"they extinguish the spirit within you"

 

“I didn’t know that there was untreatable pain.”

Yes, there is such a thing as living in untreatable, intractable pain for decades. I've done it, and I am not alone. Hundreds of thousands of people across the nation live with continual unrelieved pain, and many of us understand the opioid crisis because opioids used to be the gold standard when all else failed.

That quote is from Tucker Carlson this week after an emergency back surgery. Tucker is the most watched news show in America and isn't prone to drugs and alcohol, according to this article. 

What Carlson, who said he will never take opioids again if he can help it, found most interesting was what the drugs did to his spirit.

“I had this spirit of fear within me, which I don’t have,” he said. “I’m not bragging, I don’t have it. And I think you can feel it. I don’t have it, I think that’s why I’m successful, cause I’m just not afraid. I felt afraid just of like life or something. It’s interesting.

“It was super deep. And I just haven’t had those feelings since I was in a plane crash 20 years ago this month. I’ve never had those feelings. I’m always like ‘Yeah I’m gonna die, I don’t care.’ And I mean it. But last night I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ Fear—just like anxiety. People who have anxiety, that’s what I felt. And it was from those drugs. And they extinguish the spirit within you. And they make you feel like you’re running away. You’re hiding. It’s so fucking deep. I’m lying in bed filthy with dog toys on my pillow, and it doesn’t bother me. And I’m not that way. Like I am a fucking—in real life, I wash the sheets every day. I’m that guy. I shower every day.”

I've had doctors so inexperienced with real pain that they couldn't understand why I was still complaining with them tossing top of the line addictions at me like dealers, and I found no relief until I scraped together everything I had learned and rebuilt my healthcare team with my own set of goals and standards. I am now off all those meds, thanks to both a psychologist and a very excellent physical therapy team focused on psychoneuroimmunology. I have regained quite a lot of function and my pain levels are lower now without meds than they have been most of my adult life. Other crucial changes were finally getting a primary care doctor who didn't hesitate to fix previous doctor failures to diagnose diabetes and send me to specialists like an endocrinologist for my thyroid. If a doctor is stringing you along on medications and you feel like you are getting nowhere, step back and assess your situation and make some changes. Even in our worst situations, it is up to us to fight for our own health care priorities against Big Pharma dictating what doctors do to us. There are good doctors out there, sometimes you have to grind through humiliating visits as a new patient until you find one.

"They extinguish the spirit within you." Yes, that is exactly what Big Pharma and the international drug running cartels are all about. Break free, but be smart about it. Do your research, don't quit anything cold turkey, learn to titrate slowly off meds, make sure you do have a doctor in the loop so that it's documented in case of a med crisis or medical emergency, and be very patient with yourself. It took me years to get off the handfuls of meds a couple of doctors had me on. I was dumb and quit librax cold turkey and wound up in severe withdrawal and needed a med rescue. I was on opioids for so many years that I get the shakes when I get even a baby dose of morphine in an emergency room. I was on so many meds for so long that I'm high risk to stop breathing for a long time in my sleep even on a very low dose of one med at a time now. So go slow, learn what you are doing, take your time and do it right. Medicare and many insurance plans will pay for physical therapies and mental health visits, take advantage of that.

We are so used to celebrities and sports stars who wind up addicted to something, it's really rare to hear about a healthy person not having a clue what the drug crisis really is like and giving honest feedback about how horrifyingly spirit draining being medicated is. I appreciate Tucker Carlson sharing his experience.

thyroid, prostate, science...

 

And then I scared myself silly reading articles on thyroid storm. 😳 I allowed a very fat endocrinologist to let me hover around <1 on my TSH for years, and when I got a new doctor last year she started suggesting backing down little by little. Well, she's changed dosage twice, last summer and last winter, and I still keep going hyper, like .29 kind of stuff. I never would have connected the thyroid dot if I hadn't seen that number. I was chalking it all up to IBS causing my palpitations for months. I didn't know thyroid, IBS, and heart issues are a red flag triad, which you'd think I'd be more aware of since I've been on a thyroid med since my late 20s.

