I've been feeling sort of blah the past couple of days. Part of it is due to the unexpected tooth explosion, and the followup. I managed to get an appointment with the dentist yesterday and managed to bork it up. I've been to this dentist at least 5-6 times in the past, though I don't think I've ever made the trek by myself. I somehow managed to get lost on the way and ended up circling around aimlessly for a hour.

I'm still not exactly sure how I managed to fubar the whole thing. It's like all of a sudden, none of the scenery looked like it was supposed to look and I began driving using my non-existent psychic abilities. I felt like I was a deaf person playing Marco Polo in the pool. Suffice to say, I didn't make the appointment. That meant that in addition to feeling like a complete ass, it had to be rescheduled and there was no open slot until the 24th. I guess it's not a huge big deal since there's no pain involved, but I live in minor terror of getting a piece of food lodged in there. I can't even figure out how deep the gap is with my tongue and since the chip is on the inner-back side of the tooth, it's impossible to get a look at it. I'd feel much better about the whole thing if there were simply some way to plug up the hole so nothing weird can go wrong with it.

I also had some pain issues last night which have stretched on to this morning, which led to the current all-nighter. Things had been going okay with the boost on the fentanyl, and this is the first significant long duration breakthrough pain I've had. It was inevitable really. It's not like I really expected that extra 24 micrograms to make a huge difference in the end.

Since I can't sleep, I've been watching episodes of Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares, the US version. I had caught a few episodes of the UK version of the show watching BBC America. I'm not sure exactly what it is, but even the most inane shows are sort of entertaining when you're watching limeys doing it. In addition to Kitchen Nightmares, I've been watching Cash in the Attic, Bargain Hunt, and Dragons' Den. There's nothing exactly stellar about the shows, though the concepts are often interesting. Maybe I just find it remarkable that there are actually people who talk like Mary Poppins.

I haven't been very active on here lately in either writing or reading. It's not exactly that things are going badly, but there's a lot of transition. When it's good, it's quite good and when it's bad, it's pretty damn bad. The problem is that the situation changes at a drop of a hat. That means that I don't tend to plan as much and end up doing more spur of the moment things. Certainly I've put off the gencon recap for weeks now for the very reason that I'm not sure I could finish them if I started it and then the whole thing would hang over my head like a sword.

I should also mention that this past Sunday was Bernie and Karen's birthday party and it was pretty spiffy. We ran through yet another game of Agricola, which I won this time though I'm still not sure exactly how. I just don't know what to think about the game. It leaves me in a state of bewilderment each time I play it. There's just never enough time to do everything you want and you feel like you're constantly trying to keep ahead of the mudslide that's about to consume you. Maybe that's really part of the appeal for me. I can't pin down one single strategy or figure out how everything is supposed to work. That's why I keep wanting to play it again and again as if it were some sort of complex machine I could break down and understand if I just see it running enough times.

Anyway, back to the party. A lot of people ended up showing and we all got to meet Karen's sister who was a barrel of monkeys. She's preggers so everyone made sure to share with her all the intestines popping out and anus explosion stories they had about births. I couldn't figure out what all the shrieking was about at first. I had been in the kitchen at the time leaning on a kitchen stool waiting for my second round of meds to kick in.

When things had mostly died down that night and many people had left, I got to play a final game with Lori, Randy, and Karen which was nice. I don't get the chance to see Randy all that often since he's usually MIA at the panera events and some of the Bills' parties as well. The same usually goes for Lori and I haven't attended one of the meetups since around half a year ago. It's just too much of a price to pay in pain and discomfort for an experience I might not even enjoy. Plenty of people at the meetup are great, but it doesn't take too many shortbus-riding spazzcases to ruin the event.

I went to the pain specialist yesterday and overall, I was pretty happy with the experience. I hate seeing new doctors. In the past, they've never been all that helpful and I end up feeling like the freakshow on display. The latter part didn't much change, though I guess I should just be happy they weren't marching fucking residents in and out to gawk.

For the first time, I ran into a doctor who I didn't get the impression was holding back or riding the brake when it came to pain meds. I came out of the whole situation with a script for upping the pain patch and another for a hundred perc'ies. It's clear that the effect of the patch at the current dose is majorly backsliding. The breakout pain is almost guarenteed to occur multiple times a day now and the intensity is increase. The worst episode to date was this morning/right now. The pain is pretty unbelievable and is very reminiscent of how it was before the patches. It's just a stabbing pain. The best way I can describe it, is it's like standing in the surf of a beach and being hit by waves. Just as I manage to brace myself and get past one hit, I can already see the next one rolling up just a few seconds behind.

