Kurt

He's tall, but he hopes to achieve more in life than just that.

Steroid Psychosis Blues

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It has been over three months since I stopped taking an extremely potent and addictive steroid called Prednisone. I had been taking it for over a year in an attempt to control my graft versus host disease, which I contracted as a side-effect result from my bone marrow transplant.

As I have detailed in several posts in the past, prednisone, while being a very amazing drug that may have saved my life, comes with a cost…and that cost is many dangerous side-effects.

One of its most annoying side-effects are severe mood swings. When I woke up each morning, I always had to wonder who I would be that day. Would I be one who was effusively overcome with happiness and joy? Or, would I be one who was trapped in a deep, dark depression? Or, would I be a paranoid, hypersensitive mad–as in angry at any little slight–man?

It was an interesting time in my life, to say the least.

But now that I am three-months removed from that oscillating mental trip, I have been reading through the articles that I wrote during that time and I am not all pleased with what I am finding: The articles are either overly sentimental or overly psychotic.

Nevertheless, the articles represent my mindset at the time they were written…a mindset struggling with what is medically termed as “steroid psychosis.”

Today is the first day of spring and I must admit that, in spirit of the season, I have done a little spring cleaning on this site by throwing out a few of the more embarrassing and ridiculous articles; however, I left most of the ones that I feel best represent how my mind processed information, as psychotic as it may have been, while strung out on the evil mind warping drug called prednisone.

From Poem Man – Petey Peter the Garlic Eater

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Petey Petey the Garlic Eater
Petey Petey the Garlic Eater

My review of W. Somerset Maugham’s masterpiece OF HUMAN BONDAGE reminded me of “Petey Peter the Garlic Eater,” a poem I wrote and which was included in POEM MAN, a children’s poetry book my family and I published back at the turn of the century.

Maugham’s classic novel and my less-than-classic poem both discuss, in their one ways, the important matter of addiction and dependency. In Maugham’s story, we find that, because of the protagonist Philip Carey’s love for Mildred, a love so strong she becomes his addiction (his bondage), he nearly destroys his own life. In my poem, we find that both Peter Peter’s excessive love for pumpkins and Petey Peter’s excessive love for garlic, addictions in their own rights, destroy, if not their own lives, then the lives of those around them.

Petey Peter the Garlic Eater

Petey Peter the garlic eater
Sat right behind me in class.
And if he wasn’t busy boisterously burpin’,
He was busy passin’ poisonous gas.

I couldn’t concentrate on my studies
Because of the stink he emitted.
As a result I failed all my classes.
As for graduation, I wasn’t permitted.

Now, if you’re a lover of riddles and rhymes
You might just remember his name.
Cuz his great, great, great, great, great, grandfather
Is famous for a name just the same.

But their names are their only sim’larities,
For they both liked to eat different treats.
Old Peter Peter preferred to eat pumpkins,
While it was garlic young Petey did eat.

Though I can’t imagine eating pumpkins
Unless smashed and baked as sweet pies.
But I do wish young Petey had eaten them,
Cuz his garlic breath always drew flies.

But pumpkins, too, can bring trouble.
It’s cuz of pumpkins old Peter lost a wife.
I guess if you do too much of anything
There’s a chance it could ruin a life.

It’s cuz of Petey’s stinky garlic breath
That every single class I did fail.
And it’s cuz I dropped out of grade school
That I eventually landed in jail.

But as for Petey, he invented a breath mint.
And it earned him a million or two.
And he married the great, great, great, great, great, granddaughter
Of the old lady who lived in the shoe.