I've apparently written way in the past somewhere about a monitored double hormone crash I went through in 2012, starting around Mother's Day and lasting into the summer, but I can't seem to find it so I'm going to write it out again. I had been on birth control pills for years, those raise blood pressure in general while blocking thyroid hormone, so I was on a big load of beta blocker and a pretty high dose of synthroid just to keep things steady for 2 decades. As I aged, I kept getting 'breakout' blood pressure spikes to the point where I was labeled a 'frequent flyer' in the ER and landed solid notes about hypertensive crises. One month got so bad after years of heavy estrogen monitoring to control female problems that a gynecologist suggested getting OFF the birth control, and the next year I had a uterine ablation to stop bleeding altogether. But in May of 2012, simply stopping birth control sent me wildly skidding through super hyperthyroidism, since it was no longer there blocking thyroid hormone, and that in turn super spiked my blood pressure surges, heart rate, and especially anxiety attacks. So, my endocrinologist monitored me also stopping my thyroid pill, and I went into the craziest freefall, monitored by my psychologist. He kept talking me through feeling crazy, through feeling like I had snapped hard into a nasty midlife crisis, because thyroid can affect everything about mood, emotion, and cognitive function. As my thyroid slowly ramped back into normal territory, my blood pressure spikes slowed down and finally mostly stopped. I was put back onto thyroid and blood pressure meds and monitored over the next few months to make sure I had stabilized.

That endocrinologist had me convinced that my TSH could go as low as whatever as long as I felt ok, so I learned to not even concern myself with it. Years of him ignoring my questions turned into my own complacency. Granted, he saved me from a previous doctor that kept allowing my TSH to soar completely off range in the other direction (she also failed to diagnose diabetes, opting instead to pile handfuls of pills into me and monitor me monthly for more antibiotics), but over time he kept adjusting my dose up until I was at the other extreme. Because of my years of learned complacency with him, I've been tolerating a couple of years of palpitations that have become a bit alarming, and now I've got the full range of symptoms of hyperthyroidism.

My newest doctor, been seeing her for about a year now, immediately checked me for vitamin D and found I was very deficient. She also added CoQ10 and has been monitoring several areas of improvement over the year. One of the biggies in my improvements list was being able to get completely off antihistamines after years of dependency. I'm currently getting through what some consider to be a particularly nasty ragweed season without much more than allergy eye drops and occasional nasal spray, not even every day. I'm not fighting snot or experiencing the usual raw throat or anything else.

So now I'm wondering about D and CoQ10 affecting thyroid health and running into articles about Hashimoto's being a curable inflammatory disease with genuinely proper (not govt directed) diet and proper (not FDA directed) nutrients. I'm literally watching my Hashimoto's either getting better or crashing into runaway hyperthyroid. If hyperthyroid symptoms abate by simply adjusting dosage on my synthroid down, I'll be leaning toward healing.

I've written a few times that I haven't had an autoimmune flare since 2014. I've documented across blogs that I made a plan in 2008 to create my own health team and learn how to be healthy. It's taken years to clean off prescriptions and change my diet and deal with getting some exercise in a body that was once granted full disability with many legal restrictions because immobility was so bad, and I've gained enough back to not only actually hold a grandbaby (I dropped everything for years), but to walk the floor holding a baby for a solid month. I have years of blog posts bringing up losing my hands and arms to nerve fail.

So watching my synthroid dosage being adjusted DOWN 3 times in one year is blowing my mind. I'm finding articles other people have written about being able to get completely off thyroid meds because they regain normal function as they cut inflammation down throughout their bodies.

If someone told you it was possible in your older age to get back to normal health, would you believe it? On the one hand, you've got a carefully constructed medical system designed to dismiss actual curing to preferably control illness symptoms indefinitely, regulated by insurance companies that can kill noncompliant careers in medicine, all directed by big pharma, the FDA, and the CDC establishing what is 'good' for us and 'bad' for us and anyone coloring outside those lines is harshly belittled and sometimes (in the case of whistleblowing lab techs and doctors) 'disappeared' or 'suicided'. Once in awhile it's an obvious murder, but it gets buried pretty quickly in our daily (hourly) 'news' onslaught. On the other hand, you've got a few people trying to keep getting the word out that there are real cures, and they are cheap and easy and being withheld from us. Once you take a step back and really look at this situation, it looks really... suspicious. Makes a person wonder if govt control is really about taking care of people, or about something else, maybe. Like a lot of politicians and CEOs being millionaires. And possibly worse- like state control?... We know what state control is in other countries, but would we recognize it in our own?