The reason that this is all the more disappointing is because I had two huge q-tips stuffed up my nose yesterday. This might not sound like much of a treatment plan but apparently has a long history as far as pain management goes. The idea is that since a cluster of nerves that carry pain impulses goes past the septum, you can apply an anesthetic to it and bring pain relief. The doctor I went to see runs a clinic using the procedure and offered to try it out for me. I spent around 10 minutes on my back with 4 inches of q-tip stuffed up my nose. It felt ridiculous but I had nothing else to lose and the potential effect sounded near miraculous. It was supposed to offer pain relief for up to 6 weeks after a single procedure. Considering how I'm feeling this morning, I think I can safely say that it was a flop.

Figures.

I ended up experiencing my first side-effect/overdose senario yesterday with the fentanyl patches. It wasn't intentional definitely caught me off guard. The fact of the matter is that the patches are supposed to last 3 days. The problem, from my perspective, is that it takes between 12-24 hours for a new patch to hit peak efficiency. That means that I often leave the old one on for at least an extra 12 hours or so after I apply the new. This hasn't been a problem so far, and I'd like to believe that overlapping in this fashion has saved me some unnecessary agony from breakout pain. I also don't like the idea of 'wasting' any of the meds that might be left in the patch so I figure there's no reason not to leave it on until every last drop is gone. The problem is that the time of day I apply the patches varies. It just so happened that I had applied the previous one very late in the day and the new one yesterday early. I figure I must've spent at least a handful of hours getting much more of the fentanyl on board than I should have.

Yesterday was a game day at the Panera and I really wanted to make it there because a new game order had come in a few days ago and contained Agricola. It's the new 'hottest game' with the most buzz and excitement. People have actually been quite rabid in defending its merits. You'd think that the cure for cancer was included free in every box.

Anyway, I wanted a chance to run through it and I was actually very happy with the results. Hell, I can't remember the last time I was this favorably inclined toward a board game. It took us around 4 hours to run through it from start to finish, not bad considering that I was trying to read the rules as we went along. The problem was that halfway through I started to get nauseous. I wasn't especially sleep deprived, so I knew it was likely due to the medication. I tried to just ignore and ride through it, but that was a no go. I ended up nearly puking all over the place a couple times and that convinced me to yank the new patch off. That seemed to sort things out eventually and the rest of the day ran much more smoothly.

All in all, it was an interesting experience. I had always wondered how much patch would be too much for me. I had no negative reactions at all when I first started taking it and with the more than occasional presence of pain, I figured I was actually taking less than I really should. Now I know that double the dose is way too much. That might come in handy when I finally get to see the pain specialist on the 19th. I'm just hoping that the guy doesn't end up being a wankjob.

The past week or so has not been all that much fun. I've been having pain management issues again and I've spent a lot of time in a perpetual twilight of sorts. The pain makes it difficult to concentrate for long periods of time and so I've been spending my time mostly doing passive things. I've watched more movies in the past three days than I've seen in the past half year before that.

• My Kid could paint that


• Live Free or Die Hard


• Drunken Master


• Finding Nemo


• Iron Man


• Batman, the Dark Knight


• Be Kind Rewind


• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Normally, i watch so few films that I end up blogging about each one and writing a review. That's simly not possible in this case. I'm not even going to bother creating tags for the lot of it since it'd just be a mess. There are a couple of points I think I should make. For one, I do think I owe Heath Ledger's rotting corpse a small mea culpa. His performance in Batman was actually pretty solid. I never would have expected it from someone whose previous role was that of a gay cowboy eating pudding, or the equivalent. I'm don't think it deserves an Oscar nod or anything, but it was certainly competent and the best performance turned in for the film.

All in all, I was pretty happy with all of the movies. The only one I didn't like all that much was Be Kind Rewind and that's probably just because Jack Black is a douche. I was really pleasantly surprised at how much I liked the 4th iteration of both Indiana Jones and Die Hard. They showed that the old dinosaurs can still show the youngsters how it's done. Harrison Ford looked especially creaky during some of the action scenes but that's not unexpected. I mean, he's got to be like 85. As an octogenarian, he still gets more poon in a year than most of us see in a lifetime.

Pain has definitely re-entered my life full throttle. This is not to say that it was completely absent before, but it was definitely more muted. I've had to start taking the codeine boosters pretty regularly over the past few days. I wake up to it and it spikes throughout the day. I had always figured that the 50 microgram does of fentanyl might be too small to do the job fully when I had some breakthrough pain right near the beginning. What I hadn't really counted on was how frequent that breakthrough pain would become in only a month's time. It used to be a rare occurrence that is now happening multiple times a day.