In Honor of the End of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Policy

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An offering from POEMS FROM THE RIVER, a collection of my poetry that will soon be released.

~~~~

We War

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things.
The decayed and degraded state
of moral and patriotic feeling
which thinks that nothing is worth war
is much worse.

The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight,
nothing which is more important than his own personal safety,
is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free
unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

~ John Stuart Mills

We war, don’t we
We warriors
We worriers for the world

You, Red Death Warrior
You mobilized
You sanitized
Purified to perform ancient rights of battles
And to stake patriot claims of fragile freedom
In hearts alien, hearts eternal,
Hearts ignorant of all you know

You know
You know

You know, noble warrior,
While you wander through the heaven of Hell
Raking the shit scattered pieces
Of bitter and broken promises
Into neat, heaping piles made ready
For the devil’s dusty full bin,
I, Warrior of The Forgotten Peace
Arming my chair of flaccid command
Long for the glory fight that I never had
The fight I will never know
The fight you will never forget

You know
You know

~~~~

I would like to congratulate and thank all who courageously sacrificed their identities, and in some cases, their lives, in order to proudly and honorably serve their nation while Don’t Ask Don’t Tell was national policy.

September 20, 2011

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September 20, 2011, will be a historic day for our country, and a special day for me.

It will be historic because the United States’s discriminatory Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy will finally be put to rest.

And it will be special to me because I hope to release my novel THE SEA TRIALS OF AN UNFORTUNATE SAILOR on that day in honor of the historic event.

But, like the cup half empty kind of guy that I am, I won’t believe either will happen until I actually see them happening…

But I’m hopeful it will all come true.

I can hardly believe that DADT is finally coming to end because it has been a powerful presence in my life since my decision in 1994 to work outside my career field of telecommunications, and outside of my comfort zone, to become a navy Equal Opportunity Advisor. My duties as an EOA required me to become thoroughly familiar with the DADT policy and to facilitate seminars and focus groups regarding it at navy commands throughout the Western Pacific. A key element of my training was not to just remind sailors that they could not ask about someone’s sexual orientation, but also to make it very clear since it had become an issue in the military that, just because their values or stereotypes or perceptions or prejudgments motivates them to do so, doesn’t mean they can harass or abuse or murder someone who they perceive has a sexual orientation that is contrary to their beliefs. I use the word “perceive” because rarely do homosexuals violate DADT policy by telling others, especially others hostile to their lifestyle, about their sexual orientation. Consequently then, the most likely way a homophobic person can be motivated to act upon his or her (mostly his) homophobic tendency to want to harass or abuse or murder is by perceiving a service member to be a homosexual based upon the perceived homosexual’s behavior or personal characteristics. Facilitating the discussion of such a sensitive, and often combative, nature for three years was very challenging, yet very rewarding for me.

If I can hardly believe that DADT is finally coming to an end, I can only wonder how one feels who loves his or her country so much that he or she was willing to join the military knowing that the DADT policy required him or her to suppress his or her identity and sexual orientation in order to serve. (Normally, because I am a man and because I choose a male identity for myself (It’s a gender thing, you wouldn’t understand…probably.), I would not bother with all the “he or she” and “his or her” distraction; I would simply just write “he” or “his,” just as I would expect a female writer to just write “she” or “shis,” I mean, “sher,” I mean, “her,” but I feel in this situation, it is important for me to highlight and reiterate the fact, in an effort to remind everyone, that both men and women have chosen to make this enormous sacrifice for their country. Talk about Patriots. All you heterosexuals out there go ahead and try imagining what it would be like to not only not be allowed to tell others who you love, but also to not be allowed to completely express your love to the person whom you do love. Hard to imagine, isn’t it, since it’s our privilege to not have imagine such an absurd way of life?

And I can hardly believe that my novel is finally going to be released because it, too, has been a powerful presence in my life for nearly as long as DADT has been. Consequently, I find it hard to believe that in a few short days I will finally be able to call the project complete.

And I also can hardly believe that my novel is going to be released on September 20, 2011, since it is only a few short days away and, because of a few issues I am contending with, I still have yet to complete the publication review process with the publishing service I am using. So, at this point, September 20, 2011, is more like a target release date than a set release date. But we’ll see.