I keep hearing there are real cures for cancer, too, that don't involve dangerous 'treatment' that costs you as much health as it purports to give back.

One more thing, for you prostate guys, bless your hearts. Have you ever heard of any other organ in your body needing to go through 12 core samples at a time through the most infectious area of your body in a nonsterile office setting? Imagine 12 holes punched into that little bitty organ, how bloody and shredded that would look from the organ's point of view. Imagine if someone did that to any other organ in your body under those circumstances under the guise of 'looking for cancer'. When you really dig, you find out the real numbers in the graphs, percentages of genuine lives saved vs % of men with no cancer at all who wind up incontinent and with ED for life as side effects. Add sepsis to that and I think any of you would be stupid crazy going through that. If a woman had to go through something like that detecting breast cancer, there would be a worldwide uprising, but men keep docilely letting the medical industry rudely shove bad science up their butts.

The word 'science' has been destroyed for me by consumerized medicine. I don't believe in 'medicine' any more. I believe many doctors genuinely care and want to help their patients, but I'm seeing a number of doctors rising up around the world pushing back against a variety of codified treatment options that squeeze out real healing. Do no harm, right? Well, the entire industry does plenty of harm.

Science is showing me that I had two different doctors letting me fall through the cracks. It's time we all started paying more attention to who needs to be taking responsibility for our health care. Basically, we the people.

I'm one of the lucky ones lately. I finally have a good doctor measuring the root cause of inflammation in my body as opposed to simply tossing prescriptions at me helping me to live indefinitely with it.

When you find out, after 30 years of that level of 'health care', that all of your suffering through the years could have been prevented, it's on you to not keep going back to that and allowing them to be the boss or your health. YOU are the boss of your body. If you want to learn how to heal and feel better and get well, start researching. Really look. Spend time reading, taking notes, comparing informations, and coming to your own conclusions. They've been keeping us helpless and blind, and although they turn it into 'courageous victories', they also put people through demonstrably outrageous amounts of suffering. When you find out the cancer cure patents being blocked by big pharma contain far less suffering, will you be outraged?

I'm obviously having that looking back moment where I can see now how controlled I was to the point of nearly complete immobility and sanctioned addictions for many years. A few years of physical therapy and a year of vitamin D have done so much for me that decades of medical compliance never did.

I don't know how else to shake other people awake, so I'm telling you my story. If you feel like life is hopeless, I have years of blog posts demonstrating that a person can go from the darkest depressing life of pain and misery to not only hope, but to real healing. I'm not selling anything, I'm not pushing anyone else's products, I have no agenda other than we all really need to wake up and realize what they are doing to us as a mass population. We are so easily controlled through pain and fear, and that part they really do have down to a science. If science seems questionable and lame, it's because the real science is about keeping us complacent and controlled. One could (and should!) ask why and keep digging.

Maybe this is part of a really good answer.

https://channelstore.roku.com/details/aa3de745ff08e379788fbc59ad31574a/plandemic-indoctornation

spaz map

Originally published at Basically Clueless.

I learned during my sociology degree that we 'brain map' our social constructs so that we can retain context on all our relationships, personal, social, work, school, etc.

Part of my #brainfail through my life was being unable to retain this ability to remember my own timeline, much less map how I fit in with everyone in a continuous stream of change over time.

I've been working on this for decades, and I think I'm finding a way to piece it together in a working map. In my mind I'm constructing this map in a 4D kind of way, perhaps 5D, since it covers changes over time. In my mind it kind of looks like a cosmic event map in 3D but with an added timeline so that the map model can change by rolling forward or backward in time.