I'm supposed to see a pain specialist in a couple of weeks but I figure it's going to take some time before we work out a relationship where he'll actually provide the drugs I need. Almost all the other doctors I've ever been to have been hesitant to prescribe opiates. I can hope that as someone who deals with pain management, this guy might be different. The one problem I've run into is that I've discovered there are no doctors out there who solely focus on pain management. It seems that almost all of them are into the whole physical therapy gig which is completely useless for me. There is absolutely nothing that physical therapy could do for it. The impression that I'm getting is that this is sort of a way to CYA. It makes it less likely they'll receive scrutiny from the DEA if they're providing this service as well as prescribing potentially addictive drugs. It also likely keeps away some of the dopers. When I told the receptionists that I didn't need physical therapy, there was a definite pause and then some muted conversation in the background.

It's just not right. To this day, I've never gotten any sort of positive feelings out of taking any of these damn drugs. No euphoria ever. Yet, I end up getting crucified for the high it brings to others. More hurdles to jump through and more pain suffered. All because some people get a buzz off of these drugs that I've never so much as experienced once. It's like God's playing a twisted little joke.

I really have to wonder if the current pain patch I'm wearing is somehow defective. I've had to pop a hell of a lot of codeine today, more than I've taken on any day since starting up the patches. It's usually only taken a pop here or there to keep me pain free but I've been having quite a few issues. I'm probably at or exceeding the amount I'd have taken in a single day before I started using the patches. That's a bit deceptive since I'm not feeling nearly as crummy as I would have back then, but it's like seeing an unwelcome sight just when you had hoped you might have gotten rid of it, if only temporarily. Suffice to say, I have no clue what the hell is going on.

I should mention that today was Bill S's 40th birthday and I spent a chunk of time at their place and also out to dinner with the gang. I had been planning to get there right around noon, but lack of sleep from the previous night combined with other distractions delayed me. Those crazy-ass hippies are persuing wild rumors that Sarah Palin didn't really give birth to her 5th child this past April. The nutjobs claim that it's really her 16 year old daughter's baby and that she faked a pregnancy to cover for her. To 'prove' that this is true, they have some really fucked up photographic 'evidence' where they basically claim the kid has a 'baby bump' in the picture. Of course, what hasn't yet started to filter through to those assholes yet is that at least one of the picture they're using to show this was republished this year, but was actually taken back in '06. Not that there really needs to be much to feed this sort of insanity. If you're curious you can take a look for yourself.

Frankly, I'm cheering these wankers on. A couple of mainstream people have already bit on the rumor including Andrew Sullivan who is now demanding medical records to prove that Palin really was pregnant. It's doesn't get much better than this. I only hope that the storm continues rolling until it hits a crescendo. At that point, I'd love to see Palin come out for a press conference where she says something along the lines of this is what change means under Barack Obama, that his campaign's supporters will attack a teenage girl and try to destroy her just in the hopes they can damage her mom. Man, that would be wonderful. I think the backlash will get across even without the explicit dig, but I figure the dig would score major points.

Anyway, following the tales of the crazy made me even later and I didn't get over there until around 4 pm. I mostly hung around chitchatting with various people while others finished up various board games they were playing. I got to see Matt and Joyce's kid for the first time. He was pretty well-behaved considering that he's only two months old. I remember Madeline doing a lot of screaming at that age. Maybe it is true what they say about boy infants being easier or maybe he's just better tempered in general.

For dinner we went to a Irish pub in downtown Rahway. It was nothing spectacular, but nice general English cuisine. Most people either had the bangers and mash, the fish and chips, or the shepard's pie. I went for the latter and liked it well enough. After dinner was a Carvel ice cream cake, which is always spiffy. Not a cookie puss, I'm sorry to say, but you can't have everything.

After dinner we headed back to the Bill's place and I played a game of Oasis with Randy, Bill S, and girl whose name I can't remember for some reason. Bill edged me out in the last round and I finished a semi-close second. Everyone more or less gathered up to go home after that.

I snagged a copy of The Gamers 2: Dorkness Rising yesterday. Suffice to say, I did not buy a copy of their dvd. I guess at this point this could devolve into a convoluted defense of what is, in fact, blatant theft but you're lucky in that I don't give a flying fuck and that sort of sophistry bores the hell out of me. No, it's probably not right and yes, I don't give a damn. If it came down to it, I'll just use the Bart Simpson defense as related by Donkey Kong.

