Ch-ch-ch-changes

I’ve been in more extended pain for the last three months than I can remember in any of my 45 years. I feel about 100 most days. Walking hurts. Sitting hurts. Standing hurts. And that’s with more medication than I’ve ever taken in my life. And I’m walking with a cane.

Nothing helps.

There’s always a background pain. It’s usually dull, but sometimes throbs. And some times it feels like someone is putting an ice pick under my kneecap. Or maybe has stuck an electrode deep inside my leg and turned up the voltage to maximum power.

It’s white-hot, like being struck by lightning in one tiny random spot, and it tears through my entire body in an instant. I feel it for hours. Every step hurts, and I don’t know which will trigger the lightning again.

When it hits, I double over and grab on to my cane for dear life. I don’t want to end up on the floor. If anyone’s around, they’ll ask me if I’m okay in that sort of “did you just have a heart attack” voice. I have to reassure them that I’m fine so they don’t call 911 and really complicate my day.

It happened today when I was with my sister, who was shopping for shoes. I went to stand up, but ended up doubling over, instead. I must have made a noise, because the woman facing me asked if I was okay in a vaguely European accent. I told that I was. I just had a problem with my hip.

“Apparently so” was her cool reply. I had scared her children, I’m afraid.

I’ve seen five doctors, had 3 MRI’s, an EMG, a nerve conductivity test and x-rays. I found out I had a pinched nerve in my back and had a cortisone injection into a bulging disk in my spine. (I don’t know if it hurt or not: they put me all the way under for that. I had a nice buzz for a day or so from the anesthesia, though.)

The real culprit is my hip. I have early arthritis and torn cartilage. I don’t know what causes arthritis or how I tore the cartilage. I only know that it hurts all the time and sometimes more than others.

I’m tired of it. Tired of walking with a cane. Tired of reassuring people that I’m not having a heart attack when what I really want to do it let out a primal scream. Tired of the lightning turning me into a feeble old man.

I’m tired of doctors’ offices, out-patient surgical hospitals, radiology clinics and blood work. I’m tired of being poked, prodded, x-rayed and scanned. I’m tired of the pharmaceutical regime. Of staring at the clock, waiting for it to be time to take more meds so I might get a modicum of relief.

I start physical therapy later this week, and I’ll see how that goes. I’m giving it a month to help. I see the orthopedic surgeon in about a month, and if I’m not significantly better, we’re going to talk about the “nuclear option”: surgery. I more or less dismissed that as a possibility when I saw him a couple of weeks ago, but it's on the table now and a real possibility, and I want more details.

While I may seem to be have unrealistic expectations about physical therapy, I have some very real time constraints. My health insurance is up for renewal, and I have no idea what my coverage will be July 1 and won’t know until late May. The whispers in the breeze say get ready to pay more for less.

I’ve been lucky to hold onto a plan that the insurer no longer offers to new customers but has renewed for several years. The wind tells me it’s going to change, and, if I’m going to have surgery, I need to do it now while I can still afford it.

Also, July is when work heats up as we prepare for our annual financial audit. I don't want to take any great amount of time off between July and September.

Besides, I’m tired of the pain and want it to go away. It’s over-riding my irrational fear of needles and doctors and hospitals. When I learned that I would have to have dye injected directly into my hip joint for the last MRI, my blood pressure jumped 20 points. In reality, it was uncomfortable for a few seconds a couple of times. It wasn't nearly as bad as I'd built it up in my mind to be.

The MRI wasn’t too bad, either. I watched Reba McEntyre and Alec Baldwin at Carnegie Hall doing a concert presentation of South Pacific on the nifty goggles they provided. (I provided the DVD. I doubt any radiology clinic in the world would have it.)

I get so worked up about this kind of stuff that I don’t even want to consider something like surgery, but I’ve never lived with this kind of constant, continual pain. I’m tired. I’m worn out. And the wind is changing.

So am I.

Dammit, Janet

Ann Coulter moaned the other day at the CPAC convention that the GOP didn’t have the support of more “gays” without ever realizing how using “gay” as a noun objectifies and demeans the people she’s talking about.

I am not a “gay”. I am man who happens to be gay. One of the least important things about me.

I am a man, dammit.

I’m pig-headed, obstinate and mouthy. I’m compassionate, loving and caring. I work hard. I give an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, and then some. (Even though I don’t get paid what I’m worth.)

I stayed up all night talking to my father who was unconscious, writing when I knew he was going to die the next day. We were going to have to cut off life support, and I knew that. I wanted to be there with him for a while, alone.

I cut off life support for my first husband because I knew that was what he wanted. I didn’t for my last one, because he was very clear about his wishes.

I have a mother who needs me, and I need her, too. I have a brand new baby nephew who’s named after me.

I am more than the sum of my sexual orientation. That determines who I do or do not take to bed. And that’s no one’s business unless I want to make it known. And I don’t talk about that any more than any straight person I know.

Or should I say “a straight”.

You’ll never hear someone say “a straight”. Unless in the context of “a straight man” or “a straight woman”. But you’ll hear “a gay” or “gays” pretty regularly. Not “a gay man” or “gay woman” or “a gay person”.