Regardless of whether my novel is actually published on September 20, 2011, or not, the date will always be special to me since it was DADT, or more specifically, since it was all the harassment and abuse and even murder that was inflicted on so many service members because of DADT, that provided the unfortunate impetus for why I wrote the novel to begin with.

No Sense, Whatsoever

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Yeah, it’s another one of those piss and vinegar kind of days…

I mean, Come! On!

Without even mentioning my slowly deteriorating and dying lungs, it’s bad enough that I have lost most of the feeling in my lower extremities due to the neuropathy that was brought on by all the chemo I got juiced up with to treat my leukemia, or that I lost most of my ability to smell or to taste to only our tight-lipped God knows why (my doctors sure as hell don’t know), but, because of the reemergence of GVHD due to my decrease in prednisone dosage, do I really need to now start losing my ability to see, as well?

Jesus Holy Christ!

And Mohammad, too!

(I’ll leave it up to you to determine whether those pleas are requests for spiritual intervention and/or guidance or just blasphemously rude exasperated expletives.)

And it’s even worse than bad enough that not only am I slowly losing my vision to a deeper and deeper foggy blur, but is it really necessary to have to lose it in such a painfully annoying way?

I mean, come on! That’s just a bit beyond the boundaries of good taste, as one of my favorite former clients used to often say whenever things got really fucked up on the job. (I’m sorry if me saying “fucked up” offends you, but I only say “fucked up” simply to keep this little aside paragraph in the spirit of things that one of my favorite former clients used to often say.)

But I mean, Holy frikkin’ Buddha, come on! Can someone just please give me a goddamn break?

When I wake in the morning, my eyes, especially my right eye, feel as if they have a big chunk of jagged glass in them. Seriously. I’m not exaggerating. Well…maybe a little. But still, it takes several hours until the pain associated with the stuck in the eye feeling diminishes enough to where it only feels like there is a modest chunk of rock in them instead of a big chunk of jagged glass. But regardless of how it’s described, it always feels like there is something stuck in them and it drives me absolutely frikkin’ crazy.

And then, I guess my eyes figured since they aren’t needed to see so much anymore, they decided to stop producing tears. My eyes are now constantly dry as a brittle bone. As a result, they burn so badly it feels as if they are being, not bathed in their natural tears, but rubbed down and cured with salt each time I blink.

And then, the slightest amount of light or breeze feels as if someone is thinly slicing into them with razor blades.

Pure torture.

Pisses me off and depresses me so because, all my life the sun was always my most bestest buddy, but now it is my worstest enemy. Not only can I not stand to even catch the slightest glimpse of the sun anymore because it is just too painful, but ever since my bone marrow transplant I can no longer risk getting sunburned because, at a minimum it could screw up my graft, and at a maximum it could kill me.

Sorry sun. I used to love you, but now I must hate you.

Let’s see….what else do I have on my docket of “poor me” gripes and whines for today?

Oh yeah, the medicine.

The docs have me on four different types of meds to treat my eye gvhd:

1. Artificial tear drops.
2. Drops that are supposed to help my eyes produce tears.
3. Steroid drops that are supposed to help suppress and slow down the damage done by the gvhd.
4. And an ointment that I squeeze into the eyes at night to help keep them moist while I sleep.

I could not survive without the artificial tears. I am constantly dropping them into my eyes. It’s a pain in the ass to have to do it, what seems like, every five minutes or so, but it’s a vital pain in the ass. And the ointment feels pretty good. But if the drops to help me produce tears and the steroids drops are working, I sure as hell can’t tell. The only thing I am sure that they do do is make my eyes burn and my vision blur even more than normal.

Here are a couple of examples of exactly how much my eyes burn: 1) My nose is always runny because of the burn. I couldn’t figure it out at first. I thought maybe I was coming down with another infection. Very annoying. 2) The burn from the dryness must really warm up the surface of my eyes because after I drop the artificial tears into them and then put my glasses back on, the lenses fog up a little around the eyes. Seriously.