It's the company's fault for making you want it so much.

The movie itself was quite an improvement on their previous efforts. It looks like they actually tried to make a film this time rather than a crude string-together of random funny gamer bits. The comedy factor was dropped a notch and production values shot through the roof. The special effects actually looked pretty good and nothingfew things were so cheesy as to poke my gag reflex. I liked it quite a bit and it's a huge step forward for Dead Gentlemen Productions. They wouldn't be able to stand head to head against even the crappiest of B, or C, or maybe even D-movie production teams out there, but as long as they plumb the forgiving gamer niche market, they're golden. Hey! It's a movie kinda about me! Who cares if the script and acting and staging isn't quite up to snuff. Still, compared to their first go, this one's definitely a keeper. I'm just kinda curious how much more it cost to produce this film compared to the last. Orders of magnitude I'd imagine. I wonder if it ended up being worthwhile in the whole profit arena. God knows I wasn't exactly helping out there, though maybe my positive review will encourage some of you to go out and buy the dvd.

Other than that, the plague is still with me. It's moved into that multiple coughing stage where I'll string together near a dozen coughs which end up leaving me wheezy and breathless. Lotsa fun as you might imagine. Some calls were made to doctors tonight and it looks like I might be getting on another new drug regimen. It looks like it'll be something like Enbrel, which means shots and some basic auto-immune function. It supposedly has a better success rate than what I've tried before and hell, what do I have to lose? The real problem is going to be getting a continuous supply of these patches. No one wants to prescribe them and it's obvious. I need to find a doctor who's not all wiggy about it and will simply give me the meds I need. So far, no luck and I only have 2 patches left. The idea of not having any more is pretty terrifying. If I'm lucky, I'll just be as fucked as I was before. If I'm unlucky, I'll probably get some sort of rebound effect that will kick up the agony meter into the stratosphere.

Who would have thought that optimism would have been my failing. Despite my rosier predictions, I'm still in full grip of the plague. I'm spending large chunks of each day in a semi-delirious state where I zone in and out of sleep. My guess at the moment would be that I'm spending around 16-18 hours a day unconscious at the moment. I can't really help it as I seem to be tired all the time and the minute I lie down, I'm zonked. If it weren't for the presence or absence of daylight, I'd have no clue what time it was most of the time. I've been doing my best to avoid all other human beings since I really don't want to pass tbis thing on. With the way my luck is, I'd probably end up catching it again on its mutated rebound.

Since I'm pretty much incapacitated, I haven't done anything useful at all the past few days. Luggage has remained partially unsorted and I'm nowhere near close to downloading all the vids and pictures from the trip. It's pretty much all I can do to wheeze my way from hour to hour, assured in the fact that eventually this plague will pass. It's a very very lucky thing I have those fentanyl patches. I shudder to think what it would be like to mix unending chronic pain with the exhaustion I'm feeling like now. At least with the patch, I can actually get to sleep when I need it more or less. Sometimes an extra pop of codeine helps, but it would be unbearable if pain were still running amok.

Day 1 went pretty well here. About the only complaint I might have involves my repeatedly tendancy to projectile vomit with some, quite significant, amount of force multiple times through the day. I'm sort of curious if all the heat of exertion and the sweating might have increased the absorption of the fentanyl from the patch. I was suffering quite extreme nausea and had to vomit a few times. Luckily, I didn't consume much during the day so mostly what I spewed out was water. It was some of the most explosive vomit I've ever run into though. It was like the contents of my stomach were running a spring to get out. I'm sure I could have won a medal for projectile distance. As soon as I finished puking, I felt much better.

I didn't get much sleep last night, despite a ton of exhaustion, managing maybe 3-4 hours at most. I had some pain issues early this morning and I've been up ever since just trying to push through it. I wanted to slap on another one of the patches but I can't seem to get it unstuck from the plastic back. Sadly, I've been working at it for literally hours now with no success. It's like not being able to get a childproof cap off a bottle no matter what you try. I might just have to slit the whole thing open and lick the gel. I'm pretty much out of other ideas. I just can't get it separated no matter what I do.

So, so much for the negatives. As far as the positives go, I got to spend time with mock26 and Melissa again, which is spiffy. We wandered around downtown for a bit and then over to Midway so I could pick up my rental car. FOr the third year in a row I got lucky and they were out of the subcompact I had reserved, bumping me up to a nice midsized with leather seats and what might be the oldest, clunkiest piece of shit GPS I've ever seen. We ordered in from Leona's and spent the night watching a Robin Williams standup special that mock26 had on dvd. All around, pretty spiffy.

