For good dramatic acting, hire a comic

Just watched "Reign Over Me". Adam Sandler's character has lost everything that gave his life shape and meaning. Don Cheadle's character has everything he's supposed to, and deals with (mostly) normal-sized problems, except for having such a whacked-out friend. In the end, Sandler's character begins to find ways to move on - literally.

It was good for me. Whatever I continue to lose & whatever I manage to regain, there's not much I can keep from before and even less that I want to. Hanging onto anything that doesn't do me a lot of good is just not very good for me, but letting go of things that did so much for me before (I'm thinking particularly of my flute, here; a perfect panacea, it was) does not bring back what I lost.

I have to keep re-assessing, and that's hard. Every time I've settled into a "new normal," things change again. I want to score but they keep moving the goalposts ... Not to mention repainting the lines, changing the scoring system and playing on a different field.

Maybe I should just throw away the rulebook. Hmm...

Canna bliss: a mixed blessing

P. gave me a discount card for medical marijuana evaluation, which brought the cost from $150 to $80. C. had a windfall, which she decided to share with me, and that made it possible for me to get the evaluation.

I totally lucked out on my first visit to the dispensary. I got something that smelled flowery and pleasant, I figured out how to consume it without killing the active components (which is way too easy to do, as they are highly volatile), and it took away 90% of the pain and totally stilled the constant running current of anxiety and trepidation (something to do with having no idea how I will pay next month's slip fee, or where I will go now that I'm being kicked out of this marina, or whether this next bus trip is the one where I stop being lucky and the inevitable crazy-violent-passenger actually does hit me, or whether my boat's windows will make it through the winter, or whether my older brother will ever be able to bring himself to be human towards me again.). Truly, you don't know what you've got till it's gone, and I didn't miss that river of fear one bit.

Moreover, it was much easier to think clearly, follow directions, make decisions, and hold more than one thing in my head at a time -- sometimes as many as two or three! (I'll take what I can get.)

What does it say about the profound neurological impact of complex regional pain syndrome that I am much less f'ked up when I'm high?

So that's the upside. The downside is that I have some emotional crap around marijuana, and I didn't realize how profoundly it affected me until I had to reach for it to get the relief that nothing else could bring.

I lived for four years with a pothead I had fallen very much in love with. When the chips were down, though, the pot was more important than me. I hardly ever got to see the person I was in love with, and it takes two to have a relationship.

Moreover, I don't like medication. I liked the brain I had, the clarity I had -- and am still occasionally capable of. I hate messing with the works.

This is too damn bad, because the works have unquestionably been messed with. Each time I add to my pharmacopeia, I go through this same inward drama. So there's nothing new there.

The interesting thing is that I'm running into some deep, old programming that marijuana is for losers. Well, there are quite a few things I would like to lose: all that needless fear, a whole lot of pain, and 40 or 50 pounds of extra weight. I'd love to be that kind of loser. (Most of the strains I've tried don't make me more interested in food.)

So maybe it's not about contradicting that old programming, but of turning it on its head: I can either say, "marijuana is not more important than me," or I can say, "marijuana gives something back to me, and that's important."

Rather than trying to hypnotize myself into believing that, "marijuana is also for people who are not losers," I can stick with that idea that, "marijuana makes me lose all kinds of crap. Hallelujah!"

I like that. It's clever, and creates a way forward. I'll let you know how it goes.

Those with eyes to see

I went for a checkup at the pain center today. I told Bernadette, my nurse practitioner, about my current state: pain is persistently more extensive -- all the way through both shoulders, intensity is about the same as usual with a couple of spikes to 9-10/10 each week, medication barely adequate. On the good side, if I'm doing anything about sailing or working on my new keeled home, I can work far longer than I ever thought possible -- several hours at a stretch, sometimes. The pain comes up, but it doesn't flare; I can work through it without sending it out of control.

It's as if anything connected with sailing floods my system with so much happy-juice that it keeps the hellacious cocktail of the pain cascade mostly in the shaker. She was really stoked about my having a boat. And it doing me so much good.

Afterwards, as I was scheduling my next appointment, Mai Hong, the physical therapist who used to work with me during my 2-month intensive, saw me and came up to visit. She wanted to introduce a new patient (someone who was going into the next round of the program I did) to an alumna. The other woman looked like someone who's bearing up under the unbearable, so of course I treated her perfectly normally.

Mai Hong peered at me with fascinated intensity. "You look ... great! The expression in your eyes is different." She used to monitor my state by the look in my eyes.

She spotted, in my first few minutes in the program, what a desperate simulation every smile and word that came out of me was. She spent most of my 2 months there looking for ways to get through and around the hard, tight masks I wore -- either the brittle cheer or the anaesthetic depression, whichever one was up at the time. She helped crack it, and could spot the daylight coming through -- moreover, she could point it out to me and name it: "I can tell I'm seeing the genuine you." That was important.

I said, "You remember I was sailing with the disabled sailors in San Francisco?"

She nodded.

Smiling all over, I told her, "Well, I realized that made me really happy, so I bought a boat and I'm making it my home." (See the Handicaptain's Ship Log for more details.)

She gasped, and in her next breath said, "That's great!" and congratulated me. She just stood there another moment, still peering into my eyes, trying to take it all in.

"It's quite a change, isn't it," I agreed. She nodded. I realized the staring might seem odd to the newcomer, but I felt comfortable with it. I remarked to Mai Hong, "That's what we live for as healers, to see that change."

She said, "Ye-eah," slowly, still drinking in the sun-streaked life pouring off me, stunned by comparison to what she saw 6 months ago.

I've been questioning myself a lot lately -- old scripts trying to play out, I'm sure, given how unreasonably they've troubled me -- but I saw my "genuine self," as I am right now, in Mai Hong's peering, bottomless gaze ... and I felt absolutely fine.