#been in a weird mood lately and got hit with thoughts about finishing [redacted] but rereading it is...testing my soul to say the least | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

613526362 · 6 years

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Poodle or die

I’m sitting here, teaching a pediatric medical course right now, watching the videos along with the students, and I feel it coming on I feel the depression coming It’s crazy This journal was supposed to be the story of a burgeoning humanitarian struggling to get back to what he loved most - Africa Instead, it has turned into a tale of psychological self-discovery, a fight for survival against one’s own mind I fear the coming months are going to be a fight against money That’s typically when I do worst - when I’m worried about money And I’ll have to fight against money alone. I’m not sure if Nia left me or I left her, but it doesn’t matter. She never even pretended to care. My friends told me a girl who messages me back a day or two after I messaged her doesn’t care. But I didn’t listen. I took her to the $1,200 play she had always dreamed of seeing before she seems to have dropped me. That’s right, the financial problems will be my fault as always. I wasn’t trying to buy love, I was just trying to show how much I care and hoped someone might care back. Wrong, again. Yes I still think it’s cool I made a first-generation Ethiopian girl’s dreams come true, and yes the play was fucking amazing. Even though there were more black people on stage than in the entire crowd. And every seat was taken. I don’t think she appreciated me pointing that out. She doesn’t see the things I see. She’s never been to Africa. I would have taken her too, but maybe it would have been too late for her mind to understand anyways. At this point, she’s just another American. The chronic disease of being-an-American defines her now. Did I mention she didn’t text me back all day the day of the play, and I actually was trying to find someone to go in her place because I thought I was getting stood up? Did I mention it was literally past the time when I was supposed to pick her up - and I was about to go to a bus stop and offer strangers the ticket - when she finally called back? Maybe she’s seeing someone else. Fuck it, I’m getting a dog. I’m not sure if I even care if I can afford a dog. Every day I wish Maya would message me. But she never does. I want to talk to her so bad, but every time she messages me (about a month ago was the last time), I delete her number. Knowing what I want and knowing what’s right is something I might be getting slowly better at. The dog is what’s right now. I really will. I will kill myself in the darkest part of the winter, when business sales are low or I’m worried about the IRS or some girl has hurt me again, I WILL kill myself this winter, unless something changes. I could never blow my brains out with a dog who loves me in the other room. Never. The last two days I’ve been obsessing over researching the dog purchase. My dad is a veterinarian, so obviously he was my first stop. When presented in the context of, “This could be challenging, but women treat me like shit and women and children are way more expensive,” he was actually quite supportive. But only after suggesting, “How about no women or dogs. Maybe pet rock?” Pet 9mm Glock that expels a 1,500 feet per second steel projectile into my inner brain is the alternative. If he’d known that he wouldn’t have suggested the rock. I’ll be in Africa for a week in early October, so I’m hoping to bring him home right after I get back. I hate that the poor little bastard will have to live his first months in the fierce winter of The Big City. But shit, I have to live through those months too, and at least we’ll have each other. And once again, if I wait, I’m probably dead. This big business move I’m making, there is a good chance it will fail. In which case, once again, the only thing keeping me alive while fighting through bankruptcy battles and maybe dropping out of medical school, would be the dog. If I turn out to be a failure in everything and wrong about everything, well, the dog won’t give a shit. He’ll just want to play and cuddle. And if I actually finish school and move to east Africa, he can come too. No matter how hard, I’ll smuggle his ass in. My dad says if you shave a Labrador, the shedding isn’t too bad. Their coat is thick though, so a lab would struggle in some of the hotter areas of east Africa. What people don’t realize is that the Standard Poodle is the Navy SEAL of dogs. They don’t shed, so they leave no trace. They have thin skin and a long nose, which is good for hot climates, and they can grow their hair out for more warmth in a colder climate. They’re also light and agile, and can swim or run for long distances. Lastly, they’re always considered one of the smartest dog breeds. I hope I can keep up. Redacted Two days have passed I’m in bed now I woke up around noon, I think I worked from 7p to 7a last night On the way home, I started crying real bad That hasn’t happened in a while I don’t think I’ve cried while driving in years. It’s very rare I cry at all. I don’t know whether to describe the things I see at work anymore. I don’t know if I can. I just know the day after I always seem to wind up sitting around replaying things I saw the night before. At first I was upset they put me in triage. I hadn’t worked there in 7 months. I didn’t realize it would bring me so much closer to the horror of what’s going on out there. In triage, you hear all the stories. The shift started with a whimper. I had a middle aged black woman walk up to my triage desk with a suitcase and a four year old child. “I was told by the state that I can come here to seek shelter.” Wait what. I had absolutely no fucking clue what to say. All I knew was that she was at the wrong place. Charge nurse told me to call the city hotline. I did, and when the lady on the hotline asked to talk to the woman in need of shelter, I went into the waiting room, handed my $800 cell phone to her, and then left the room. God has taught me a lot over time. One thing I’ve learned is that I’m generally protected when taking risks to help people in need. Generally safe, that is. Safe from immediate adverse harm. Not safe from long term consequences though. After I got my phone back and some amount of time passed, I noticed she was gone. We had a number of those throughout the night, but the rest just wanted to sleep in the waiting room. One of them was a younger black woman, must have been in her late 20’s. She said she was homeless, and