I should be packing right now considering that it's less than 9 hours before I have to get on the plane. I would be packing too if pain weren't such an issue. I have no clue why things went to pot all of a sudden but I've been incapacitated for the last 3-4 hours. I've popped two codeine in the meanwhile to not real noticeable effect. I'm starting to wonder if I should slap on another of the fentanyl patches. It's unlikely that 100 mgs would OD me and if things got really wonky, I could always yank one of them off. I'm also thinking of just applying heat to the one I had on. I read an article online where it said the absorption increases with the use of heating pads or the like. Some old woman accidentally off'ed herself with the patches because of her penchant for heating pads. No reason her loss can't be my gain, at least from an information standpoint.

Feh. There's so much crap I want to pack and bring with me that's going to cause space issues. I've been trying to think of ways to reduce the number of bags I'll be schleping around, not because of bag fees since I booked this flight before that particular innovation, but because I don't think I can handle a whole heap of bags and crap as I am. I'd be playing the real life version of tetris right now if I could just duck out on the owie.

Well, I'm happy to report the patch has been pretty spiffy so far. I haven't taken any codeine since the tablet early evening yesterday. This isn't to say that the patch has been able to alleviate all pain. I'm still getting flashes of it, but the key difference is it's usually not as extreme and tends to dissipate with time. As it was before, pain in the past if ignored would just grow and grow and grow. The best way to think about it is if there were a huge mountain range that went on, graphing out my pain level. Fentanyl has added an ocean to the picture, covering up the smaller peaks and diminishing the larger ones. There are still instances of 'breakout' pain where everything spikes above sea level, but I can wait it out and it usually subsides. I wake up achy instead of in total agony.

The downside to all of this is that the patch seems to work great in a controlled environment where I can take timeouts whenever I need and there's always someplace to sprawl and rest or wait. Even in that situation, the pain is still palatable most times of the day. I'm just worried that it's going to get completely overwhelmed when I add the stressors of the trip. Increase movement, sitting, standing for long periods, etc. If I were having the dosage adjusted, I would say that I would likely want at least 20% more of the drug just to handle daily home usage. God only knows how being out and about will affect that sort of metric.

I had intended to offer, if not hourly updates, then at least a few through the course of the day reporting about the effects of the patch. Since this is the first entry I've made since a hour after popping it on, it's fairly obvious that idea went to pot. I got conned into going over to my sister's place and there, ran into some pain issues that were a pain to lock down. Around 4-5 hours into the patch time, I had to take some more codeine and then limp and hobble my way out. While the next 10 minutes or so were incredibly brutal as I would have expected, it was also my first indication the patch was doing anything. The codeine kicked in faster than it ever has in the recent past and was providing a lot more relief than it should have on its own after the initial onset time. Despite issues, I was able to refrain from popping any more codeine after that.

Even after getting home, dozing for a bit and then waking up to take a shower has seen me basically functional in a low impact setting. There's pain, but it's not unbearable. If this were a normal night, I might take a half pill to try to drive what was left away or a whole pill and hope for a restful sleep until morning. At 12 hours in, the patch shouldn't be at peak effect yet so I'm hoping that it'll still ratchet up a few more notches and take what's left of the pain with it. It's unlikely that I'd be able to sleep with the residual pain remaining so I'm just going to see if I can wait it out.

The downside, if there's any, has been the general opiate haze that I'm pretty used to by now. It's nothing extreme but it's a pervasive muddle-headedness and earlier some vague nausea. It's not anything I think I'll need to really worry about if it stays at this level, though I'm not sure how it'll go combined with a stuffy plane ride or other aggravating factors. I might just end up having to use a barf bag.

Welp, there are no happy fun patches yet. Shelley was off signing to buy her condo yesterday and didn't make it back to the area to get the prescription filled. She has all my insurance information and I'll have to wait until she can get to the pharmacy to sort it out. The problem is that she's not working tomorrow and is supposed to start painting the condo. I'm not sure how pleased she'll be about making a swing into work just to grab the meds. I'm down to 2 tablets of codeine and it's been another rough night where I don't think I'm going to get much, if any, sleep. Still, if I think happy and positive thoughts, this might also be the last sleepless, pain-filled night for a while if those patches work out.