I dread it when it comes time to have to put the pain producing medicine drops in my eyes. It takes a good hour afterwards before my eyes return to “normal.” Unfortunately, the supposed tear producing drops go in twice a day and the steroid drops go in three time a day; so, for about five hours out of each of my day, I get to self-inflict even more pain on my painful eyes.

Fun.

And you know what scares me the most from all this? It’s that I am having a harder and harder time doing what I love to do so much, and that is this, what I am doing right now.

Writing.

Working on the computer.

As I wrote this pathetically whiny draft on a Word document in a completely darkened room, I literally could not see anything much more on the screen than a glowing blurry mass of white characters. The characters are white because even the light, especially the light, from the computer is torture, so I have to invert the colors of my documents so that the page is black and the characters I type are white.

You should see how ridiculous I look right now as I prepare this…all squinty-eyed and mouth opened, glasses pushed up on top of my thin and disheveled-haired head, face pressed up as close as possible against the screen in a near-failing effort to read the crap that I’m typing.

Expect to see, which I am sure you do, see things with your eyes that is, and expect to see with them even more annoying typos in my junk than normal.

Yeah, it’s all getting really hard.

And stressful.

To be honest, I don’t know how much longer I can do it.

Write, that is.

It is just hurting too much.

And I suppose, as I continue to reduce prednisone dosage, it’s only going to get worse.

And if I can no longer write…

especially after all my life wanting to have the time and ability to be able to write full-time like I have been able to do since all the cancer fun started…

I don’t know what I will do.

But I do know I will be very sad until I figure it out.

But as of now, I do not have it figured out.

Because all my lack of senses…

makes no sense to me, whatsoever.

I mean, come on.

Exploiting the Crisis

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Rahm Emaneul, President Obama’s first Chief of Staff, was famously quoted as saying, “Never let a serious crisis go to waste” in response to the financial meltdown of 2008.

I imagine most would regard that quote disdainfully—a little too Machiavellian for their pleasant palates, perhaps.

But you know what? It is that exact mentality towards life in general that I have tried to apply to my life over the years, and I have been trying even harder ever since I was diagnosed with cancer and lung disease.

Because let’s face it, regardless whether your palate prefers pleasantries or not, the saying that we all know, every single one of us, that expresses so well about the horrible inevitables that life sometimes trips us up with is not “Flowers Happen!” or “Perfume Happens!” No, the saying we all know and have probably even declared from time to time in our sometimes horribly inevitable lives is:

“SHIT Happens!”

And do you want to know why we say it?

That is a rhetorical question because I know you all ready know.

We all know the answer because no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we study to get good grades, no matter how many hours we put in at work to make the money that we use to build our little nests for which to lay in our little eggs, no matter how well we plan and believe we are prepared for all the horrible inevitables we find in our paths, sometimes life can really stink.

And sometimes it can really, really stink. Sometimes life can be so smelly our noses cannot even become desensitized to it. Sometimes the smell is so bad it seems like it has become our permanent atmosphere. And in order to survive, we have to breathe it in no matter what, knowing that each breath we take is poison and will make us gag, or even kill us.

Now that is one stinky life, in my blurry view.

Fortunately for me, one of the side effects from all of the shit that has been happening in my life lately is that I lost both my sense of smell and taste.

Pretty handy when life smells so badly that you can almost taste it.

Shit happens. Yes it does.

Another less offensive way to those whose sensitivities are easily offended, and less poetic, too, of saying the same thing would be to say that life is nothing more than moving from one crisis to the next.

I guess how we manage life, then, is dependent upon how we define and deal with crises.

I am not sure how you define and deal with yours, but I define my crises as “inevitable opportunities” and, like I all ready more than alluded to with the title of this article, I deal with them by exploiting the hell out of them.

For instance, this blog is nothing but a pure and simple exploitation of the biggest crises that I have ever faced in my life.

I have been exploiting the hell out of my cancer and lung disease as much as I can. Hell, I tell you exactly as much in my cheeky, self-infatuated, hand-written blurb about me under my obviously intentionally depressing looking picture of me, used only to get you to feel sorrow for me so that you will be more compelled to read my exploitative writings.

