The Last Seven Months...

Needless to say, Joysa hates me, and to be honest I dont blame her but we love who we love. I was never big on faking emotion and now that I am firmly entrenched in middle age I feel t hat with the clock winding down I will only worry about things I can control. I didnt see a future with Joysa and in the end, at age 23, she will barely remember who I am soon enough.

I therefore began 2012 on the right foot, involved only with Lovely. In February we ran into some major difficulties and although we managed to endire, April brought even worse problems. From April until the first week in July we went through one major issue after another. Finally, on July 6th, we called it quits. Usually Im 100% open about everything in this Blog but just as when Rizza and I imploded, it sometimes takes a bit of time before I can manage to discuss it with at least a modicum of objectivity. At this point it is still too raw of a wound to put it on display.

On July 8th, probably due to stress from the breakup, one of the metal fragments in my sinuses-bullet fragments-caused me a nasty bout of Sepsis. Without tossing about technical labels, there are two forms. I had the form presenting as super low body temp and dangerously low blood pressure. To make a long story short I nearly died twice and was hospitalised in Butuan until July 22nd.

Lovely had been spirited away by her parents on a week holiday as they tried all sorts of things to get her to stop crying over the breakup. Returning home July 9th she thought I had simply walked away from it all without a word. It wasnt until July 26th that she was able to discover what had happened but by then I had already flown to New York City, my current location, in hopes of getting some first class medical care, my concern being my liver due to Hepatitis C.

Im back at my friend's flat, finishing up my tests, just about back to full strength. I have had to switch from morphine back to methadone, 220 mgs, but I often prefer methadone anyway.

Lovely and I talj online every couple of days now and things are in stasis until I return to Mindanao, though Im not thinking that far ahead at the moment.

 

Sorry you're going through all of that. I can't imagine the amount of stress you must be under.... I think the travel and change in your surroundings could help some.

Also for my relationship with my girlfriend, we seem to get along much better because one of us is gone for a week or so every month. She is now in San Francisco helping care for her sister's baby for the week while her sister, who works for a large financial firm, is going without sleep to prepare quarterly corporate financial reports at the last minute.

Taking up new hobbies seems to help reduce my own stress. I am here in Washington, near the Canadian border, spending much of my spare time rebuilding a vintage motorcycle that had been sitting in somebody's barn for years.

On Hep-C, there is some anecdotal evidence that drinking coffee can slow the progression of the disease. For example:
Freedman et al. Coffee intake is associated with lower rates of liver disease progression in chronic hepatitis C. Hepatology, 2009; DOI: 10.1002/hep.23162

I was exposed about 20 years ago. There was very little harm-reduction information available back then. I never have had any of the acute or chronic symptoms so hopefully I got lucky. But since then, I have craved coffee.

 

Wow Socko, how come you never told me you were positive as well? Yeah I also never had any symptoms but never the less am in Stage V. I contracted it through IV after one of my two wounds in 1984, we used to re-use IVs in the army, lucky HIV was almost unheard of in Israel then. I never injected myself, always had others inject me and always clean syringe, we had them for free from our medical kits.

On relationships...iis good to have a bit of time apart for sure, and in my own case seems to be doing the trick, see what happens with Lovely.

 

Hep C must be one of the easiest diseases to ignore and be in denial over. So for several reasons, and I will guess that you have lost count of the number of times you have heard them... among them being the stigma of how I was exposed at my young age nearly 20 years ago. (Maybe I am one of the lucky 20 - 35% or so who self-cures after the initial exposure, etc, etc....Ignore it and maybe it will go away.). That and there is virtually no reason to worry about infecting others.

After typing that, I have thought about it and recalled that I have recently developed 2 possible symptoms -- I can not handle much alcohol (more than 1 or 2 servings) without feeling poisoned and having a severe migraine intensity headache. That and several months ago for a few weeks, I could smell ammonia (another possible sign of liver damage) coming out of my skin. I'm still not going to start worrying because there are other explanations for those observations.