I was doing some more reading on the fentanyl, running google searches looking for other people's experiences with it and other tidbits of information. Much of what I found really started to make me angry since other than a few medical websites, it largely consisted of fucking drug addicts sharing info with one another about how to get the maximal high off of the stuff. I ran across people trying to extract the fentanyl from the gel-center of the patches to others who recommend actually rolling it up and smoking the damn thing. Those druggie fuckers are the reason that so many people with legitimate pain issues have so many problems getting help from doctors. Just thinking about it infuriates me and I wish that we could just execute drug addicts.

I understand more about drugs and drug addiction than the vast majority of the population due to my education and experience, but I still don't viscerally understand it. I can quote statistics and studies and rattle off tons of peer reviewed research about what's happening in the brain when someone takes drugs but at some level it's still a mystery to me. I'm sure part of the giant stumbling block is the fact that I personally don't feel anything positive when taking opiates other than pain relief. There's no euphoria or feeling of well-being other than what results from the removal of the pain. It just baffles me that there are crazy assholes out there who will spend every moment of their lives scamming and scrounging for their next fix. I just can't understand why they can't or choose not to control themselves when it comes to drug consumption, especially when there are so many negative consequences.

Maybe I just got the short end of the stick and there's something screwy in my head where I don't feel drug rewards. I guess that's possible but seriously unlikely. Sure, there are individual differences when it comes to drug response, but it's hard to believe that I don't get anything off of them. Hmmm, it's probably more that I don't equate any of the effects as being positive. Contrary to popular opinion, very few people who take opiates for pain relief ever become addicted to them. I think the percentage in the last study I saw was around 1-2%. People might become dependent, which is more an effect of long term exposure and tolerance, but they don't show the addictive seeking behavior that we associate with drug abuse. I've always felt that's because when people take drugs for pain, their goal is to get rid of the pain. When people take drugs for recreation, their goal is to feel good. It might just be that we all get out of it what we expect to and view it in that perspective.

Oh well.

Hopefully the codeine tab I popped half a hour ago will kick in soon and let me get some sleep. I've got a fair bit to catch up on lately.

I just got back from the doctor and he prescribed me a bunch of Fentanyl patches. Fentanyl is the king daddy of opiate analgesics more or less. It's usually used for cancer patients and according to wiki is 3 times more potent than heroin and 81 times better than morphine. Of course, that's the pure stuff when it's not in a transdermal patch so it's not really comparable. Suffice to say though that this is many orders above the codeine I've been taking. Hell, it suggests not even trying to patch unless you're taking at least 300 mgs of codeine a day. I'm probably a bit short of that on average, but that's more due to trying to conserve meds than out of anything else.

I'm hoping to be able to give the stuff a whirl before I actually have to get on the plane. The patch lasts for 3 days and starts to really work within 12 hours of application. I will admit I'm a little unnerved by the fact that my google search for the stuff turned up so many reported cases of overdose. Not that I haven't considered the fact that overdose might not be the worst thing in the world mind you, it's just the fact of being caught unawares by one doesn't sound appealing. If I'm lucky, we'll get the script filled sometime today so I can slap it on tonight.

Well, it's been another one of those nights where I would have loved to have been able to stay asleep if only it weren't for the stabby sensations. The randomness of it all is one of the more obnoxious part of this whole thing. There are times where everything runs on a fairly consist schedule. Pop pills ever 4-5 hours, things go spiffy. Then there are times like now where it's as if I skipped a dose and additional followups don't seem to do much good. All I can do is try to wait it out. Fine enough if there's nothing that needs doing and I can handle a bit of pain but it's circumstances like this that worry me about the gencon trip, where there will be things that need to be done at certain times. Then, I can only hope that throwing back pills like candy will be able to break through the dam. God knows I don't exactly have a backup plan.

So yesterday I actually went and snagged a copy of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay. I had always meant to do that eventually, but like most things it had slipped my mind until I had read stinky's comment in my NPH-love entry. I was really sort of disappointed by the movie, which is depressing since I liked the first one so much. It just didn't seem like a cohesive film of any sort. It was like a series of sketch comedy shorts all stitched together. You can almost imagine the writers sitting around a table with a giant list of racial/regional stereotypes and making check marks down the list as they either dispel some for comedic effect or reinforce others for the same. In some scenes, they rock and tip back and forth like a seesaw from one to the other. How about we have a real southern redneck who shoots animals (reinforce stereotype - check) and he lives in this rundown shack in the woods with his wife (reinforce stereotype - check) but inside the furnishing is all modern and they have DSL and crap (dispel stereotype - check) and they have a cyclops baby in the basement because they're brother and sister (reinforce stereotype - check). It wouldn't have been bad if the encounters just made a little more sense to the plot instead of just being sort of random.