But, there’s more to the exploitation than that.

I may sarcastically say I am exploiting my disabilities by trying to get you to feel sorry for me, but what I am really doing by all that nonsense is attempting to cope with my insecure feeling of trying step out in my new life as a writer and an author. It’s all pretty scary for me.

What I really mean when I say I am exploiting my disabilities is that I am trying as best I can to take advantage of the opportunities my crises have provided.

And the opportunities are many.

Do you think I really would have been able to pursue my life-long love of writing as aggressively as I am doing now had I not become stricken with cancer and then a chronic, debilitating lung disease?

I think not, so I am exploiting the hell out of my disabilities to blog and to facebook and to tweet and to finally publish the novel and poetry collection that I had never been able to finish before because life had always gotten in the way.

Do you think I really would have had the time to share each day and grow in partnership and friendship and love with my wife and children had I not become stricken with my diseases?

I think not, so I am exploiting the hell out of my disabilities by waking each day looking for new ways to love more and to be more loving and to continually grow as an individual.

I could give many other examples of how exploitative I am and how I am not letting my crises go to waste, but these will do for now.

And sure, sometimes the smell of the crises in my life are so overwhelming to me that I become numb and despondent from the smell, but those days, too, are nothing more than smaller crises that must be dealt with in the same manner as all the others: by realizing that no matter how hard I try to be positive and productive, sometimes it—my life—will just hurt too much and I am going to become deeply depressed and I am going to feel so sorry myself for being so unlucky and I am going to feel so resentful towards you for being so lucky and I am going to sit in my cocoon-like chair and let myself sink into a almost inescapable (so far) black hole of depression.

It happens. I get depressed. And I realize it will continue to happen to me from time to time until a cure is found for my lung disease.

But I accept that it will happen.