I didn't know most of my life that I'm a fragmented person. They used to call it multiple personality, now it's dissociate disorders of varying degrees. As I've been waking up to my 'selves' and learning to share info among my fragments, as opposed to feeling locked out of my own long and short term memories and confused and disoriented, I've been very slowly piecing together the points of impact or breakage, as it were. It wasn't at all clear, especially since most of the fragments are independent enough to take and absorb life hits on their own, but over time I've been using a free association technique that allows me to 'randomly' tiptoe through my head, and learning to stop and let my 'head' talk back to me. That's more simplistic than it really is. Learning to recognize reality sifting down through simulated materials aka the way we process and retain our memories and then tell our stories back to ourselves has been a meticulous and very sketchy process taking several years, as evidenced throughout my blog fleet.

Part of the challenge has been more than one of us learning to do this and leave trails for each other, sort of like leaving notes or tag tabs for other people in a big project. Imagine working on a very large project over a very long time and never seeing the other people coming and going, and every time you come back to the project, things have changed and you either get a shift change log with not the greatest notes or nothing at all, and you try to pick up where they left off, which requires quite a lot of redundancy. That is what trying to piece together a bigger picture of a fragmented person is like.

For the most part, I'm very stable nowadays, rarely switching back and forth. And I can tell nowadays when I do because of the headaches. When I get sharp stabby headaches out of the blue that dissipate just as quickly, sometimes with a sick dizzy feeling that also comes and goes just as rapidly, I am dealing 'on the fly'. For years I would fret that those feelings meant something horrible in my body, like illness or stroke or whatever, but now I know it's simply a high stress moment being taken over by another part of me that can better handle a situation. Sometimes I'm cognitive of sharing space and sometimes I'm not. Most times I retain most of those memories, but they can get a little blurry. It's like I'm there but sitting on the sideline taking a break.

"I" is not always the same person. I figured out awhile back that we take turns writing in blogs, sometimes paragraph to paragraph and even sentence to sentence. Even when I had no clue this was going on, we were all chipping in together. Writing seems to be the way I talk to myself, or share my head with me. Many times I've gone back through blogs and read things I don't remember writing, or sections that seem surprisingly 'other person' chiming in. Any of you who've read through a lot of the old stuff probably saw sudden continuity breaks and just thought that was poor writing, lol. Well, I'm not a poor writer. We just don't all agree on when to stop talking, apparently.

So this summer I have figured out more of the free associating feedback, and it feels like the others are becoming a little more open to being stalked 😂, so we all seem to be building a common map together that helps show us where we all fit with each other.

In my mind, I was explaining to a fictional figure in an ongoing alt life reality (some might call it a dreamscape or storyboard) that a few key mes were like epicenters during fragment events, and they became their own color families. I think that explains the pinkybluejacky thing, and why Jacky is stuck on which color of blue is the best, azure, cyan, royal, or sky. Lately we've noticed that soft mint and rustic orange together seem to strongly evoke memory fragments, as well, so however an event cracked that current local landscape at the time, they evidently got color mapped. I realized a couple of decades ago I am synesthete and seem to map many things in my life around hex charts, including blogs, and that each color family strongly attracts or repels other parts of me. We seem to be socially grouped. The blue/pink treaty involving Jacky and Pinky happened a long time before I became cognitively aware of the significance, and now I recognize it as a shaky alliance between the two strongest personalities who fought for control most of my life and finally settled into sharing enough space to stabilize. This settling happened with my second marriage to a very patient and forgiving man who doesn't make a big deal out of my weirdness (this is where men emotionally ignoring women can come in really handy), and now nearly 3 decades into this marriage, I'm finally getting a bigger picture mapped out.