Neil Poon Handler was spiffy as usual. There's just something incredibly entertaining about the idea of a gay guy playing a lecherous sex-crazed hetero version of himself. "Let me be clear. There is nothing on the planet that I love more than a hot new pussy. Nothing." Craziness. I wonder who even came up with the idea of NPH playing this twisted version of himself in the original movie. Hell, had he even come out at that point? I guess it would be almost as funny just messing with the whole Doogie Howser persona but there's certainly a bit more irony this way.

So, all in all, not a classic like the first movie. I'm pretty sure I don't even want them to try to put out another film in the series because I can't see it not going downhill. Then again, morons watched those Cheech and Chong movies for years and they stank on ice. A least I know that I'll never have to spend $10 for the privilege and that makes me happy.

It's down to 7 days and change until I board a plane for Chicago, and then after that, Gencon. I'd like to be able to say I'm looking forward to the trip, but the plain and simple truth of it is I'm not. I'm just too screwed up to be all that sanguine about such a venture. It's pretty amazing when you think about how far I've slid in just a year. Last year, I remember worrying a bit and thinking it was a hassle. This time around, I'm seriously wondering if I'll simply make it through the whole thing without a breakdown. I would really prefer not to have some sort of massive pain breakdown that leaves me sprawled out on the floor in agony. Well, actually, I'm sure that will happen at some point. I can only hope that I can keep things well enough locked down that I can do my collapsing in an unobtrusive corner or something.

I dunno. Part of me hopes that maybe the endorphin rush will help with pain relief. It's been known to happen before where whenever I go out to some special event, I manage to function better than I would have if I were simply going out to run errands. Of course, it also helps that I usually pop back drugs like candy during those events and that might explain things. I'm thinking about going to the local doctor here before my trip and trying to get him to prescribe something, anything, new. He's always been compliant in the past about writing codeine scripts. I'm just not sure how he'll feel about writing for something stronger and bigger. I'm sure he doesn't want to DEA crawling up his ass and that fear has paralyzed a lot of doctors I've known from providing adequate pain relief. I often wish I really were a drug addict. Then at least I would be getting some joy out of all this bullshit. Not to mention I might actually have the contacts to actually score some heroin or morphine or something that will kick like a mule. I just desperately want a 'secret weapon' for when everything else I try fails me. And I know it will. The only real question is how often and how badly.

Things have been so bad this year I've also completely given up on things I normally do for gencon in terms of prep. No Killer Breakfast schtick this year. I just couldn't end up doing the Monster in the Dark like I wanted and no new Take a Token box. I was just too broken to actually spend the resources to even attempt Arts and Craft projects. There are times I feel like a person in an overloaded boat that becomes more and more rickety each day. I toss things overboard as fast as I can to try to steady things and keep it all from capsizing. These two gencon events are simply two of the most recent casualties. I think I'm still going down with the ship though.

You'd think I'd know by now to just pop my pills the minute I open my eyes. Whenever I wait too long or worse, eat something first, I end up suffering the pain of delayed onset and it's not pleasant. On the positive side, I've finished catching up on lost sleep at last. I've spent more time unconscious than conscious since getting back from Dexcon, often waking only for long enough to pop more pills and then wait for them to kick in.

Sometime Saturday night, we had a burglary here at the house. A sneak thief either crawled in through a window in the back or jimmied a back door. A cell phone and a wallet were taken, with the latter having a few hundred dollars in it. I was barely coherent when this information was relayed to me due to lack of sleep and ended up missing all the angst and rigamarole that went along with it. The thief also stole a digital camera but it was found in a neighbor's yard where he or she must've dropped it accidentally. Overall, I have to say I'm very surprised. We've never had break-ins in this neighborhood, at least none that I've ever heard of. That and I would have thought that the dogs would have raised a fuss. The general theory is that the burglar only came into the family room and no further. He swiped some items from that room and then left. The dogs usually sleep in the living room at night and there were other monetary prizes to be had that were left untouched in adjacent rooms. It seems odd to break into someone's house just to steal a few hundred dollars. Talk about a poor reward to risk ratio. If I were going to resort to thievery, I'd want to make sure I got a lot of bang for the buck.