And when it does, I will deal with it by exploiting the hell out of it.

~~~~

Oh, by the way.

Now that I got you feeling sorry for me…

How about reading [download id=”7″] and letting me know what you think of it? 😉

Preparing for the End

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As you may or may not be aware, the end of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy will be officially and finally declared on September 20, 2011.

I honestly am very happy, and more than a little apprehensive, that its end is coming.

Additionally, in the spirit of my shtick, I am also not as honestly very happy, and a little more than apprehensive, that I have until September 20, 2011, to complete and release my novel THE SEA TRIALS OF AN UNFORTUNATE SAILOR.

Why do I have only until September 20, 2011, to complete and release my novel, I hear you ask.

Well, how else can I best exploit for my own bloated self-interests the pain, suffering, and humiliation of thousands of those who served their country during the course of the life of the humiliating DADT policy than by releasing on or about the date of DADT’s death so that I can best leverage the public’s increased interest in the issue a book with themes that attempt to illustrate the same pain, suffering, and humiliation that those who served their country during the course of the life of the humiliating DADT policy experienced, I answer.

Key word in all that bumbling nonsense in the last paragraph: “attempt.”

But fear and puke not, for those of you whose stomach I just curdled:

For I am known for setting and committing myself to firm and fixed deadlines and then easily and breezily rationalizing them away as their date flies by and the work remains woefully incomplete.

And I certainly do have much woeful work on the novel yet for me not to complete between now and September 20, 2011.

Until then, you can check out the first five chapters of THE SEA TRIALS OF AN UNFORTUNATE SAILOR at the “free reads” page, if you feel so inclined and/or charitable to my cause.

Rise Up!

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It’s the bottom of the ninth.

We’re down and in desperate need of a two-out rally.

So what are we waiting for? Should we go
for the win and swing for the fence?

Or should we just drop our bats,
grab our crotches,
and wait?

Just wait for someone else to come along and bat clean up?

Just wait for them to come along and clean up all of the shit
our silence has created?

Should we wait?

Just wait for the president and the congress and the
governors and every other sleazy politician to knock
the dirt out of their spikes and lead the rally?

Or should we, instead, wait for Wall Street and the
chambers of commerce and the boards of directors
and the unions and even the goddamn Junior Achievers
to stop sucking each other off and let them lead the rally?

No.

I’m tired from waiting,
and I’m sick from feeding on bullshit
and shallow metaphors.

It’s time for movement.

It’s time to say to hell with our condoning silence
and rise up.

Hey you!

Yeah, you in the corner with the pencil.

You, the unassuming bard whose verse speaks in whispers.
It’s time for you to rise up and write the words that need
to be written.

It’s time for you to sharpen your pencil and to tear
and thrash at the page till it bleeds and screams out
in desperate fury.

And when your words are read the readers are shocked
and angered and filled with such passion and rage
that nipples harden and balls retract in their sacks.

So rise up!

Check your zippers and march.

Listen for the rhythm ‘cause no one is leading
and no one is following.

There’s just us.

You Me Her Him We, Each confused and disoriented but
Each coming together and marching in one
Throbbing Mass of Poetic Fervor.

So rise up!

Rub the crap from your eyes and focus.

Breathe deeply then grab hold of today and straddle it.
Dig in deep with your knees and spur the bitch till it bucks.

But be ready ‘cause when it bucks it’s gonna buck good.
And when you fall and taste the dirt don’t spit it out.

Taste it!

Chew on it and swallow.

Because that’s why we are here:
to taste the flavor of today
and determine what ingredients are missing.

So, if your heart’s not pounding
and your hand’s aren’t shaking
and you’re still just sitting on your ass
waiting for someone else to do your work,
then close your notebook and break your pencil
because you are dead.

But if You feel the Passion
and if You feel the Rhythm,
then know that it is You who will do.

You who must do.

Yes, You.

But first You must Rise the fuck Up!

Seiko

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In Japan, today is the forty-ninth day since the death of my mother-in-law, “Mother,” “Okaa-san,” “Obaa-chan,” Seiko. Today is a special day where, in Buddhist ceremony and belief that on the forty-ninth day after passing the soul is no longer bound by karma, Seiko’s ashes can now be permanently interred. Unlike her funeral ceremony where many of Seiko’s family and friends and admirers attended to show their love and respect for her, today’s ceremony is a smaller, family-focused occasion.

How I wish I could be there with the family today to also show my love and respect for her, and to be closely surrounded by them all during this time.

But I cannot. So I think fondly of her and I pray for her and I pray that the pain of her passing will quickly ease for those of us who love and miss her so.

Seiko embodied and lived the values and qualities in character and of action that I wish I possessed as an individual and that I wish I had been able to live throughout my life.