The actual traumas are incidental and fantastically boring to me by now, plus they've been written out all over my blogs, so I'm not going to reiterate anything. I do recognize that Janika is an epicenter that happened in the '80s, and that was so rough that I lost being able to map a continuous timeline for 11 years. I think all the really significant big stuff happened long before that last one, most of them during my childhood at various points over various very overwhelming events, but the key is realizing that two of the stronger personalities umbrella'd over and took control of successive fragment events. Jacky seems to be a parent figure for a few 'kids', and Pinky is the mom as recognized by other 'kids'. Claudia and Lydia respond and defer to Pinky making decisions and handling things, and since Pinky was universally recognized in my head as the interface with real world for several years, it was probably natural to become cognizant of those fragments sooner than others. Janika seems to be very rogue and is responsible for some of the 11 year messcapades, along with Yablo. From what I can tell, Yablo is a latent mostly nonverbal 'Loki' figure nearly completely disconnected from anything tangibly emotional to the rest, and probably saved our lives a few times during Janika's plunges into various miscreant behaviors. Not sure, but I think Yablo is the one who wakes up during surgeries and drove home during the heavy drinking. Yablo shares space easily enough, but without the emotional connections, the contexts are always sketchy. Yablo was around for a very long time before getting named by one of my sisters. Janika was named by my child when she was 4 years old.

Jacky and Pinky go way back to very early childhood with their own continuous timelines of memories. Janika doesn't have memories before the 80s, making me think that epicenter was from my friend being murdered and then the immediate dissociation for years. Personally, I think Yablo was already around and probably helped stabilize Janika from going over addiction cliffs, but just barely, certainly wasn't out of worry or caring, more like having a friend to pal around with. When I look into those two I can kind of see the switching off. Janika never passed out, ever. It was like Yablo could bypass all that and take over and drive. Those two easily shared space and have common memory trails, so as I've been learning to free associate back into my past, I've been able to pick up on that buddy system between a couple of ne'er-do-wells. At the root of that, Yablo is responsive to Jacky. Pinky and Yablo don't ever seem to cross streams, which may be the bigger cause for memory holes in Pinky than anything. Pinky is emotional, Yablo is simply unattached emotionally, so it's like they are mutually exclusive. Yablo also doesn't fight for dominance or control. Jacky, on the other hand, is very dominating and fought with Pinky for years over control, even though Jacky is flat effect. Jacky may be "the cat that walks by himself" (Kipling), but Jacky does care deeply that things not go off the rails and considers Pinky to be weak when situations get stressful. The only thing Pinky remains strongest over Jacky with is being the mom. Jacky isn't really mom material and probably lets things slide more than they should. Since my first husband and that whole mess came hot on the heels of my friend's murder, whoever was occupying and controlling head space at the time was clearly not being supported by Jacky until the epic control fight that saved my child from that marriage. I'm still not able to access that very well, even though memories come through clearly enough to know what was going on, so I can't help wondering if the 'kids' were muddling through that on their own with a dash of Pinky here and there. I just know my head was such a mess that I couldn't logically think through anything. That was before Janika started drinking, so it wasn't alcohol. It was more like still being in shock, nothing felt that real to me except having a baby. That was real. And the fear was very real once we realized we were very much in danger and that my kid was being so abused.

I can see how and why some people can't see reality around them when they are in bad situations. If they are already fragmented from abuses, the parts of them that recognize it just shut down out of some kind of weird psychological protection. It's hard to wake that up and then do something real about it, especially when danger gets overwhelming.

Anyway, my map looks like an undercurrent of babyhood that one of me calls Sasha for lack of better information, followed closely by a couple of epicenters that cracked Pinky and Jacky (and possibly others) into existence, and then a short few years later Lydia and possibly another, and then another few short years came Claudia. The ages look a bit like baby/toddler, 3 years old, 7 years old, and 10-11 years old. I'm only guessing, they just feel like that. Lydia is the one who started having the witch nightmares, calls them witch-cats, and she never talks out loud when she pops out, but she sees everything. Claudia is the crabby fighter personality who remembers how to kill things, rambunctious and argumentative. Not sure who the 'kid with the bike' is yet.

I have clear memories that go back to babyhood. The memories that we all share before fragmentation events are the strongest. I've been learning to go back in time to before those events occurred, finding the shared memories, and then sorting out the fractures as I slowly move forward. At each fracture event a new part of map emerges, and events with strong epicenters seem to reorganize the continuities into new behavior group patterns. Figuring out how each of my fragments relates to all the others has been a real puzzle, because over time they change, just like relationships do with real people around us.

