Dope

Abilify and Depakote both make me feel dumber. My retention and recall is not as sharp as it used to be, even though I cut out everything fun. And in fact, when my sister visited I had a cocktail at dinner and the sharp sound in my brain caused by lack of serotonin got louder, I decided that even the occasional cocktail just isn’t worth it. All the drugs I’ve used to maintain myself over the years are slowly working their way out of my system and being replaced by a protocol I did not choose for myself. I was told what I would get because they did not have any medical history on me and did not ask for my former doctors’ phone numbers…. easily obtainable from my cell phone.

My nurse practitioner told me that I could have my old protocol back if I submitted to random drug screens, and I said, “sure.” I also told her that the first one wouldn’t come out clean because I didn’t smoke weed anymore, but it takes about six weeks to get out of your system. I quit on 4/20, so I was right; my pee was complete with seeds & stems. I have a feeling that these drug screens are not random anymore, as she did not start me on anything for anxiety. I’m just going to tough it out until the first clean drug test. That’s fine, I guess, except in the meantime I am suffering from more anxiety than usual. I am learning that walking helps, but it does not solve everything. I have been through too much to think that everything can be solved by exercise alone. My doctors think that my story is invalid, but that’s ok. They’re supposed to do that. It was preordained by forces bigger than me, because neither Aada nor I knew the consequences of what was coming, and she has more power than I do. She will pretend until she’s dead that she has nothing to do with me and this. Believe what you want. I have enough of my own evidence, deleted for public consumption. Only I have to know what is true and what’s not. What’s true and what’s not is enough to make my heart stop, or to have a panic attack large enough I wish it would. And in fact, I’m sure that’s Aada’s goal now. To make me wish I was dead every time I think about publishing anything she’s ever written but oh, by the way, there’s nothing you could do that could ever hurt me…… just for plausible deniability.

How did it get so ugly? She sent me an e-mail that looked like it was a job recommendation, not a personal letter. It didn’t look like it was to me, it looked like it was to you. And then she blocked me so that I couldn’t ask her whether it was okay to publish it or not. Nothing in the e-mail was damning except she left in a detail I should have edited out. I regret it and yet there’s nothing I can do about it. The e-mail only existed on a server for a couple of minutes, if that, because I took it down of my own volition. But that was enough to make her disconnect from me completely. That’s fine. I didn’t need her at that point. At that point, she’d become an albatross around my neck. I couldn’t connect to anyone but her and she treated me like an enemy combatant when she felt threatened, which was more and more over time. I was doing everything I could to manage an enormous amount of anxiety in which I couldn’t talk about it…. my friend Michael teasing me and then getting very quiet. He said something about Zac not being able to help me figure Aada out, and being surprised when I said, “that’s not what I meant. I meant that intelligence is all alike. I figured out that he was the version of her I could tolerate.” However, Zac’s life was above board in that he came to my house and showed himself. Aada was disembodied, some version of my “corporeally-challenged celebrity girlfriend on the radio.”

That’s an old joke, by the way. It’s probably been 20 years, but I went on two dates with Allison Frost of Oregon Public Broadcasting and that’s the nickname Dana and I came up with……

It’s an old joke for two reasons. The first is that Aada isn’t queer, and isn’t interested in me. We just had a connection that was deep and meaningful right up until it wasn’t. When I tell the story of how I ended up at Sinai in the first place, my care team freaks out and I am told to go to the emergency room because this story could not possibly be true. I say that on my list of sins at the end of my life, at least “whoring out my sister” isn’t going to be on it. But who knows. Maybe her sister was in on it, because apparently I gave them all a very good time because there was more than one. A triumvirate was achieved, and all I did was type. Either that, or Aada made it up that anyone else was in the room…. and the triumvirate was all her. That idea doesn’t suck, but it’s not as funny as thinking about the entire gang at the cool kids’ table enjoying the benefit of my tutelage.

Typing got me into this mess, and it’s slowly getting me out. Telling my story is the only thing left.

I do love that Aada chose to keep my love for Mummo clean and white, but Heytch was down in the mud. Although I do not know what her relationship with her sisters is like, this tracks. She’s always made fun of Heytch behind her back, but in very innocent ways. This was…. Not. That. Innocent.

(Oh baby, baby…….)

But to be clear, she knew I liked hearing her catty takes and would listen to them, so who’s really the dumbass for not saying something? I could have said, “actually, Heytch is really important to me and it seems like you’re taking digs for nothing.” I didn’t. I did notice when she said that, “as you’ve noted and observed, Mummo is smarter than the rest of us.” Mummo is about my age or a few years older. I’m just old enough to be a grandma now, like she is. Aada was the one who told me neither would ever speak to me again, so I stopped trying to make amends 10 years ago. Who knows if she was right? I didn’t even try.

I just waited to find out that Aada was a trained interrogator and mandatory reporter. I found this out as our friendship was ending, so I had the horror of realizing that when she said she felt threatened, it wasn’t the same as when I did. When I felt threatened, there was no one to tell. When she felt threatened, she had all the power in the US government available to her. To realize you’re under that kind of pressure makes you fold into yourself, and I certainly did.

