I'm in a funk of epic proportions. Send me anything in any way. I don't know what's wrong today but I am down, down, down. I desperately need to hear from everybody. My life is in the balance. I want to hear from those who read my blog. I need to know I'm more than a curiosity. I really miss the world I used to inhabit tracyboettcher@gmail.Com
Monday, April 29, 2013
Resistance may be futile
A certain realization........ I find myself in observation of my environment, detached and clinical at times, emotional and longing most frequently, still hobbled by my loss of invincibility. I watch Amy playing with Alex and Isaac, my heart heavy, tears close by, ever aware that my participation is limited to my imagination, my memory. Alex may remember when I walked, Isaac knows me as a wheelchair captain and the new baby may never know me at all. Through all my trials, my new realizations, my small victories and my annoying digressions runs a thread of despair I cannot break. The fabric of my being has been rended beyond repair. I try to assemble a solution with the remnants, laboring endlessly, tirelessly, continuously battling an invisible storm, continuously pushed back. Sometimes I ask myself if it would be better to simply give up. Maybe I need to accept my fate, undig my heels and ride the train to my destiny. Maybe I need to quit looking down at my path and begin to take in my surroundings before they fly by. If fighting tooth and nail does no more than leave me toothless and nailless, why do I continue? If I'm to be sad no matter what I do, I may as well smell the roses along the way and hope that my final destination is far, far down the road.
Saturday, April 27, 2013
Back to business
Back to business. Don't fret, my junkets into the land of make believe are just the....... Junkets. The two old posts simply represent the fact that I have figured out how to retrieve them from the archives, copy and paste with my eyegaze alone. We are investigating the merits of investing in a Tobii device that would allow me to interface with my PC using the eyegaze technology available today. My very expensive eyegaze computer, running Windows 7, has a slow processor and is not equipped with a competitive word processing program. Presently, I have no spell check, no thesaurus, no ability to paragraph, indent, change fonts, change size or any other feature provided by any decent program. If I'm to get serious about writing, I need the proper tools. My Cyberpower PC has everything I need except for the eyegaze component. I can buy it for $4,000 or try to get it through a program by providing a business plan showing how I can earn money with such an investment. It may be possible for me to use my Chief Architect program with the eyegaze attachment. At the very least, I could begin writing in earnest. With Microsoft Word, I could write more involved literature with correct structure. This would be a far cry from the conglomerations I have been churning out for the last 21 months. In other news, Wednesday was the day I met the guys from Permobil who dropped by to demonstrate and let me try out their new state of the art head control device for my chair. With this head array, I can drive, accelerate, turn, raise my chair, recline, tilt, raise and lower my legs and honk my pathetic horn, all with slight, proper movements of my noggin. The headrest is equipped with proximity switches so that I can activate them without even making contact. My personal unit will be installed in about two weeks. Since I presently have difficulty driving with my depleted right hand, two weeks time cannot go by fast enough.
Friday, April 26, 2013
I just reread this and now question my sanity
Sunday, August 21, 2011
A series of disturbances, funny in retrospect.........
Before I get into this,
today I received an article proclaiming a breakthrough in the
understanding of a source of ALS. I will research all available
information and get back to you.
Some
lines of thought point to trauma as a possible cause, or at least a
contributor to the onset of ALS. With that in mind, lets explore my
past, focusing on those incidents I can recall involving my cranium or
any other body part involved in mayhem. I need it to be known that not
once have I ever lost consciousness, broken a bone (that I know of) or
spent the night in a hospital. I've taken only two ambulance rides,
separated by 35 years, but never visited an ICU. I have never been
declared dead and have never been given mouth to mouth after near
drowning. I have, however, cracked my skull numerous times and have the
remnant scars of dozens of stitches and staples. Let me explain. Don't
fear the following- none of these atrocities proved to be fatal. I have
never awakened in a morgue.