One thing I've been learning is that just because a personality seems to be latent for a long time doesn't mean they are inactive. They are literally part of a real time brain, a whole, and it doesn't just shut off like a light switch. Even latent personalities can hear, see, filter, and incorporate information into themselves even if they are not sharing cognizant space with other fragments. They may be a little lost in time and confused in place when they do present, but they aren't stopped and started again like a dvd player. Each fragment is part of a real person, and it's rough feeling left out of the loop and suddenly having to deal in spite of a big gap of continuity missing, but that personality being out and active might be a crucial development in dealing with something. Whether we are cognizant of each other or not, each fragment is important to the overall stabilization of the whole person.

Part of mapping some of the fragments into relationships has depended heavily on our willingness to share feelings without self recrimination and even self harm. Jacky and Pinky intensely disliked each other for many years, to the point of sabotaging each other. If you have a disorder wherein you are self sabotaging, you might want to look into a duality playing out that is seeking common ground. You may not be fragmented as such, but you may need some kind of reconciliation therapy. It's ok to forgive yourself. That was a very important part of my own processing. Parts of me are OCD level perfectionists, other parts of me are life fail depressionists. That battle between two conflicting personalities only made things worse. Learning to share space with agreements not to inflict insulting judgements and guilts on each other was a huge step, and reaching a place of understanding that the root of that bitter fight all along was Jacky loves Pinky so much that Jacky would force Pinky into submission out of harm's way so Pinky wouldn't cry was utterly heartbreaking. That was a real thing, and reaching that place broke down a lot of barriers.

thoughts about George in his broken brain in Sublime (2007)

This is a repost from my PinkFeldspar blog. It's originally part of a movie review, but so much of this section is a reflection on what it's like living through what I call 'brain fail' and 'glitchy brain' that I think it needs to go on spaz blog where other medical posts are collected. If you get distracted and want to see more about this movie in general, you can find it among my #TomCavanaghWatch posts.

This is super random like a writing prompt and not intended to be part of the review, and is especially super spoilery if you haven't seen the movie yet, so go watch it first before you wander back.

I've blogged before about movies / TV shows and characters being how we emotionally connect into stories that we personalize while we deal with or process our own life journeys. The movie Sublime that I have reviewed recently has been one of those uncanny connects for me.

I spent years publicly blogging my own 'mess' of 'glitchy brain' fail that began, in part, in 2004 with what my doctors assumed to be a viral infection on top of years of autoimmune challenges. That is one of the layers I've been processing through. When this happens to an already fractured mind from childhood trauma and a lifetime of PTSD, I'm here to say it can be pretty devastating but survivable.

I'll jump right in. When George asks to be taken on a tour of the broken East Ward presumably under construction, he doesn't realize he's surveying his own brain fail. I've had numerous dreams like this over several years, it really does work like this when you are trying to figure out the problems that you can't see and your brain starts helping you consciously assess internal damage from the point of view of an entity that isn't human like you are, because it's existence is lived as an organ that processes data. Oddly, brains can't just type us notes, so they 'simulate' scenarios. If we break it on down, a brain as an organized entity is itself made up of numerous selves that continually work on construction and vital systems management protocols, like securing and shipping energy and oxygen. When shipping and/or nutrients are interrupted, the entire system can plunge into massive fail.

A brain is a living thing that wants to work properly. Like a machine, it runs automatically without our cognition, but like an AI, it connects to us and talks to us in dreamscapes, riddles, visuals, experiences. Our brains can interact with us as a separate entity from us, yet still be one with us. Consciousness, arguably, is not completely dependent on the brain, although the brain is how our consciousness is able to interact in this world reality we see around us with other people in it.

During this tour of the East Ward, George chances upon a room full of files, a sort of archive of information. It is organized but the version is outdated, a hard copy backup of a digital system. He finds his own file with his name on it, and in the very thick file he sees hard copy of many organ and tissue assessments. This is literally what the brain does, in one sense. Our brains know everything conceivable about what goes on in our bodies, that is their job. When there is brain disconnect, or fail, that information can stop being updated, or even be lost, and the brain automatically fills it back in with real time information gathered from what we'd think of as diagnostics. I went through this when I went through central nerve fail and memory glitching. I could feel this happening. Sometimes it was painful, most of it was maddening from a conscious aspect. I didn't know what was happening, but over time, with very patient inner communication, I was able to consciously piece together my own archive of thoughts and reflections about what I was experiencing as my brain was working on healing.