The theft has caused all sorts of expected angst. There's talk of installing some motion detector floodlights in the back of the house as well as other things. I personally think it's overkill, but whatever makes them happy. It's too bad that it's illegal to rig lethal boobytraps in your own home. We hardly ever use the door the thief came in by. It would be sorta spiffy to have a shotgun triggered to fire the minute someone opened the door. The government won't let its citizens have any fun.

In other news, I have a backlog of things I need to take care of. Mostly rebates that need to go out and ebay auctions to mail. Since I've been sleeping away most of the daylight hours and pain management is always a problem, I've been putting it off. I also need to call the HMO and see if they have a pain specialist on their roster in the area. I'msure I won't get an appointment in time for it to affect gencon, but I have to get it sorted out at some point. I'm just way too gimpy to function at the moment. I did okay at Dexcon, but everyday errands are still highly unpleasant.

During the last couple of hours of Dexcon, the lack of sleep caught up with me. I had both headache and nausea raging and I decided to flop down near one of the walls in between piles of luggage and games for a liedown. I fell asleep almost immediately and awoke a couple of hours later feeling pretty retched. The room had cleared out in large part and most of the stuff that had been piled around me had since vanished. I can only imagine that the owners got to experience the added fun of trying to maneuver their belongings around a person sprawled on the floor.

I managed to arthriticly make it to my feet and then slowly lurched my way out of the room and to my car. I didn't even bother to say goodbye to the people remaining who were playing one last game before heading out. I shufflestepped my way to the car and managed quite an impressive feat when I drove it home without wrecking myself. Since then and now, I've spent a lot of time unconscious and the time I've spent awake has been pretty horrid. I'm not sure why exactly but in addition to the normal pain that usually wakes me, I ache everywhere. It's like I wake up to a cacophony of competing somatic complaints. Everything throbs or aches or feels like I'm being shived. Most of the problems fade after a while, leaving me with the old familiar agonies. Despite being absolutely exhausted still, I never manage to sleep more than a few hours at a shot before I have to wake, shuffle to the bathroom, shuffle back, pop more pain meds, wait for them to kick in, and then go back to bed. It's a really tedious and unpleasant sort of experience. Since the sleep isn't all that restful (or doesn't seem to be), I think I still have at least a 6-7 hour defecit to make up.

I'll try to pop back on at some point to recap recent events. Of note, the house suffered a burglary in the past day or two. The losses weren't huge, and what's surprising is it even happened in the first place. I guess our dogs are just getting way too old to sound the alarm at night.

Welp, the start of Dexcon could have been worse. As the time was approaching that I really had to leave in order to get there on time, the pain wouldn't go away. I kept popping pills and even went on to swilling what was left of the vodka but still had issues on my way there. I think that's the main difference between my life now and my life back around 6-7 months ago. Back then, I knew the pills would work. There was no real uncertainty in it and the only decision I had to make was whether or not I wanted to take one or if I thought I could muddle through and endure without it. Nowadays, there are times like last night where no matter what I do, I just can't get a handle on things. I ended up popping 4 codeine and downing a quarter of the bottle of vodka as a chaser and still felt terrible. I took all of this on an empty stomach and was anticipating more of a kick than I got. I managed to limp my way to the hotel and things weren't going horribly until after I had eaten and the opening ceremonies were close to ending. All of a sudden it was like I was hit by a drug-induced freight train. I was heavy headed, nauseous, and have never felt so 'stoned' in my life. I ended up on my knees, sprawled across a chair in the corner for the next 45 minutes. I can only assume that all the drugs had a real delayed response and chose to all kick in at once. My main goal was just to not fall asleep and also try to not redecorate the floor. Eventually, I staggered my way over to a game of Alhambra and perhaps it was the mental activity that helped to sort me out. By the end of the game, I was feeling better and while still a bit heavy headed, wasn't apt to fall over anymore. I decided to stay on for a quick game of Gloom and then made my way home, getting back a little after 1am.

I had planned to head back today at 2pm, but ran into the same problems with the drugs again. They just didn't seem to be doing anything and I was pretty incapacitated. Since there was no dire need to get to the con, I decided to just wait it out this time rather than running the risk of the drug induced coma I was fiddling around with last night. It's only now that I'm starting to feel somewhat like a functioning human being and I've already missed all the afternoon slots. The next games won't begin until 8pm and so I'm twittering my thumbs until then.

To entertain myself, I decided to make a new icon that I thought would be funny. I figured that if nothing else, it would drive hippies insane, and that's always a bonus no matter how you slice it.



I'm really sort of proud of the effort since it's likely the only icon I've ever made that another person might want to use as well. I wonder if I should find some political communities and offer it up to the participants?