Just A Peek

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Port St Lucie, Fl, United States
I'm not the man I was, I'm not the man I want to be. I am the man I was, I am the man I want to be. Today: This is the man inside of me. Interests and Passions: Many forms of creative expression; the strange, mysterious, and unexplained; and personal and social transformation.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Accidents, Injuries, and Diseases

Besides doctors and nurses, does anyone really like to be in hospitals--or any other medical facility for that matter? All my senses become 'on-guard', because of the plethora of triggers: the smell of Ethyl alcohol, the moaning of the sick and dying, the sight of blood and vomit, the cold waiting-room seat, the taste of hospital food, the encompassing shroud of foreboding, etc...
I think, however, that the main difference between most people and how they deal with such things is how one was raised to deal with the adversities, tragedies, and taboo-subjects enmeshed within our lives. For someone born reasonably healthy, I'd never enjoyed much time being in that same place. Being of Celtic background, 'dirt-laundry' was never shared or exposed--including mental and physical maladies. My family was loaded with them, from which I would not be exempt. My siblings and I rarely saw anyone in the medical field unless it was an emergency--and that was loosely defined. (On the other hand: Today, people use the emergency room like a baby uses a pacifier.) The way I see it today, it's not only what we experienced in health issues , but even more poignant, it was what we were exposed to in relation to the collateral damage related to these types of matters. Many times I was left to process things by myself, and consideration to the mental and emotional issues that often accompanied such experiences were left unattended--sometimes even ignored. What I witnessed had as much, if not more, impact on me than what actually happened to me physically. Before I was 6, I saw: a pot of hot coffee spill over my sister, my brother's split-open head from a fall to the couch, and a husband and wife fighting and the wife was hit over the head with an old-fashioned frying pan--just to name few examples. The smell of burning-flesh, the sight of a loved-ones brain-matter and blood gushing from a woman's eye socket; all indelibly marked in my memory and left unexplained and twisted in denial and false-truths. At an early age I was admitted to a hospital for a 'stiff-neck'. I still don't know what the hell it was except that I experience 3 days of lonely-fear. Even before I was a young adult I saw: a axe slice into my brother's knee and watched , not blood, but fat oozing out of him; one of my sister's ride-by in an ambulance with a ripped-up face after falling off a speeding-bike down a stony road,a small car flip over several times and the driver crawling out as a bloody mess, my father cut off his thumb off in a powerful window fan, friends 'beat-to-a-pulp' by drunken fathers,and this is the short list. As for some of my maladies, I had: the worst cases of eczema and acne, all over my body--for years. The emotional pain far outweighed the physical uncomfortableness's--and those moments by themselves were many. Between the two, I produced a constant flow of puss that continually soaked my clothes and provided fodder for the constant mocking from peers and teachers alike. (The fact that my parents smoked non-stop everywhere(including an enclosed car) didn't help much either towards our overall good health.) My nervous system was stretched to the limit constantly, and the only real relief and solution came when I became a daily drinker at the age of eighteen. It didn't work for my parents, but I was determined to make it work for me. Actually, it worked most of the time; however, it was a short-lived solution. I began to mimic my parents and most adults of the time, and began dealing with life on my terms. The insanity increased, and I eventually began to perpetuate the same behaviors and results. Everyone else was the problem, and there was plenty of blame to go around for others--and eventually self-pity and disdain for myself. I knew it all, but had so much to learn. What I was exposed to as a child, I was now experiencing the same two-fold--through my own participation. In some ways the alcohol and drugs saved my life, but it was the absence of them that gave me an opportunity to be reborn. The problem now lied in the fact I was thirty going-on fourteen-and I had to make a daily decision to willingly move towards doing the work in order to 'begin' to grow-up. It wasn't until years later in therapy that I uncovered some others reasons I choose alcohol and drugs to deal with the strangeness that accompanied and inundated my life experiences--as well as psyche.

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