In somewhat reverse chronological order, as I recall:
Several years ago, maybe 2006, we were building a house. Wait. No. I am not writing a book here. I refuse to frame these incidents. If I ever write a book, you can buy it and read it, complete with fleshed out scenarios, scene description and body. For this, I strip it down to skeletal. So, I stepped across the corner of a stairwell, containing no stairs yet, but for some reason, my left foot stepped into air, I spun clockwise and dropped horizontal, back first into the hole. A 16' 2x4 spanned the opening where my head was to travel, so I broke it in half (with my head) on the way down, forcing my chin to my chest long enough to avoid bouncing it as I lit on the concrete 12 feet below. My landing was basically flat on my back, with my hammer under my right hip, which proved to give me the most lingering problem with this mishap. I bled like a stuck pig from my lacerated scalp and for a minute, after I filled my flat lungs with air, I thought I broke my back. As is me, I put all my body parts through the ringer to see if they worked. Hurt like hell, yes. Broken, no. Jim, (best working partner and friend in the world), looked down and asked if I was okay. I said something stupid and he called 911. An ambulance came, the EMT's checked my blood pressure, pretended to listen to my assessment of my condition and gurneyed me into the van, where they checked my blood pressure a second time because the first test was normal, and it had to be wrong. I tried to explain that this was not, in fact, my first rodeo. Again they pretended to listen as they duct taped me to a sheet of plywood. The rest of this is boring, so I go to another fiasco of common sense and caution.
I'm on a roof, some 14' off the ground, I'm cutting excess roof sheathing from a gable end while Jim is behind me, nailing. The saw is in my left hand and I am sawing down from the ridge. My weight shifts off center of the sheet I am sawing from and on (figure that one out) and the inside of the sheet rips free of the nails, catapulting me, teeter totter fashion, off the roof. Head first. Clutching the saw in my left hand, traveling feet in the air and lighting as follows- first, my outstretched left arm pile drives the saw into the ground. My arm bends upon impact and the right side of my forehead hits a stack of plywood, skidding the top sheet off and wrecking my glasses, followed by my lazy right hand and then my body, ending up in a heap. For some reason, I jumped up immediately without a second thought and bound up the ladder onto the roof, where I found Jim nailing away. He thought I just climbed down. I was somewhat pissed at the fact that nobody saw me go down. Kind of like the tree in the forest thing . Follow? I finished out the day and had a sore shoulder for a week. No doctor visit seemed necessary.
So, we're finishing up the day and rolling up extension cords and the like when I grab a cord that runs to a second floor window opening, but I find it's snagged on something and won't release. Being who I am, I tug and whip and tug to no avail, but will be damned if I'm going to put a ladder up just to unhook it so I give it one giant heave ho and the cord rockets from the opening and the end cracks me over my right eye at 100 mph, raising a knot the size of a small turtle. Went home after that..........
A ways back I was sliding joists out to build a floor system and the joist I was standing on gave way, sending me head first into the basement. I was very happy the concrete had yet to be poured when my head impacted 8 inches of pea gravel. I'll never forget that sound....
Way back I was turning up a jack post with a screwdriver when the bastard screwdriver broke and I punched myself in the face as hard as I could (you can't make this stuff up).
In '85 I dropped a circular saw blade 1-1/4" into the top of my thigh, missing the femoral artery by less than an inch. I needed some 40 stitches and a 16" long drain tube (I took both stitches and tube out a couple weeks later in the shower)- missed a canoe trip and 3 days work.
This one? At home. I am safe nowhere. Our bedroom is on the third floor. The stairs down follow a U shape. Find a door at the bottom of stairs. Find me, in a moment of anti-clarity, deciding to jump into the hallway- from the landing above. I crack my head on the header over the door and project myself into my daughter's bedroom across the hall- on the fly. I only tried this once.
Still in the house: So I'm taking a shower, you see, and the old tub had a nasty bolt or screw protruding from the drain, and while I'm washing my hair, I slip. My right heel is punctured by the screw and as a reflex reaction I propel myself upward, only cockeyed, and my propulsion shoots me out of the shower backwards, the shower curtain acts as a body condom and envelops me as I crack my head on the vanity and yell bloody murder. Amy comes running and finds me, naked of course, flooding the bathroom and hugging the toilet. She begins to laugh so hard she actually snorts.........................
As a kid, (chronology just left the building) I had more than my fair share of "neck up" injury. Could be I picked up ALS in grade school; I am a slow learner, ya know. When I was 5 or 6, I clothes lined myself on electrified barbed wire while running through a barnyard, dashing into the farmhouse bleeding from the neck and scaring the wits out of my mom and her friends; later that summer I found myself playing in a 100 year old corn crib (in the same barnyard)- I would run up the slope of corn, turn and slide down. For some reason that escapes me, I decided to turn and jump instead, blasting my head against a huge wooden cross member, knocking me (more) senseless. I guess I forgot that day when I lit from my stairwell landing years later. As I stated, I'm a slow learner. I guess some things I never learn.
