so i’m home … i’ve been home for a couple weeks now, and as far as i can tell have yet to actually do anything …
i am sure i must have, as i got here on the 1st and today is the 18th … so something must have happened … but i don’t know what it was …
i think at some point it must have involved cabbage …
i could prolly rattle off a page about how i feel … but i don’t want to … it’s all the same ‘i’m scared, i’m exicted, i’m sad’ … b.s. … and frankly … i’m sick of hearing myself talk …
so here is something else …
i started taking Mefloquin (no clue how that is spelled) … i have been pretty much unmedicated my entire life, so the idea of systematically tampering with my body chemistry doesn’t appeal to me … but then neither does dying from malaria … so i will take my chances with the drugs …
crazy stuff though … primary adverse side effect ??? … psychotic episode …
doc thought it would be a good idea for me to test it out for a couple weeks before i hit kenya … (don’t need it in ethiopia, as i will be above the mosquito line, and kenya is my launching point for sudan) …
extreme psychiatric incidents are pretty common they say, with 25% of people who take it experiencing some side effect … for most people, they say your dreams get crazy and vivid …
last night i had a dream i 24, but was playing hockey against all the guys i did when i was younger … for some reason we had this 3 way game going between drake and watrous and imperial … i was my team’s captain and scored more goals than i should have …
really made me wonder what ever happened to all those guys i used to play against all those years … i wonder …
was a pretty fuckin vivid dream though … i usually have a hard time prying myself out of bed, cuz let’s be honest, dreams are fun … so now that should even be harder .. which is exactly what i was looking for …
here’s hoping i don’t go psychotic … that would add a whole new degree of difficulty to christmas wouldn’t it …
drugs really do scare me though … i know that has a lot of people rolling eyes … but it’s true … when you take something every day or every week for a long period of time, little bits of chemical creep their way into the little nooks between cells … and change the way those cells work … sometimes this is the point … i mean … that’s why we take drugs after all … but they are not precise … so when you carpet bomb your body with something that helps you in your liver … who knows what it does to the nerve endings in your skin … or the chemical makeup of your spinal fluid … or the walls of your heart and lungs …
there are always side effects after all … and b/c our government looks out for us, they make sure that testing is done to determine what the side effects are … so we feel nice and safe popping pills every day at $2.65/pop …
but then … it’s business … and people’s lives are stake … so we better make sure we get that wonder drug to the market … sure we don’t actually KNOW HOW it works … or how the body will react after … oh … 30 years or so … maybe your liver will just stop altogether … or maybe you will develop strange allergies you never had before …. maybe the drug will accumulate in your testes over the 5 years that you take it … and 10 years later your son will be born with a severe allergy to wheat …
but that’s a small concern … i have restless leg syndrome, and if i talk to my doctor, he can fix me up with some little pills right away …
for now i feel like i am in one of those old choose your adventure books:
For a slow painful death from a mosquito borne virus, go to page 74
For an extreme psychotic episode with high risk of suicide, go to page 103
am i the only one that wanted to do both … (always spoiled i was)
