realized how terrible i looked. like someone in distress. i decided that i needed to go and see someone as soon as possible, so i made an appointment with zoomcare. i also decided to swallow my pride and steal some of my roommate’s medicine so that I could get sleep for a couple of hours before I went in.

in the morning, i was able to see the nurse practitioner fairly quickly. one of the reasons i avoided getting help was because i dreaded the idea of being ashamed to tell them that I smoked, but it turns out that its pretty shameful to explain to a medical professional why you didn’t get help when your are clearly sick. i explained that I had had inhalers in the past, and I needed a new scrip for one. she listened to my lungs and was like,

yeah… you should get an inhaler, but you also have fluid in your lungs. you’ve been walking around with pneumonia.

inside my head I’m like:

because my cough was actually much better until very recently, and if I have a lung infection right now, I’ve probably had it since september.

i braved the obnoxious bore that is filling a prescription, and took the first doses and immediately felt a lot better from the steroids. i was glad to have insurance with drug benefits, but it was a lot more expensive than I wanted it to be (here’s some terrible shit about the shittiness of drug companies vis a vis asthma) I called in sick to work because at this point i was just feeling like shit and hadn’t gotten more than a couple hours of sleep. Lauren was off of work and I hadn’t seen her in a couple of days, so it was nice to have a little BestieTalk™ for a couple hours before we both slept.

felt much better when I woke up. talked a little bit with my family. cleaned the kitchen. ready to feel better.

i have a lot of complex thoughts about what it means to be so careless with myself as to avoid treatment for something fairly substantial. I think my own emotional sense of risk and reward is broken, and i feel bad at how sad it is to live as a person that avoids asking for help or addressing issues because there’s a chance that it might become worse, and that clings to the misery of the present because it’s a known quantity. i’ve got one of my last sessions with my amazing therapist tomorrow, so i think that’s what I’d like to talk about.

1.5.15

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

fairly unquiet day, very hard to keep my mind in the right worldtrack.

spent a lot of today poking around discussion forums for reed alumni and students, and reading 1,200+ comments about trigger warnings and the proper use thereof. reedies: ideas rich, empathy poor. including the students. it was a little bewildering, and made me glad to be of that tribe and also away from the campfire. like how a lot of people feel about their families.

it was the first day back at work with kids in the building. there’s something very humbling about feeling jealous of a ten year old child because they got an ipad for christmas. third graders were losing their shit at the whole concept of two truths and a lie, though. they have no idea what’s coming to them when they hit never have i ever territory.

when i got home, i couldn’t focus on anything to do except manically sort out books that I’d like to get rid of/sell back to powell’s. It feels like time to winnow down. i kind of wish I had spent my time reading though.

i cheated last night and had a cigarette & spent the day wheezing. on the other hand, i ran out of the nicotine gum and haven’t missed it, so maybe its a wash.

wild bunch

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I tossed and turned all night watching the new L-series episodes of QI, so I didn’t wake up until very late in the day.

I got some dinner with R, and we caught up and talked about being stressed out about returning to work. I talked about how in high school, I spent the entire 45 minute drive between home and school being nauseous. I was never sure that I would have the energy to switch to being the home version of myself (or school version of myself). Even though I would get comfortable again after a day or so, it always seemed like it was going to be so much effort. Later, I found out that what I was doing was code-switching, and it gave me a lot of empathy for people that have more of a difference between their compartments, and that have to do it more often.

I went to a Meetup group with J, a film club that was watching the movie The Wild Bunch. I’d never seen it before, and while it was not my favorite kind of movie, it was a rich text for discussion, and it was nice to have the intellectual experience of taking in a work of art together and picking it apart. It was also very cool to spot the source of so many callbacks and references that had gone over my head before.

Ended my night chatting with a cute OKC boy, I’ve got a good feeling about this one. Hope springs eternal. It’s Chinatown.

bagby

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I fifth wheeled with two of my friends and their new people to Bagby hot springs south east of Portland. It was beautiful out, grey and greens, harshness and mystery.

My lungs handled the hike fairly well. I was disappointed that the exercise triggered my asthma, but on the other hand, I kept a faster pace than I might have else. I’m very impatient for my new lungs.

Frozen tree sap
Frozen tree sap on the trail to Bagby Hot Springs

There were a couple of people being slow getting out of the tub that we wanted to use. They seemed like people that moved around a lot, and maybe didn’t have a settled place that they live. Collectively, once they had left we all called them “hippies” and I felt like an Eisenhower Republican and super uncool. I try to only care about people breaking “the rules” (a concept that does not itself seem that useful) when it is harming myself or others, and it left a bad taste in my mouth to talk shit about people that were a little obnoxious but otherwise were nothing but nice to me.

The last time I went to Bagby, I greatly enjoyed being naked in public, but the chemistry of this group was different.

On the walk back down to the trailhead and our car, I listened to Frank Zappa’s “Montana” from Over-Nite Sensation. It was pretty special to rock out to that as dusk overtook the forest. I played the track later in the car, but I think it was too weird.

The drive back to Portland took a while because the fog was thick on the ground, and road conditions called for slower speeds. We went out to eat once we got back to the city, but it was one of those situations where prolonged exposure to the same people leads to everyone hating each other, and so the meal was quiet.

Sometimes the known is an acceptable substitute for the good. At least in food.

I ended up falling asleep for an obnoxiously useless amount of time, waking up around midnight. I worked up my courage to arrange a hookup with someone from the internet, but they flaked out and I got irritated because I think of myself as the party that’s entitled to the flakiness, and this was an inversion of the natural order of things.

a friday

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Books

I caught up on my book cataloguing today. I’ve kept records of what I read going back to 2009, and they’re pretty accurate. I read a hellish amount of books in 2012 (mostly because of a stretch of unemployment), and I thought that 2013 would be a real step down. I was surprised to find that I read a gentlemanly 17 books, and with such great classics as Lolita, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on the list, it was a completely respectable year.