There are no “gays”. There are gay people. Using the word as a noun is demeaning and objecitifying. It’s perjoratie, and it hurts. If I live to be 100 (and I hope I don’t—I believe that God is merciful and will take me home before then), I never want to hear that word used as a noun again.

What Ann Coulter didn’t get is that she was offending the very people she was trying to appeal to. Wonder why there aren’t more “gays” in the GOP? Because they’re people first and a sexual orientiation on down the list. It’s not the most important thing about them.

And they don’t vote with their dicks.

Except when they do. But that involves hanging chads and other messy things that I won’t go into. Suffice the say, one would need a tissue, hanky or hand-towel to clean up after them, depending on the level of patriotism.

At the end of the day, I am you. You are me. We’re human beings. I’m a human being with a penis. I happen to want to go to bed at night with another human being that also has a penis. What happens when I close the bedroom door and pull the covers up is none of anyone’s business but mine and the other penis’s.

Gay does not define me, and it never will.

Until the politicos realize that people like me are people like them, they’ll never get it.

When Daddy was in the hospital and running out of steam rapidly, Mama said that she didn’t know what to do. I told her that when the time came, she would know what to do. That it would be the hardest thing she ever did in her life, but also the easiest. That I knew because I’d already done it.

The situation had required it, and I manned up to it. That defines me more than anything else: I’m a man taking responsibility because someone has to, and I’d just as soon it be me as someone else who might or might not care as much about the consequences of the actions. That is who I am.

I am gay. I’m a gay man. But I’m not “a gay.” I’ve never even met one, much less been one.

Until right-wing whack jobs like Ann Coulter understand that, they’ll never have broad support from gay and lesbian people. And until the radical right quits telling me with everything it does that I’m less equal than other people, I don’t give a rat’s ass about anything else they have to say.

When the GOP is ready to talk about that, they can call me.

I’m a man, dammit, Janet.

One of my Favorites (Today)

I spend my days working and seeing doctors. I spend my nights missing Shannon. I never thought that I would miss going to the hospital to see someone, but at least I could see him. Now, I can only remember what he looked like or how he smelled. Or that cackle of a laugh, like a chicken laying an egg. A rooster laying an egg.

It ended too soon, but we almost had it all.

We did. Just not long enough.

Snow Day

Snow rarely falls in Austin, and accumulates even less frequently. The weathermen had all been talking about the possibility of it with increasing giddiness. They were like schoolboys anticipating getting to second base on prom night. What they got was a home run.

I got up to pee a little before five this morning, and pulled up the local news online before I went back to bed only to find that I could stay up: it had snowed and everything to speak of was shut down or not opening. Including my office.

I peeked out behind the patio curtains and blinds, and everything was covered. When I turned on the TV, I saw freeways and flyovers coated with snow except for the small amount that traffic had compacted into ice.

Lucy wanted to go out, but it turns out my youngest cat is afraid of snow. She’s never seen it before. She ran outside the second I opened the door, ran to the edge of the snow, smelled it and came bolting back inside.

I would call her a fraidy cat, but I didn’t venture out until everything started melting.

I was diagnosed with early arthritis and cartilage tears the day before, so I wasn't taking any chances on getting out with the obligatory cane. (Ironically, the symptoms are mostly in my knee. I can't explain that, but the orthopedist wasn't that surprised.) And I didn't want to slip on an ice patch and complicate things.

And I certainly didn't want to dodge all the stupid drivers who don't know how to drive on that stuff. I grew up doing that and learned early on that testosterone should not be a part of driving, whether on snow and ice or on dry pavement.

These days, I have to worry about people on cell phones on the snow and ice.

I ain't getting younger, but I would like to get older.

Ghost Story

For years I worried about what would happen to Shannon if anything happened to me. He barely made it through a few of my visits to Tennessee without drifting into psychosis, so my being gone forever would have pushed him over the edge, almost certainly. And not only would he have been crazy, he would have lost his major income stream: me.

We never had "my money" or "his money"; it was always "our money". But without mine in the mix, he would have been hard-pressed to make ends meet. He was the beneficiary of multiple life insurance policies, but that money would have run out.

I didn't know if he would have been able to cope well enough to keep functioning on any level.

I don't have to worry about any of that now, but the question still haunts me because of something that happened years ago: I saw an old man who looked like an older version of Shannon standing on a traffic island asking for money. I keep wondering if that was something he might have been spared from.

I don't want to say that I saved him: we saved each other. But I was the one thing he could count on. That I would be there day after day, whether he was sane or not, in good health or not. I don't know that he had that assurance from anyone else or that anyone else understood him enough to care on that level.

I wonder what happened to that old man. I look for him, but I've never seen him since. What I remember most about that chance encounter is his shoes: from a distance, they looked just like the ones Shannon wore. Up close, they were tattered. Shannon's were never tattered.

Those shoes haunt me more than anything.

That, and the image seared in my brain of someone who looked like a possible picture of the future for the man I loved.

I always knew that Shannon would probably die before me because of the age difference (14 year), but I never expected him to do so this soon. His death devastated me, but I can take a small (very small) comfort in knowing that he was never reduced to begging for money on a traffic island.

It wasn't as large a leap as some might think.

In the end, I took care of him, as I always had. I advocated for his best interests when he couldn't do so for himself, both in life and death.

Still, that old man haunts me.