Previous weight: 361.6
Current weight: 356.4
Delta: -5.2 pounds
My personal assessment of the past week: Weight loss? Excellent. Otherwise? Awful.
The reason I lost so much weight was because I was in the hospital yet again. I went into arrhythmia and needed my medication adjusted.
About six months ago my cardiologist tried to get me off my main heart-regulating drug, amiodarone. Amiodarone works damn good, but it’s got terrible side effects over the long term. We tried three different medications (multaq, verapimil and most recently propafenone) and every time I’ve had some sort of episode. I had one at Stardock, which was terribly embarassing, and one here at Somanetics, which was also terribly embarrassing.
So at 6 AM Monday morning, my pacemaker shocked me while I was asleep. Go to the hospital. Find out my heart rate is running wild and I’m having arrhythmia all over the damn place. So they put me back on amiodarone. Unfortunately, they had to keep me in the hospital to load me up with the stuff and get my heart rate down.
I’m out of the hospital now and taking rather large doses of amiodarone to build it back up in my system. The good news is that my heart rate finally seems like its under control again. My cardiologist agrees that I should get some weight off before we try changing my medication again.
The bad news…anxiety. It’s not terrible but it’s worse than it was before this happened, naturally.
As I look back over this blog…I’m really not the same person I was before October 2008 and it’s all due to the anxiety. And for god’s sake, it seems like every time I get a little better, get back to myself, something happens and all I want to do is distract myself (usually with World of Warcraft). I don’t want to talk, I don’t want to work, I don’t want to work on my own projects. Such extroverted things, difficult enough for an introvert like me, become impossible when I’m anxious. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to write this damn web post about it. I don’t want to do an episode of Let’s Play Starflight. I don’t want to work on Inaria. I don’t want to work on Planitia. I don’t want to set up my web store. What’s the point?
I might die soon.
Soon after everything that happened in October 2008, I voiced the opinion that I wished it were a year from then, because things would be back to normal.
It’s three years now, and they aren’t. I’ve done a lot of brave things…moving to Michigan knowing I was cutting ties with the cardiologist who best understood what I was going through was difficult. Weathering the layoff from Stardock and managing to get right back on my feet with another job. But I don’t feel brave. I feel crazy scared, all the time, unless I’m being distracted by a computer game.
I guess I should just come to grips with the fact that I’m never going to be the person I was again. I’m never going to be able to forget about the fact that hey, guess what? I’ve got a completely bum ticker and if it weren’t for modern medicine I’d be in the ground already.
Where do you go from there? Is there anywhere to go?
I don’t know. All I can do is keep plugging; my wife needs me, my kids need me.
But will I ever wake up happy ever again?
(Oh, and why the hell did my damn pacemaker have to go off while I was asleep? I haven’t slept well since, and frankly, sleeping is one of the few things I really like to do. I swear, it’s like some sort of Pavlovian thing. “Let’s shock him until he’s got nothing left to enjoy!”)
I can’t say that I really understand what you’re going through, but I do feel your pain. I check your blog most every day and I hope you get better, both in health and in happiness.
Also, you can’t be brave without being scared… The way you keep going, I think that’s pretty brave.
So just keep going!
Anthony,
I read your post earlier today, and waited to respond. I’ve been thinking about it all day, and trying to put something together that would be meaningful, but not completely “stalker-level creepy”, if you know what I mean.
Now you don’t know me from a hole in the ground, save for the fact that I’ve posted here a few times, but I feel that I’ve gotten to know a lot about you just by reading and seeing your work.
And just like the poster above “Kris”, I cannot honestly say that I “know what you’re going through”. But I think I understand some of it. While my own health is good, thank God, my mother’s health has been shite since I was a small child–I can remember dozens of instances of doing homework in hospital waiting rooms, staying over at grandparents and other relatives for weeks at a time because Mom was off in another specialty clinic, for another surgery. (She’s had over 30 of them.)
My point? Please don’t give up. Please don’t “Put the head down and keep plodding.” (That’s a mistake I’ve made too many times in my past. I just makes us angry, depressed, bitter, and empty.) Look around, and really think about what you have. Take joy in your wife. Take joy in your kids. Take joy in the fact that you have done and are still doing some damn fine work. And I mean “work” work as well as ViridianGames work.
Take joy in that there are people like me, who come to your blog every day, eagerly hoping that you wrote something new. Take joy in the fact that we actually _CARE_ about what you think, how you feel, how you are doing, even if you’ve never met us. (When I get my own website and dev-blog finished I promise I’ll send you the links. Maybe give you something to look forward to! Tit for tat, and all that. (Hey! That’s kind of catchy! Maybe I ought to put it on a t-shirt…? Uh, mebbe not.))
But I digress. My point is that you should find joy in all of those things. Don’t dread them as “responsibilities”–we don’t judge you because you didn’t feel up to posting a blog entry, or a screen-shot update, or a video, or whatever. Look forward to them as expressions of everything YOU. I certainly do.
Will your stress dissapate? Maybe not, but you just might get some respite. Many philosophers, from Zen to Christian to Greek to Atheist have posited, “Being happy and optimistic is not an outcome of our circumstances, it is a _choice_ we make. Sometimes that choice to be happy is a difficult one, but it can be done. And that is perhaps the greatest thing we can teach our children.” (Pardon the paraphrasing..)
Anyway, I’m glad the ticker is under control, and the weight is off. Please PTFSD, PUTDA (Pick Up The Damn Apple), and KCCS (Keep Coding Cool Stuff).
Cheers from a fellow grey-beard dev!
Found your blog while looking for videos of Powermonger for my blogs review section. I used your video as it contained all good info about a game and i hope it’s fine by you, please have a look at my blog ( http://spinningcubes.com ) and say if you thinks it’s OK :). About your current post i hope things are well with you, you might die soon or you might live another 50 years and then all these sad days would have been wasted so try to think =). I try to every day, i have a similar problem with anxiety and I’m eating anti-depressants drugs so the sad thoughts don’t fry my brain. All that remains is to try to face each day as it will be a great one =).