I would have liked to have drawn a picture of her to include here, however, no matter how hard I try, I find that my eyes are too bad now and my hands shake too much that my efforts to capture her beauty, not just her physical beauty, for that she certainly had, and for which her daughter, my wife, also possesses in a very close likeness of her mother, but mostly it is Seiko’s spiritual beauty, which was profound and deep, that, regardless how well my eyes can focus or how steady my hands can draw, I am unable to, nor would ever be able to, capture in one of my feeble drawings.

So I share my loving memory of Seiko in a poem, a poem that falls well short of capturing the good and positive life that she lived, a life which touched and comforted so many in so many different, known and unknown, ways, but a poem which, nonetheless, comes closet to expressing my feelings and my love for her.

Seiko, may God continue to, and forever bless you with Eternal Peace, Happiness, and Love.

Like Incense, You Burned

 
Like incense, you burned
true, steady, reliably,
patiently purifying the world around you
with a bright, burning intensity and passion
and unending purpose
that only the gods could comprehend.

Like incense, you burned,
not for yourself but for life,
all of it.
You burned with love for each of us,
for everyone.
You burned with a love that transcended all boundaries
and all languages,
a love that transcended space and time.

Like incense, you burned,
and as you did
your presence permeated its surroundings
and filled it with your sweet soothing sensitive balm,
a healing balm,
a mystical balm,
a beautifully fragrant balm that will last and linger deep within the senses
and the soul of the universe
for all eternity.

Ask the Question, I Dare You

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When meeting with someone with whom you are consulting and seeking advice from and relying on for critical information, someone like your doctor, it is my belief that you should not leave that meeting without asking him or her at least one question.

Funny thing about those paradoxical little buggers, though…questions, that is, not doctors…is that it seems that the more we know about something, the easier it is to formulate and ask questions about that something; yet, the less we know about it, the harder it is for us to come up with questions to ask about it.

Well, that’s usually how it is for me, anyway.

And I don’t know about you, but for me, even sometimes at my old and calloused age, and no matter how many times that rusty, dull saw “There’s no such thing as a stupid question.” is drawn back and forth across my grainy, knot-holed brain, if I feel stupid about asking a question before asking it, then it is really hard for me to get up the gumption to get the stupid question out.

I don’t like Stupid.

It hurts too much.

And, at least for me, far too often.

Oh, and brother…and sister…let me tell you, you should have seen what a nervous mess I was in high school whenever I wanted to ask a question but felt it would make me look stupid(er) if I asked it, which pretty much encompassed just about any question I wanted to ask all throughout high school.

Not pretty.

I am not so bad about asking them now because, long ago, I embraced and (as is evident by all of the ridiculous nonsense that is going on in this ridiculous blog) even began exploiting my ridiculousness, right along with my insecurities and fears…and yes, even my infirmities.

Over time and after a lot of uncomfortable suffering, I have learned that the best way for me to face and overcome all my insecurities, fears, and just about anything else that makes me feel foolish or awkward, is to break them down in my mind as far as I possibly can, no matter how serious or sad or sickly they may be, right down to the ridiculous.

I mean, come on! How ridiculous is it that a six feet five-inch, former 230 pounder, former somewhat burly and excessively hairy self-proclaimed (remember now, I said former) “Manly man” could be afraid to ask a simple question, regardless of how stupid it is?

Pretty frikkin’ ridiculous, that’s how!

And that’s all there really is to this breaking-things-down-to-ridiculous thing.

But in defense of my former self—no matter the size or strength or amount of body hair one has, Stupid, armed only with gnawing and piercing barbs of doubt and indecision, will whip just about anyone’s stupid ass just about every stupid time.

But back to my ridiculous attempt at explaining how ridiculous just about everything serious in life can be…come to think of it, I should change the title of this ridiculous blog from here is where it hurts to TAKE NOTHING IN LIFE SERIOUSLY…SERIOUSLY!

Nah, that would be a seriously ridiculous thing to do, wouldn’t it?

Anyway…

And once I have broken down my insecurities and fears and, yes, even my infirmities, to their most purest state of ridiculousness, I then can happily, and often giddily, laugh at them and ridicule them for their ridiculousness, and then exploit the bloody hell out of them like I so frequently do, mostly right here on your friendly neighborhood “here is where it hurts” ridiculous blog.

So yeah, I do not really have a hard time asking stupid questions anymore.

Howeeeever…depending on the situation or on whom I am directing the stupid question to…

Every once in a great while, I just might have a hard time getting the gumption up to get that stupid question out.

Stupid me.

*

When I was diagnosed with cancer, a form of leukemia called Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia in Blast Crisis with the abnormal Philadelphia Chromosome (a real tasty mouthful, huh?), everything happened so quickly and the chemo and the steroids and the other drugs were pumped into me immediately and so often, and because I knew so very little about cancer in general and CML in particular, not to mention all the procedures and protocols and pokin’ and proddin’ that it takes to treat it, either I did not or I could not ask the questions I now feel I should have asked about something as devastatingly important as was what I was then going through.