her torn clothing and disheveled grooming seemed to reinforce that statement. The only question she didn’t seem to answer was, “What do the voices say when you hear them.” She got a really terrifying look in her eye when I asked that. But she didn’t answer. Even when I asked twice more. When Dan left me in triage alone with her for a minute, my mood immediately changed. It was weird. I guess I have my guard up when I’m around other staff members. Immediately after he walked out of the room, I felt a kind of intimacy with her. I wish I could have held her. But she would never have wanted to hug me, and it wouldn’t have made her feel any better even if it had happened. She had asked me for a blanket, and I grabbed her one before she left. It wasn’t before she had left the room completely and gone back out to the waiting room that I noticed there was blood on the chair she had been sitting in. I figured it was probably from a patient before her, so I grabbed a wet wipe and cleaned it off. A minute later I was back up front in triage, and I noticed there was even more blood on another chair she had sat in before I had taken her to the back room for blood draw. In emergency medicine, we’re not supposed to assume anything, so I needed to figure out where she was bleeding from. Obviously it was probably menstrual, but I couldn’t assume that. If it was rectal bleeding, although extremely unlikely, it could be deadly. I went and searched for her in the waiting room, and I found her lying on the concrete floor with the blanket over her. She had made a little bed for herself, using a small piece of clothing as a pillow. “Are you bleeding?” No response. “Where are you bleeding from?” Then she blurted out, “On my period I guess.” I walked away. I decided to get her another blanket, and a blanket for the other homeless man trying to sleep on the waiting room. I walked to the blanket warmer in a nonsensical path, not allowing any of the employees to see me twice. I knew it was against policy to give people in the waiting room a blanket. Back when I worked in the ER at (redacted), I used to take tons of juice out to the waiting room and give it out to anyone who wanted some. They would have been furious had they caught me doing that. When I put the second blanket on her, I guess I had meant to kind of lay it over her, but since I was standing over her and hadn’t taken the time to lean down, it came out as more of a throw. The top of the blanket, still balled up, smacked her in the face. She didn’t move, or react at all. I wondered if she even knew what had just happened, and, if she did, what she thought of it. It didn’t matter though. Here was a young, black, penniless, filthy, schizophrenic, woman, lying, soaked, in her own menstrual blood, on a concrete floor, in a dilapidated hospital, in a devastated, ultra-violent, 100% Black neighborhood, three miles from Trump tower and its $60 cocktails. And I just aggressively hit her in the head with a blanked stained with blood from one of her young Black brothers shot to death on the same streets she sleeps in, gets raped in. I am sorry I hide this. People should hear it. I just spent six hours shopping for dog clothing online. I just mailed a $750 deposit for a pure bred standard poodle this morning. Because I can’t even hear it myself. I started fighting this war so long ago, and unlike those who never even cared to admit they have a role in this war, or that there’s even anything to fight, I have become affected more and more by the war and my identity in it. I am ultimately isolated and alienated, by my own mental illness, and the burden of the path that mental illness and the abuse I have suffered and witnessed has taken me down. And I come to the same conclusion I came to before my shift last night. I really need a fucking dog. Redacted I hated my mom, for so many years after high school. Simply for what she did to me. It’s crazy that I finally learned that my dad told her that he would leave her if she didn’t get mental help, and she refused to. That made perfect sense. I think the turning point, where I stopped blaming the person and started to feel compassion for what the disease did to the person, was my trip to Sand state. She had a guest bedroom and a guest bathroom in this house she’d been renting for a while. She’d tried to make everything perfect for me, had a clean towel in there and new toiletries if I needed them. When I went to take a shower that night, I turned on the water. Turned the nobs a bit. Waited. Turned them some more. And waited. Eventually, I figured out the hot water didn’t work in there. She had never had anyone stay with her. No one had actually ever used the guest bedroom, or bathroom. Redacted When I walked back to my bedroom from the bathroom, I glanced at the shelves and saw the toothbrush and toothpaste in the packaging on the top shelf. I’d bought them when I started the whole dating app thing. The one girl who had stayed over I guess was too drunk to use them. I offered in the morning if she wanted to shower and everything, but she just wanted to fuck more and then leave. I hoped that Nia would eventually use them. I’ll never know what was going on in that girl’s head. But I know God saved her a bullet by keeping her from wanting me. I think people like my mom and me (saying “my mom and me” is pure evidence of how much I’ve come to understand this year - I never would have said anything like that before), I think people like my mom and me need to live alone. Yes, when I was dancing violently to Juice Wrld a minute ago and then fell to the floor and spit on the floor, yes, I wouldn’t be able to act that way if I lived with someone else. And maybe keeping that bottled in wouldn’t even be bad for me. But still, it feels right to be alone. To flush all this out. It would just terrify and damage someone else. I wonder what my mom does when she’s alone. As kids, I just remember she would get depressed and watch TV for long, long periods of time. And then she would obsess herself with weird projects and work tirelessly on them. I just thought of something scary. I’m supposed to have bipolar II. But my mom got hospitalized. Did she have bipolar I? Ok I’m going to stop thinking about that and just finish this post the way I had planned to. I used to have all sorts of cool names I thought I could name my book. Now I’m thinking, “Living for Suicide: Meditations on Mental Illness, Sacrifice, and Being Alone” The title doesn’t even fucking mention Africa anymore Fuck I’m still going to accomplish something, right?

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