Let's talk movie clues.

When George is arguing with the care team (in his mind, since the IV bag fluid is milky white), the date on the file he found, according to the medical lawyer (a brain perspective trying to share information to his consciousness), was Feb. 29, 1947. That was not a leap year. (That had also changed from what he saw originally.) But there is also a name connected to that file that George thought was his, that actually of George Spelvin, if I heard that correctly (I could be wrong, I suck at transcription). If this is the case, then the pseudonym and nondate are key clues, along with the unidentified bandaged man that George thought he saw murdered, are really himself as an empty slot. The file contents are his own brain content being interpreted, the file identification shifts between the time he discovers it and later argues with the medical lawyer. His 'evidence' is slippery, and his brain is filling in the lawyer's words with substitute answers. Is his brain updating in progress, indicating more loss? Or is this like a dreamscape where hope plays tricks and information is slippery anyway? In any case, his brain itself is aware of loss, but communicating that into his consciousness isn't easy. George is in full fight or flight mode by the time he seizes out during his brain slamming another fail simulation at him, his necrotic leg. That scene is a giveaway since necrosis to that extent takes time. The brain is screaming that it cannot find his leg, it cannot connect and assess, but in George's consciousness (in his vegetative state), it becomes interpreted as a diseased and then missing leg.

The mystery of problem solving inside a broken brain can send a person hurtling around an emotional rollercoaster. It's hard. I was very struck by the opening theme by Bird York, Have No Fear. It's nearly impossible not to have fear when your nervous system is part of the breakage. It's like living inside downed wires and massive grid damage when you can't move around correctly or easily speak what you mean. It's like feeling trapped in a maze of confusion, so much fail going on and no way to share the fear in a way that nets back badly needed emotional support. And sometimes that support is so misunderstood in all the confusion that one can only recoil back into solitude. I have thankfully never experienced a vegetative state, but at one point I made the decision to wrap my mind around preparing for the what ifs of a complete communication sever. The intuitive response is to fight, that can translate into combative patient and poor treatment, and I chose to bend my will toward remaining calm, accepting, and pleasant, trusting what I could not trust. That is very hard. (The key to accomplishing this is to, as George found, wrestle one's demons, face the truths inside that we refused to see, and acknowledge our life fail of allowing bad things to happen, very much like a life review.)

Add to all the confusing emotional rollercoaster the jumble of real life still coming at you, the torments and persecutions of judgments from people all around you, whether those are perceived correctly or not. George reliving memories of his birthday party, assuming he was even remembering correctly, was part of the big puzzle, many pieces that needed reassembling before he could cognitively understand how to take action months after a medical accident. To recognize that he had this power to make a decision was a giant lightbulb after so much misery.

One thing this kind of life challenge wakes you up to is information. Information in general from everywhere, everywhen. Time has no meaning when one is compiling information trying to restructure. Sorting things like timestamps comes later. I personally developed an obsession with timestamps because I lost my sense of time. What I discovered was compiled information.

Using twitter as an example, I am unable to keep up with real time linear interaction flow. For a long time I couldn't keep users straight, much less their personal information that made them unique. I learned to use the twitter search bar with keywords and hashtags to pull up a time order for users and particular thoughts, and I was able to remember the timestamps for some reason. I noticed that a person might say 12 different times over 4 years how terribly sick they were, and then at other times say they never get sick. In their linear experience, they might not remember, while they are in a vital healthy phase, regularly picking up seasonal colds that last a week. I could easily pull up their histories and see that while we are in linear experience mode, we are in the moment and don't pull up all the files. Once we step out of linear experience mode, we can see all the files more easily. Well, I crashed out of linear experience mode early in life when I started dissociating, and parts of me are 'research hounds', obsessed with finding and knowing information for various reasons. Add a 'brain crash' to that and I felt like I simply dropped out of humanity synch with world time. I used social medias like twitter to see the rhythm and try to slide back into it (like jumping into an ongoing jumprope game, perhaps). I'm still not very good at that and eventually let go of trying to keep up in real time. I live in my own real time now.

