Chronic fatigue keeps me practically bedridden for a week

I hate when that happens as I always like people to be able to rely on me, but Jack's eviction and his condition afterwards was enough to send me into that week of mourning manifesting in extreme fatigue. Now it was alcoholism pure and simple on his part. Everyone has a different pattern of drinking, and when Jack started drinking you would want to run for the hills. I don't really blame management for his eviction. In fact, if anything they might have waited too long on his last binge. I thought he was about five days from death then and it turned out that he developed a raging case of blood poisoning from infections due to his scrapes and cuts while drinking and would undoubtedly have died if they had not caught it in time and treated him for 11 days in the hospital.
Now I have found out that the cause of his second inexplicable meltdown was getting the news that one of his kids had died. Well, that's a big one, so now I can sort of understand a lot better why he stumbled again after so many people had rallied to try to help him sober up. Jack has lived here ten years and a lot of people felt they had a connection to him. That was the kind of guy he was. But I think he thought he was superman or something. Not even he could come back from such heavy bouts of drinking without being evicted, rendering him homeless, and hardly even able to cope, which at the time seemed like it might be a death sentence.
I have not heard what happened to him, but I hope he is on the road to recovery somewhere rather than dead.
In the meantime I was going to have a period of mourning, inevitably, for the kind of person he was when he was sane and sober. I always paid tribute to him for that. He kept the monster at bay for five years. And I could see at times what a struggle he was having to do it.
Which tells me we can never stop studying alcoholism which has a grip on so many people.
Then on top of that I had to poison myself with my own out of date food. I have learned my lesson about eating out of date food I hope. I drank just milk yesterday and finally ate a little bowl of oatmeal last night. I am going to have to be careful what I eat for a few days, but I am pretty much recovered.
I eventually have to tell people that if I disappear for a few days that just means I had to take some recovery time for something. My chronic fatigue is connected to probably scarlet fever in childhood as well as an inordinate amount of stress due to my Dad's drinking and coping with molestation by two of his hired men. It compromised my stamina and would start manifesting whenever the stress was extreme. This was undoubtedly my body's way of saying limitations had been reached as to the stress a human can stand.
The fact that too little is known and understood about what different kinds of extreme fatigue can mean can be very dangerous. The worst thing that can happen when you are already compromised is to experience extreme stress from some new source. This you try to avoid at nearly all costs. It's like having a car accident when you are already very sick. So when I am in quite a long period of recovery I try to avoid any new stresses like the plague.
Everybody comes to understand the fatigue pattern that goes with their own diseases and health conditions as with MS and diabetes. Any disease is going to involve fatigue. Serious fatigue. That is the body manifesting limitation. It's saying, "you can't do this any longer without rest." Whatever it takes, retreat, distancing to relieve the demands on the body to react.
Just because I don't know the exact point of origin of my condition, I have had a time with doctors. I am better off treating myself. I have talked to quite a lot of people who say mono started all their problems with chronic fatigue. Mono is their point of origin, even when doctors were saying there was no medical evidence of it. That just means they have not researched it, and are not likely too as long as a great many more people are sick with something else. AIDs, diabetes, alcoholism, cancer, heart disease, these are all conditions about which a great deal is known because so many people have these diseases attention must be focused on them. So I had to be content with the idea that there were mostly no answers about my condition, just speculation. But I remember whining to everyone for months, "What do I have? What could this be? Surely I am not the only person in the world to be knocked out for two years and not know what it is!" This was when I was having some long terrible bout of it that never seemed to end. Chronic fatigue for months, which is why I had to seek disability. I finally figured out that work was doing it, something in my body was burned out, so if I worked very long I'd soon be running on empty. Oh, it gets difficult at times being your own doctor. But I figured that is why God gave me a brain, to figure out what was mysterious, and what about it was real and what wasn't.

Doc works on his 'Blue' character today for the new video series

He brought out those wonderful blue glasses of his you can't see out of. They are perfect for Blue. He uses them to flash blue lights and signal to his space ship. That Doc is an inventive character. I worked very hard revising two scenes. But we did clash like a couple of betas ( in Doc-Rick's picture above). However I could not help but appreciate his originality. Since I met Doc I know that alcoholism is a disease that takes a miracle almost to cure. In fact, "Blue" is full of alcoholics Jessie (me) is trying to save. We are not yet ready to upload to Youtube. We need to practice some more, but with an alcoholic actor practice tends to irritate rather than make better. Depends on how far gone he is.