Nothing she’s ever said to me has been overlooked by anyone, nor has anything I’ve said to her. I deleted most of my e-mails to her and vice versa, because I thought I’d get them back one day. Now, I know I won’t. Aada isn’t real, she’s just a ghost that plays in my head. Because if she was real, she would have knocked on my door. We would have had kahvi. She would have picked me up in her cute little car or something, anything to prove that she was more than a disembodied voice over the Internet.

Now, Aada is just a story they tell little kids…. but I won. I won big. I proved to her that her trauma was leading her down a dangerous path of treating friends like enemies, and if you treat friends like enemies over a number of years, they will act like it. I published her e-mail because she didn’t get to be special. She didn’t get to be different than The War Daniel or anyone else who has flamed me because she didn’t have any recent history of treating me with love and respect. When she was angry, she’d flame me. When she was happy, she’d ignore me. Only I was capable of words being pricks on her skin. She did nothing. Even the e-mail I published was all about how I manipulated her. There was nothing about how she read from her own experiences and jumped down my throat based on what she thought I wrote, rather than asking questions and being curious. She apologized for not being present when my mother died, but it didn’t make her more present in the future. We were at war with each other because we couldn’t resolve the war within ourselves. If I did anything, I hope I forced her into a different kind of therapy, because whatever she was doing wasn’t working.

So in the end, being a trained interrogator and mandatory reporter left her with jack squat in terms of coming after me and too many fingers pointing back at her. She is going to have to live with her choice not to trust me forever, because she’s going to think that because I didn’t play the game to her specifications, that means she cannot trust people. It was her lack of trust that drove me away. It was her lack of trust that made me believe our relationship wasn’t real, would never be real, was only playing with my head. I was right, because her method of being close was staying away from each other, not really communicating, and hoping for the best. I hope she’s happier without me in her life, because she’s shown me that I cannot hang. I cannot cut off my emotions to the degree that she needs to keep her shell intact. Publishing her e-mail was not the reason we both lost. It was just the last thing that happened. There’s a huge difference.

I still have nightmares about all of this, and wish all of it would end. Broken heart syndrome is a real thing, and I’m doing my best to fight against the tide.

My nurse practitioner told me that no one in the hospital system would prescribe me benzos, and that if I wanted them, I’d have to advocate for myself somewhere else. There’s only one problem with this. I was not advocating for benzos. I did not know that there was such a thing as serotonin and dopamine agonists, so how would I know to ask for them instead? Why does she not trust the doctors I’ve had my whole life who have said I needed them, despite being open about being a pot smoker? They knew the difference between what you get at a dispensary and what you get at a gas station and they didn’t care. Again, whatever. I am old. Medicine is ever changing and I might find something that works even better. The last time I worked in a doctor’s office was like, 2007. I am certain things have changed since then.

However, I’ve been prescribed Klonopin for the last 10 years and it has worked spectacularly well. When I got out of the hospital, they gave my sister all my drugs back and she gave them back to me. I’d been taking the Klonopin prn until I ran out, and was ok not getting it refilled because my nurse practitioner said I couldn’t have them anymore. Apparently, there’s a lot of risk that the hospital sees that I don’t, because no one in my life has ever been shy about prescribing it. At Sinai, there’s a whole worksheet on why they don’t prescribe benzos for anxiety, because it causes your muscles to relax, your reflexes to slow down, and a whole host of other things I did not know.

So again, fine. Getting off the dope is probably a good thing. With drugs, you always have to weigh the pros and cons. Right now, I’m wondering if I really want to go back on Lexapro and Lamictal, knowing how Lamictal destroys my stomach and wondering if that’s worth the few extra IQ points I think I’d get back. I’m just not the same writer, nor the same person. I cannot decide if this is better or worse. I do think that being without anti-anxiety medication is ultimately worse, so I was not feeling so hot when my nurse practitioner told me that I could start a new protocol on our next visit, and I got no new prescriptions. Apparently, “starting a new protocol” meant “I forgot to ask for your records from your old doctor.” I didn’t get any new drugs. I only got a lecture on smoking weed (again…. and the lecture is “it’s legal, we can’t stop you…. but we won’t think very highly of you, either) and why I wouldn’t be prescribed anything until the next visit.

They are making sure I suffer through this as much as possible, but it doesn’t seem like suffering to them because it isn’t happening to them. My nurse practitioner doesn’t have to live in my brain with its constant refrigerator whine that makes me want to stick an ice pick through my forehead just to stop the noise. My doctor doesn’t have to live with the ghost of Aada breathing on the back of her neck, because she’s out there somewhere…. probably still a fan because no one breaks up with my blog and not reading me is more dangerous than just toughing it out.

But at least once in my life, I’ve shown her a good time. I’m not sure I would have told me that, though. She already thinks I have a big head. Now it won’t fit through the door. It sort of makes up for the shitty time I’m having now.

Sort of.

That’s because if I gave Aada a good time, there’s literally no telling how many departments in the United States government have had a good time with us. I just didn’t know it was her. I still don’t.

I’m assuming a lot, but it is a very educated guess. No one can hide all their punctuation flaws while they’re typing with one hand.