A Cursed Life

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: A doc - who is most know for making lots of mistakes, while having a big ego that refuses to admit wrongdoing - is told a med plan is turning out to be a mistake, but his ego makes him stick with the plan instead of listening… which, of course, leads to three months of absolute hell, as the one mistake leads to an improbable run of terrible misfortune, impossibly bad timing to maximize damage and consequences, and the resulting symptoms entering into a feedback loop that amplified everything wrong!

I knew it was coming - in that I knew the first month would have setbacks, and I’d be limited in making changes because timing landed me a doc who wasn’t familiar with my case for two months, and he definitely wouldn’t just take my word on things - but I could not have anticipated the constant amplification coming from the cumulative horror. Stress is what did me in. Knowing all I could do was survive for two months ate at me, until stress manifested in some of the worst lower back spasms I’ve ever had. This meant no sleep, extra pain, and the aforementioned feedback loop of doom - which made focus impossible, so I couldn’t write any proper updates. All I could do was throw out quick updates and apologies for my condition on Twitter when I got a few seconds of thought. (Checking my Twitter - @chrispco - is the best way to keep track of what’s happening, should extended silence here make you fear I finally died.)

Well, my three torture months came to an end. I saw my incompetent main doc again - note that I’m trapped with him, cuz he broke me so badly no other doc would ever touch my case - switched to the med I needed to be on… and promptly got destroyed by Medicaid and my pharmacy both deciding that doing their job was optional! My new treatment plan set things up so 80% of my coverage was by own medication. A medication I’ve been on, and which Medicaid has covered, for two years. One that would ALREADY be fully authorized if the replacement doctor hadn’t misinterpreted instructions and placed me on an older script instead of what I should’ve been on. And so I got to go a week without 80% of my covered, just cuz the universe truly hates me!

Now things are in place, if super damaged from my loss - we all know my doc won’t replace meds I had to use to keep me from dying, ending in ANOTHER week of inadequate coverage, eight? - and, lo and behold, the first day I was back on my correct plan I BEGAN SKETCHING AGAIN! My treatments work? (Doc: “If they worked, then why are you always getting worse? You got proper coverage for two weeks, then poor coverage for two weeks, and now you’re worse! Clearly the plan was never gonna succeed!”)

I’m on my way to prepping an actual Patreon post connecting all my recent sketches, but I’m using this “Tijo is cursed” pic for an apt summary of my condition in this placeholder/update post, so you know I’m here and will be [slowly?] cobbling the new post together as I [even more slowly?] enter a stabilization process. The new sketches are on Twitter already, but you’ll be getting background stories and full explanations over here.

Look, if any of you are wealthy enough to have the type of doc who is more medication order form than real doctor, I could sure use a pile of meds I can keep in my safe, so I don’t fully collapse the next time the callousness of American healthcare burns me. Break the law for me, people. Also, if any cop is watching, this is a joke and I don’t mean it. (Before you ask: My body has bad reactions to almost all meds, and that includes the now-legal marijuana. I’ve tried it twice in my life, and it made me horribly sick each time! Also can’t take any anti-anxiety pills or sleep meds, so I’m forced to experience the full brunt of every high stress, no sleep night!)

Seriously, the reason I lost my career, my savings, deeper connections to my friends/family/fans, is due to major collapses that ALL happened when my treatment plan THAT WORKS IF YOU’D JUST LET IT HAPPEN had significant interruptions. My “mystery” health condition has been solved like 5 times, only for switches to new insurance plans to destroy me as they blocked approvals for months, or my treatments being interrupted by devastating scheduling mishaps, or multiple instances when I plan ahead and tell the pharmacy to be read to handle a new script, only for them to both it so badly the delays get tripled and my body gives out, and even the “God is real and wants you dead” incident of me having my best week in years, with a life-saving treatment plan change (that was the world’s most common sense change, so docs refuse to ever acknowledge it), only to have it negated when ONE OF MY TEETH EXPLODED, followed by a doc doing the “you say you don’t feel well NOW, so I’ll ignore the tooth explosion and conclude the med change didn’t help! So we’re gonna halve your coverage instead!” BS. This one was followed with the office hiring THAT doc, btw. My first visit with him resulted in him saying I’m a liar, and threatening to boot me from the program (which would kill me) because he refused to believe… the data that was on his screen, and verifiable if he would tilt his head down slightly, and it has gone down as one of the worst days of my life, since it was the change to fix me and instead he made a giant mess of things. Next time I saw him? He made a math error, caused my body to fail (the first of many math error collapses he caused) and nearly kicked me out of the program again, cuz I took the blame instead of him taking responsibility!

I should be publishing Precocious book 10 right now, because I would still be going strong in a world of even 5% fairness. It should not have been possible for stuff this awful to happen, much less this horrific stuff happen to me on a monthly basis!

As you can tell, I have a lot of resentment built up. The curse is that I’m not strong enough to be my own advocate, because it’s three disabilities stacked in these moments, and I just don’t have the infrastructure to compensate for my failings, so I get the full brunt of a broken system. Please forgive the wrath. I try to purge it all from my brain so I can reset my thoughts, rather than let things fester until my back goes out. I’m starting to draw again, so let’s hope I keep momentum this time. (We already know the docs could destroy me, as detailed above, but let’s pretend doom isn’t inevitable!) Purge and move on. One of these days it’ll take!

(Standard disclaimer that I kinda zone out and autopilot while writing these posts, so it goes very stream of consciousness. I won’t remember all that got dumped here when I snap back to being present. It’s quasi fugue stating! Going back to check for typos and coherence would force me to focus, which would trigger a migraine and big old collapse, so I post and move on!)