More things in heaven and earth

Oh my God! I got fan mail! I was so excited to see a comment on my last post that I nearly fell over. And it was from someone I don't even know! I checked out PSPam's profile and discovered that she is a fellow Hep C patient and has two blogs, both of which are chock full of all sorts of useful information about Hepatitis. I haven't had time to look too closely at her archives, but I would bet that her Hep C story is much more informative than mine about the actual disease and its treatment. Probably it would be hard to find a blog devoted to Hepatitis C that was less informative about the disease than mine.

Another week has passed and not much has changed. I've noticed occasional bruising at my injection sites, and also some itching and redness, but none of it is worrisome. A friend of mine told me that she went through gallons of cortisone cream to deal with the itching on her thighs from the shots, so before I started the treatment I went out and bought a tube of the stuff, which I have yet to use. Possibly it takes awhile for that side effect to show up. When I started the treatment, I was instructed to do one shot on each side of each thigh and then one shot on each side of my abdomen, which would give me six weeks of healing before I had to use an area again. My first four shots went fine, but the first abdomen shot turned out to be the last. For one thing, I was a bit squeamish about sticking a needle into my belly. There's nothing in my thighs but muscle and fat, but my abdomen contains quite a lot of essential working parts. Even though I knew, intellectually, that the needle was nowhere near anything that could be damaged, I still didn't like it. I did the shot anyway, though, and then discovered that the injection site was bruised and swollen for a couple of days, which didn't happen on my thighs, so I decided to skip the abdomen shots. I now have a four-week rotation of shots on my thighs, and that seems to be working just fine. I'll keep an eye on the injection sites and see if cortisone cream is indicated.

On the thyroid front, things are looking up. All of my symptoms have lessened, including the deafness, which is a huge relief. I'm not "all better," but I think I might be getting there. I won't have my thyroid tested again until early August, and I hope the symptoms will have abated completely by that time. It takes six weeks to get accurate lab results after a change of dosage, so we should know where we stand by then. I don't know how long it takes to stabilize, but from the way I feel now, my guess is that my levels will still be slightly low at the six-week point. Dr W needs to bear in mind that Interferon can lower thyroid levels, so it's possible that I'll need more of both types of thyroid this year than I will when I complete the treatment.

I saw an old friend last weekend, someone I haven't seen since before I got clean. He was in town for two days, and we spent most of the day together on Sunday. At one point we got into a heavyish discussion of free will and the power of positive thinking. He lives his life with gusto and enthusiasm, and he tends to get a bit didactic on the subject of making things happen. The motto he lives by is, essentially, go for your dreams with everything you've got and you will get what you want. I agree with the first part, but not necessarily with the second. My experience of life has been that if I pursue my dreams with everything I've got, I will get what I want if it's meant to be, and I won't if it's not. John would say that if I didn't get it, it's because I didn't really want it, but I don't agree with that, either. There have been things I wanted with all my heart that I didn't get. The best I can do in that situation is to accept that it's not going to happen and stop wasting time and energy trying to bend the world to my will.

This led to an argument about free will. I know that my opinions on the subject are not popular, nor are they particularly digestible for most people, but I can't help how I feel about it. I can't make myself believe something. I would love to believe in fairies, but I just don't. I would love to believe in heaven, but I just don't. And I would love to believe in free will, but I just don't. It has to do with my spiritual beliefs, which aren't really beliefs at all but something much less cognitive, something below the level of language. I won't go into that here, but I will say that when I read Spinoza it struck a chord. He gave voice to what I have always sensed. I am a hardcore determinist, just as he was. How I arrived there was by looking back over my own life and trying to see the stepping-off point of various paths I ended up on. I was never able to find the beginning of any of them. I would think, "Where was the initial choice I made that got me onto this wrong road? Or that right road?" And I was never able to find it. I would go back farther and farther until I reached birth and never find the beginning. The way I see it, each action in my life has led inevitably to the next and has come inevitably from the last. I see no free will there. Each "decision" I've made in my life, and each resulting action, have been determined by everything that has gone before.

I've taken that further because of my sense of what God is and what the world is, at bottom, but I suspect that my belief system has been informed, at least somewhat, by all of the reading I've done in my life. I learned to read when I was eleven months old, before I could talk, even, and I've never stopped. I survived my childhood by reading stories. I often say that books were my first drug of choice. I could lose myself in a story and forget, for awhile, the reality of my life. Not that my life was so awful or so traumatic that I needed to escape from it, but nevertheless I felt the need to go someplace else. So I read stories. I have been steeped in literature all of my life, and I'm sure it has had an effect on the way I see the world. The characters in the stories I read and reread never do or say anything other than what they did or said the first time I read the story. I can read a book for the fith time, or the twentieth, and not a word of it will be any different. My perspective may be different, but the story is the same. I suspect that because of this, I have come to see the story of my life as a book which has already been written, and I'm just playing a part decided upon ahead of time by the author.

Wherever it comes from, I'm stuck with it now. I can't see things any other way. I tried feebly to explain to John that I don't feel it lets me off the hook in any way. I still have to take responsibility for my life and my actions. Regardless of the reason why I did something, I still did it and I still need to accept responsibility for it. But it relieves me of the burden of the outcome, and it frees me of the fatal tendency of taking any one decision too seriously. It's liberating, too, in that, if I'm simply playing a part which has already been written, my only real responsibility is to play it with all my might.

None of that makes any difference, though, in my day to day life. As I said to John, ultimately all of that is just mental masturbation. I can't live my life by it because I don't know what's coming. I still have to make decisions and take action without knowing what will come of it. The only time it's helpful is when I look at the past, when I need to let go of an outcome, or when I look at the actions of other human beings. If I don't believe in free will for myself, I have to extend that to them as well, and that takes care of any impulse I may have to harbor resentment. Obviously I have a way to go in my efforts to live by the belief system I've formed. I still have trouble with difficult decisions and I still have to deal with resentment from time to time. Spinoza's prescription for a happy and contented life was self-examination. Examine your emotional responses to the events of your life, down to the roots of them, and over time you will learn to relax and allow life to happen as it will. At least, that's what I've managed to glean so far. He's a bit opaque, I have to say. It's difficult reading. Possibly I got that out of it because that's what I wanted to get out of it. It's the road I'm already on, and it's the road that suits me.

I admire John for his enthusiasm and for his ability to pick himself up each time he gets knocked down, and I'm grateful to have people like him in my life because of my Eeyore-like tendencies. I do believe in pursuing my dreams, but I've dealt with so many obstacles, disappointments and setbacks in my life that I sometimes forget about that belief and want to give up. The step work I've done in the last few years has been, in part, an attempt to rid myself of some old, self-defeating beliefs and attitudes about life, which I developed early on as armor against the disappointing difficulty of things in general. If I always expected the worst, then I wouldn't be disappointed when the worst occurred. And what I have learned is that under the veneer of cynicism was a hitherto unsuspected core of optimism. Removing that armor has been a painful process, though, and has left me feeling raw and exposed. The challenge now is to resist the urge to replace the armor when things don't go my way. So far, so good.

Next week I will find out if I still have a viral load. Despite previous disapointments, I fully expect to be negative. Despite this unpromising beginning, I fully expect to clear this disease in the fifty weeks of my treatment.