In 8th grade I was on the playground flipping a football around with my friends, eventually going out for passes, catching most, when with a full head of steam and my head turned right to look for the ball I clocked an aluminum light pole full on, raising a bump over my left eye so tall I could see it as I stumbled to the office. Realize, in those days nobody called a doctor, as was the case here.
Along with these small episodes could be added other, lesser injuries, such as 4 stitches in my head to close a wound caused by a swung belt terminating in one of those giant 70's buckles during a fight when I was 14, or burying a utility knife into my thumb and having to tug to remove such, or smashing my thumb so bad I heated a needle and plunged it into and through my thumbnail only to get IT stuck as the needle cooled down, or when I rolled a circular saw over my right thumb deep enough to expose the tendon below, or driving a microwave into a cabinet and nearly de-gloving my middle finger, or bouncing my head in my garage trying roller skates for the first time, a similar fate with ice skates to follow.....
You get a pattern here? If ALS can be encouraged by trauma, I've done my best to bring it upon myself. If not, the fact I've survived all these years leads me to believe the disease may hobble me, but will not put me down. I figure Dr. Death has tried his best, and failed. I remain a hard nut to crack, and, more importantly, impossible to extinguish. I'll be pecking till the cows come home.
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A blast from the past!
Friday, November 11, 2011
What have we here?
The
advantage of writing a blog over writing a book is that with a book,
you can skim ahead to see if the story remains interesting, and if not,
you can discard it and find something else, while when reading a blog
you're at the mercy of the writer- in this case, me- continually hopeful
that the next post will hold your interest. Oh, by the way, the
aforementioned advantage is mine. I see things from my perspective, I
have no idea what yours is.
Look
on the bright side; the mystery remains so. Given my penchant for
conversational schizophrenia, you don't know what you're going to get
each day. Sometimes I'm depressing, others clinical, often clever
(mostly feeble attempts), sarcastic, reflective, on occasion I'm
radically metaphorical (likely loosing a bunch of you), combative,
determined, pissed, thankful, sad, scared, but mostly and generally you
will find, threaded through my posts a dash of latent insanity, keeping
me from going crazy. This concoction, well structured, might make for
good reading. I wouldn't know. Generally I just wing it. I jot down
whatever infests my brain at the time. Imagine what you'd find on these
pages if I had Alzheimer's? If that were the case, you'd probably read
the same post over, and over, and over.......I'd be interested to see
how many page views would show up before readers figured it out. Don't
worry, if I get Alzheimer's I'll let you know, again and again and
again.
Do
you realize I've spent a couple hundred words and several minutes of
your time writing about absolutely nothing but writing? Can you see how I
reel you in with a bare hook, only to leave you dangling and spinning,
gasping for content while I drone on about ................about what?
You chased the line, found no bait yet swallowed anyway, reading on to
at least this point, where there is no point, really. If you're now
concluding this to be a waste of your time, it's too late for you.
You've been unceremoniously dumped into the fish bucket of lost minutes,
along with all the other "hook, line and sinker" tuna, unable to escape
the dregs of a post that reeks of literature masturbation. I mean this
in the most whimsical of ways. Really.
See
how easy it is for me to draw a lasso and pull in the unsuspecting,
tightening the noose to force cloister, to drag the bunch through my
self aggrandizing drivel, holding on to all, even as far in descention
as we find ourselves. Me, running the show of "show you nothing" the
class of "teach you nothing", the art of writing without writing. This
circus of diatribe without content is brought to you without commercial
interruption and completely devoid of any common sense. It has been an
exercise in fun and silliness.
If
you're still reading, I thank you for your perseverance against all
odds of ridiculousness. Sometimes I need to get off of the subject of
ALS, of my life, of anything material, and play word games that often
head downhill into mumbo jumbo. This post proves my earlier assertion
that as in Forrest Gump, paraphrased- posts are like a box of
chocolates, you never know what you're going to get. Such is the
mystery.
2 comments:
Slow day Tracy? hahaha Your funny. I think writing would be good if you had Alzheimers. You could write down everything you do everyday to remind yourself who you are and what you did. All the while enthralling the masses. OK, apparently I read the whole post and feel sillier for having done so. Thanks for brightening my day! We will see you guys tonight!Reply22Delete23
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