All I could do, as I pathetically lay in my hospital bed while wrapped in my chemo and drug-induced blanket of fog, which I would occasionally and nervously peek out from under to stare blankly back at all the surreal, masked faces of my family and friends and doctors and nurses and social workers and cleaning staff and food attendants and anyone else who floated in and out of my room at any given time and who whose gracious mask-muffled encouragements sounded strained and distant, while their eyes spoke loudly with the voice of their heart of their concerns and their uncertainty and their fears, was to feel deeply and pitifully sorry for myself.

That constant sorrow took just about all of my energy, leaving little for the care or concern to ask the questions I probably should have been asking.

To cope with my lack of care or concern, and so that I could focus on feeling sorry for myself, I kept telling myself that I had little to worry about regarding this cancer thing because I was being cared for and treated by THE Johns Hopkins University Hospital, which was repeatedly voted as the number one health care facility in the nation. At least that is what all the self-promoting, self-congratulatory posters that were plastered everywhere advertised.

Well, as we all know, regardless of an organization’s reputation, even if it is one of sustained superior performance and results such as JHUH says of its reputation, they are still filled with a fallible and fickled species called humans who, while known to do some pretty fantastically wonderful things from time to time, are also known to do some pretty ignorant and stupid things just about all the time.

So, regrettably, in some part because I probably did not assume enough responsibility and make enough effort for my care early on to ask the questions I probably should have asked my doctors, and, in more than some part, because of a few stinkers of medical professionals who were involved in my care and treatment from just about the beginning of my cancer diagnosis and who, I firmly believe, excelled at mismanaging my said care and treatment in an exceptional manner, I feel that my health condition is worse off now than it should be as a result of our collective “efforts.”

And that is how I have come to my belief that one should never leave the doctor’s office without asking at least one question.

Here’s a quick question for you:

What do you call the medical student with the lowest GPA in his or her graduating class?

Doctor, of course.

And here is another revelation that dawned on me during all of this cancer and subsequent Graft Versus Host Disease, stuff of mine:

Doctors, as smart and highly trained and impressive and sometimes, not always, but sometimes, intimidating and overbearing as they are, are, fundamentally, only high paid consultants.

When we get right down to it, they can only make recommendations and give advice, they cannot decide for us.

Only we can decide what is best for our health.

And for us to decide what is best for our own health, we must have as much relevant information possible to make the best decision possible.

And as smart and highly trained and impressive as most of our doctors truly are, they cannot yet read our minds.

For them to be the best consultants to our care and treatment they can be, and for them to be able to provide us with as much relevant information possible so we can make the best decisions possible, and regardless whether they want to or not or don’t have time to or not or are too tired to or not or whatever or not, we must ask them the most relevant questions we can ask.

Some of these relevant questions will be deep and probing, and others will seem shallow and stupid, but all must be asked in order to prod and pull the genius-matter free from our doctors’ very big and very expensive brains so that it can be reconfigured and presented to us in a way that we mere mortals can understand.

Asking relevant questions to very smart people like doctors, is tough, especially if these doctors are specialists. These stereotypicallybedsidemannerless barons of the brains are so smart, in fact (and in fiction, sometimes, too), that they probably have forgotten more about their area of expertise than we could ever attempt know, even if we factor in the internet. And when we do not know much of anything at all about the subject that we want to or need to know about, it is even tougher to ask relevant questions. And when we are afraid that by asking a question it might make us appear stupid, which may just be the case, then that is just about the toughest question of all to ask.

But, we must find, or fight, our way through all that toughness.

And if, even after we have gotten over our fear of looking stupid, we still cannot for the life of us come up with one single relevant question to ask, then at a minimum, at the very least, we should ask:

“Hey Doc, if you were me, what questions would you ask you to help you, er, I mean…me?,” Whoa boy, now this question has me confused.

Let’s try running through that question again.

“Hey Doc, since I cannot think of any relevant questions to ask you, how ’bout you tell me what questions I should be asking you so that, with your answers, I will be able to make the best health care decisions possible?”

Or…something similar, but hopefully much less discombobulated, to that effect.

But you get the point, right?

Just ask the damn questions, will ya?