We cannot explore all the files this way until we step back from in the moment reacting. George tries to react in the movie, but he's lost his moment and can't find the way back to that moment. He's stuck on a moment unaware that months of time have been passing, trying to problem solve what went wrong with very minimal access to information. He can see the broken parts, and he can see the diagnostics, but he can't see how he himself fits into that.

What he didn't expect to see were the jagged details of collected memories exposed in the brokenness, his demons, if you will. Evidently, George was very aware of the political divergence going on around the world that supported his real life success. He was aware of the human abuses going on that supported capital gains in his world. He chose not to 'see' them while he was in the moment. He believed he deserved his success because he had earned it himself. Likewise, he had chosen not to really 'see' or be cognizant of how his wife was feeling. The simulations are valid communications about his fears and feelings and situations, but since he cannot translate them logically, they create panic. His fear grips him and then all he can think about is feeling trapped and wanting to escape.

I can say that level of vividness is very real with 'broken brain' stuff. It's catastrophic to realize we are stuffed full of information that we don't even know we have. All our brains are absorbing all the things all day long. Good things, bad things, all the things. We might consciously choose to focus on our own interests as the days go by, but that doesn't mean all this other information collecting going on constantly is being deleted as overage. It's all still there, and it's all important. Why are things we ignore important? Good question, especially since humans seem to universally experience compelling life review phenomena.

When I see George really noticing these political atrocities among his jagged broken East Ward, I see him realizing the reality of what hadn't been real to him, real people, real lives affected in the kind of life he had been constructing for himself. Whether they were actually fallout from his own financial decision making is probably beside the point, because who could know that. In general, however, there was a connection, he knew it was all connected, and he chose in his linear in the moment life to not see those connections. He turned away from taking responsibility. That this is affecting him so much in the dreamscape simulations is a very strong hint that he went out of his way to stifle these feelings in his everyday life. He stayed busy making money, probably nightcapping his way through his marriage after long days of wheeling and dealing. I can't judge since I don't know, but it's looking like the rude awakening after the brain fail was a seething pile of guilt he managed to lock away for years.

How one heals from a broken brain, assuming one has that option (like me), can involve a very deep dive into cleaning out one's soul. Pulling everything out of the closets of the mind, sorting through it all, repacking and organizing- this is all inherently part of healing when a mind scatters into pieces after the structure crumbles. Restructuring is rebuilding. I think at one point I compared it to reassembling a building piece by piece out of the original materials without a blueprint after it had been blown apart. That was so many years ago I can't find which blog I wrote that on.

:edit: Found it. "Like someone reconstructing an earthquake smashed mansion brick by broken brick without a plan, I am reconstructing my brain today. Like someone who lived in that mansion, I know I lived in my brain, and I know it's all still here. So I glitched again, so what. It's not gone. I just have to go over all the little connections and see what needs to be plugged back in." Dec. 27, 2012

Having our consciousness interrupted from illness or injury is a terrible thing. I compared losing my intellectual capability to beautiful people losing their good looks to some calamity, which we all know can be very devastating. I became very dumb and spent years crawling back from that. I consciously could not logically piece together my own history. I've had to wait while my brain heals bit by slow bit.

In George's case, there was no more healing. Nothing more could be done to cross back into the 'real' world of linear in the moment with his family. He had healed just enough to become minimally aware that he had a choice whether to stay or leave. Whether he was truly cognitive of his family around him is unclear, and as messed up as his awareness was anyway, we'd still only be guessing at what he truly was aware of at the end. However, he did seem, inside his head, to be aware enough of himself to reject remaining in that state. Even on life support he managed to 'escape'. There would be no way to measure if he truly did that or if his brain just stopped working, since he was considered to be effectively medically unable to ever respond again.

I could be like Fangoria and talk about Sublime's "health scare plan", but I'm not going there. I do think it's valid, though. Click to go check out issue 261 published on 9-28-19.