I jumped back into William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition because it has been the only book to ever fully capture the idea of an online message board community for me. A message board created and hosted by a regular person (A South Korean police officer) to discuss and dissect, obsessively, a series of evocative film snippets released one at a time by an unknown film maker via the internet.
It's Lev Grossman's
The Magician King
for me. I re-read it just a couple months ago and my heart was so full of Bronzers, Buffistas, and Bronzistas that it just about wrecked me. That amazing feeling of belonging and rightness, the miracle of meeting these friends in person finally.
I find myself frustrated that I know I'm remembering my one meeting with ita wrong. I remembered her looking differently than she did, I remember her as a giantess but then I think that maybe I'm remembering what I expected her to be and she was of such a reasonable height that I was shocked and taken aback (of course, anyone over 5'1" appears to be an Amazon to me), and I'm just so mad at myself that I don't remember that evening sharper.
I don't remember it with clarity, because I had a migraine.
Stupid stupid effing migraines.
My husband discovered that alcohol was his major migraine trigger, and that if he cut out alcohol entirely, he stopped having migraines.
And my son, as we all hoped beyond hoping for, did what some male adolescents do and mostly outgrew his migraines. He's just turned 21, and got an A in his first community college class after missing all of high school.
That's great Betsy. I have a friend who can't consume anything aged or fermented.
Pain management is ridiculous. My dad was in a lot of pain around his hip replacement and we had to fight with his doctor for adequate pain management. And that would have been more difficult if I didn't have Anita giving me correct information on drugs and their side effects, since my dad's doctor was scare mongering about opiates and their side effects.
Betsy, that is great to hear. Wonderful news.
I'm so happy for your husband and for Will, Betsy.
Betsy, I've just threadsucked straight to your post, and was so pleased to read your news regarding your husband and your son (though it's of course impossible that he's 21. He can't possibly be that age, that must have been some typo). You're daily in my prayers, so the problem was definitely on my mind frequently, and it's such a relief to read that there are steps taken in the right direction. Hopefully soon for you, personally, as well.
ita did, ironically, make that dickhead's job easier.
Sometimes I still have to remind myself there was no Seamus for ita to meet, isn't that stupid?
Good God, some of Hubby's infusions were charged at $50,000 a shot or more!
The law covers the charge to the patient, not the insurance company.
Someone comes to you for pain meds. You treat them for pain or you treat them for addiction. Possibly, you treat them for both. But you effing treat them.
In a nutshell.
When I'm less angry - I'll never be less angry - when I'm able to modulate my emotions better, I might try to draft a version of ita's Law into a petition for Change.org. Or even one to put on the whitehouse.gov site, about changing the way pain medication management is handled. It probably won't do much, but if it gets enough signatures, they have to respond to it, which means they have to read it. There are so freaking many people on migraine and cancer support sites who are surely wrestling with this very same problem, I bet it could get enough signatures in a week.
Betsy, that's such great news, especially about your son.