3- A superiority complex cripples the intelligent drunk

Here Doc and I are back to discussing how he refuses to take his drinking problem seriously. I am saying in this video how my father would always deny that he had a drinking problem and would abuse us for saying he did. His superiority complex kept him from admitting he had any serious faults. He was arrogant. He acted like if you had money you did not have to concede any flaws. His lack of humility made it impossible to have a civilized discussion with him. Our discussions would always turn into big fights, which we would sometimes engage in out of desperation or self defense as his superiority complex made him very bossy and controlling. He knew best. The last communication I had with him before he was found dead was a great big sneer. Sneer at the way I was living my life, my poor choices in men, etc. etc.
But my father had quit drinking for the most part, although he was in serious trouble with the law at the time of his death for a drunk driving charge. He had crossed the yellow line to pass a car and hit a car headon coming toward him he apparently was so drunk he did not see. In the presence of the cops, he tried to open another beer twice! They were waiting for the ambulance, the tow truck, etc. One of the passengers in the other car got his leg broken. Otherwise the 4 people involved in the wreck, including my dad, seemed to be 'okay,' although I believe that the terrible blow he suffered from the steering wheel nearly impaling his chest affected his heart, causing his death 9 months later. Both cars were totalled. He was driving a practically new Cadillac de Seville (hard top convertible)a beautiful car he had paid cash for.
Doc has still not got humble enough to shut his drinking down! Sober up. He has never sobered up in the 3 years I have known him. I have never had the chance to connect to a guy before as intelligent as well as talented as he is. I don't think there is anything he could not have succeeded doing if he had set his mind to it. He showed talent as a musician and artist in his younger years as well as sales. His acting abilities made him a super salesman, so he got so he would work only when he had to, basically because he hated sales. But he was never encouraged to go into the arts which is probably what is at the seat of his drinking problem. He 'wasted' many years doing something he hated doing. He loves the arts, but as far as I can see the german lutheran community he grew up in was very controlling. It is as though they were pulling his strings all his early years and he is still drinking to 'show them' he cannot be bossed. What a destructive way to rebell.
I keep trying to get through to Doc through all the stubbornness he has developed about throwing his life away if he chooses to do so. Making something of himself was actualliy what he was taught to do, only there were only a few acceptable ways to do that. For a phenomennally gifted man this was almost a death sentence, but I got the same kind of pressure from my dad to abandon any foolish notions about making a living as a writer, playwright, etc, and had to fight him constantly over my bad choices and impractical ideas. A lot about ranching bored him to death, but he could drink, which he would not have been able to do and succeed had he pursued the profession of law in college which is what he set out to do. He was going to have to be too disciplined even to get through the course. Ranching was about the only work he could still do whilst seriously trying to drink himself to death. At forty he was almost finished, and then he rallied enough to quit drinking for the most part.
I don't know if Doc will ever rally at 71 to quit drinking. But he is slowly departing this life through his alcoholism. I am still exploring his capacities to think and communicate despite his drinking, but it is a difficult frustrating task at times. I suppose one of these days it will be either good-bye Doc or good-bye Gerry. We can't keep on like this too many more years. We are an addicted nation.

Lets see, where am I?

I do have to take stock of my world now and then. I finally recovered from the migration and am now trying to set up a routine on blogspot. Plus make my videos which I must do to keep Doc from driving me crazy. We are getting ready to film the third and last episode on the Intelligence series tomorrow, but today we did a series I wanted to do about Planning my next life time. It turned out that this needed to be done to keep me from taking up with any more alcoholics in my next life. Doc being one of the worst alcoholics on earth has cured me. That will no longer be my mission. But this is the alcoholic age. Which I talk about in our series. Doc is burning the disc right now. So you see we never lack for subjects and will probably be making videos right up until our demise. He will either drink himself to death or he will drink me to death.
I enjoy making these videos of conversations between people. I suggest that you all do it, too, if you have the camera. Photos are good but videos are even better. I would love to view a conversation on film between you and your husband, or BF or whoever is around.
I have been shocked about what has happened to several journalists, including Carlene of Horseshoe Bend who had a very bad fall and broke her wrist in all kinds of ways. She is laid up for I don't know how long. I relate to Carlene because she and I have both made our living waitressing. I write and read a lot and I thought my partially disabled body would go right straight to hell if I did not get an active job. I feel sorry for women who do have to work at sit down jobs. By the time they get to and fro from work and their families taken care of they have no time to run 30 minutes on the treadmill, and as a result are gaining weight. I am sure Carlene will recover because she is in shape from running probably ten miles a shift, especially an eleven hour one which is an eternity in waitress work. She is such a worker, though, she probably had to fall before she would take a much needed rest.
Then came a huge shock with Donna having a heart attack and three bypass surgery. I have snagged so many of her graphics. I just hope she can cut back on her busy schedule, stop smoking or whatever else the doctor recommended as we want to see her around for a long time, even if she must limit herself. All of us have benefited from her journal This and That and Hockey, too. I think of her as the ultimate hockey mom. Sarah Palin gave her a little run for her money nationally, but nobody could be a more devoted fan of her beloved hockey team than Donna. I am sure all of you have the links to the journals of these two well known bloggers. Great ones, both of them.
Now I must confess that my life long habit of reading so limits my journal reading time I am not able to get around to everybody very often. It may be months before I see you, but when I run onto a book like Cherie Blair with a subtitle like "Speaking Up for Myself" I just have to stop and read. This memoir by the wife of the formeer Prime Minister of England, Tony Blair, is just fascinating to me. I just read where Hillary and Bill came to stay with them, and then they went to the U.S. and visited them at the White House. I did not know a thing about Cherie Blair, so I have hardly been able to lay the book down. But I regard her as just another journalist I just have to read.
I also just read a memoir called "Madness" about a bi polar woman with one of the worst cases of mental illness I have read about. It is by Marya Hornbacher who also wrote "Wasted" about her anorexia and bilimia. I am interested because I think my sister who was bilimic might have been bi polar and even though she died of ovarian cancer, she might have evaded that had she not been too manic and too depressed in cycles. Perhaps there are a lot more women with extreme mood swings who are not able to handle cancer threats in order to save their lives. Perhaps a mental illness contributes to their demise. I feel I need to investigate and this memoir is a riveting piece of writng. I got these two books at the public library, just hot off the press.
So if you don't see me often, but I have read you before, I will be back in time to check how you are doing. I read as much as I can and this is the best I can do. And I will understand if you don't read my journal very often either. I am not going to send out a notice every time I post, just once in a while if I really want to call your attention to one. I think in the age of blogging we all have tons to read we can't get around to, blogs we want to read, books we want to read, videos we want to watch. I noted that Donna was covering a lot of journals and she may have to cut back. Boring but sometimes necessary. I don't know if Carlene can even type in her condition. So what do you think?