At first glance, you wouldn’t think that Victor Henriksen and I have anything in common.
Victor is a tough FBI agent who takes on the most dangerous criminals.
I am a nurse who works with medically fragile children.
Victor can definitely kick an ass or two.
My body has so many things going wrong with it that it’s getting to the point where the only thing “tough” about me is my fuck you attitude and the consistency of my flesh.
However, Victor and I do have something in common nonetheless, and here it is.
“My job is boring. It’s frustrating. You work three years for one
break, and then maybe you can save a few people…maybe. That’s the
payoff...So
yeah, sign me up for that big frosty mug of wasting my damn life.”
The nursing I do is not “sexy” nursing. It is not high energy, racing to save life and limb as quickly as possible ER nursing, although at any moment in usually stable case, I may have to drop everything and attempt to do just that.
The nursing I do involves caring for those with chronic conditions. I clean up a lot of poop, snot, and vomit. The patient I’m working with currently has a very rare congenital disease. This disease is terminal, but nobody knows how long this kid has because he is literally the oldest living person with the disease. Most kids who have this disease die before their fifth birthday. My patient will be twelve this year.
This kind of nursing is notoriously low paid. Home care nurses do not get paid time off. If I take a day off, it’s always on my dime. A lot of home care agencies treat their nurses like crap. The previous agency I was with asked me to work 60 hour weeks consistently and would have been fine with having me work a 72 hour week, but I drew the line. They had me work when I was sick. There was always the emotional blackmail of “the family really needs you.” Then when the inevitable happened and I fell asleep during a shift, both the family and the agency were more than happy to fuck me over.
You hear about the saintly nurse for whom the work isn’t about the money, it’s about the caring. I do care very much about every patient I’ve ever worked with. However, in many ways being in the medical profession is a big frosty mug of wasting my damn life, and no, it is not an option to just change jobs or to go back to school. I don’t know how to do anything else and nobody’s going to pay my way while I’m trying to get an education in some other profession. I can’t take the cut in pay to go work at a hipster cafe or new age book shop while I try to figure out my life’s purpose.
So that’s what Victor and I have in common. We both work in noble professions and have fuck all to show for it when the day is done.
I probably won’t die by being blown up, though. I’m guessing my kidneys will shoot the moon one of these days (fuck you diabetes) and I’ll be poisoned by my body’s own waste. Good times!
I didn’t want to hijack anyone’s post, but when I saw this picture and this quote
He’s already begun to forget himself, everyone he’s ever known, ever loved. Even you.
Soon, he’ll forget how to speak, how to swallow. Then he’ll die.
I couldn’t help thinking of a real life sibling relationship where that is the reality, because that is what Alzheimer’s does to those whose lives it devastates.
These brothers are two years apart in age, but the elder of the pair looks like he’s much older because of the disease process that had started destroying his mind. He was still able to recognize his younger brother at this point. He doesn’t any more.
I’ve always found a parallel between Sam and Dean’s devotion to each other and the devotion in this real life soul mate relationship, although I need to insert the caveat that while I eventually started shipping Sam and Dean as an OTP, I sure as fuck have never seen anything but a very strong platonic bond between these guys. Fuck’s sake, I could slap the living crap out of the idiots who do the whole “oh you ship Wincest so you must see all siblings as sexually involved, including you and any siblings you may have.” Fuck’s sake no, you moron. Anyone who thinks this way (and I use the term “think” loosely) is welcome to either tie raw steaks to themselves and jump into shark infested waters or jump aboard a rocket ship bound for the sun. I have no patience for your stupidity.
I have thought about Malcolm Young every day several times a day ever since I found out about what is happening to him. I doubt I will ever stop thinking about what this damn disease has done to him as long as I live. I know I will always remember, because if I find out that I’ve developed a similar disease process, I’m taking myself out before it can destroy my cognition to the point where I don’t remember.
My father had vascular dementia. At the time of his passing, he still recognized members of his family, but he was extremely confused about everything else.
It is better to die some other way than by one of the processes resulting in dementia. Pretty much any other way.
One of the true horrors of a disease such as Alzheimer’s is the fact that it takes SO FUCKING LONG to kill its victims. By the time it finally does, there is pretty much literally nothing left of the victim’s brain.
This is a real photo, comparing a slice of a brain from a person without Alzheimer’s at the time of death to one from a person with Alzheimer’s at the time of death. Let that shit sink in.
My aunt, who was a very tough lady who survived many years of abuse at the hands of her first husband and retained her sense of humor and generosity in spite of the things he did to her, has this fucking disease. It is getting to the point where my uncle (her second husband--I refused to call the first my uncle) is looking at the possibility of having to put her in long term care. He can’t stay awake 24 hours, and her wandering is becoming much worse.
I hate this disease. I hate this disease so fucking hard. I want to cry but I don’t have any damn tears. My tears would be useless anyway. It’s not like they could help anybody. So I seethe and am angry and it is literally affecting my heart, but I still can’t cry because that feels weak and because I’m afraid if I started I couldn’t stop. I have to function. I have a lot of shit that needs to get done.
I see so many parallels in this episode to what real sufferers of Alzheimer’s and their families go through. There are funny moments, yeah. There are funny moments in real life situations with family members with dementia too. Angus recalled how during the band’s final tour with Malcolm he was trying to look after his brother without making it seem like he was being condescending to him. When Malcolm protested that he didn’t need Angus and Brian Johnson following him because he was just going to the bathroom, Angus said “oh, us too. And we need to go together so that Brian doesn’t get lost.”
When my son was a baby, I worked for about 6 months as a private aide to a man who had Alzheimer’s and diabetes. He liked to tip one back but with his health conditions, that wasn’t a good plan. So his wife locked the liquor cabinet. When asked why, she told him it was because I had a drinking problem.
When working as an aide in a long term care facility, I would sneak into one patient’s room while she was asleep and remove all the dirty clothes in the bottom of her closet. The reason I had to play thief in the night with the laundry is because she’d become extremely upset if she saw anyone touching the clothes.
Moments like this are humorous, but there is nothing funny whatsoever about this disease.
This intelligent, independent, creative person who wrestled and won against addiction to alcohol and fought valiantly against the Black Dog and severe social anxiety inspired me to remain in the land of the living and fight back against those who bullied me. They were legion and they nearly pushed me to killing myself. Once I knew about this fellow, though, I realized he wouldn’t want me to, and his opinion was worth far more to me than all of their bullshit combined.
At the point when this picture was taken, he still recognized the person next to him although he often didn’t know where he was. She’s his daughter. He no longer recognizes her.
There is a picture from 2015 which shows not only confusion but fear in the once very alert and determined eyes. It’s fucking horrible.
In Regarding Dean, Dean is okay at the end because Supernatural is fiction.
The reality looks like this, only it doesn’t get resolved.
The reality is the words “he’s not in there at all any more” being spoken by a devoted younger brother regarding his best friend and soul mate.
I’ve never been able to finish reading the interview where those words were spoken. I had to stop at that point. I’ve never picked the magazine back up. I put it on a shelf where it has remained since.
If this were Supernatural, this might be the end result for these fellows, although I reckon Angus would probably end up with horns and a tail.
I think it is the end result in the afterlife, but not on this plane. On this plane, there is only separation, deterioration and death. If magic or miracles exist in the material realm, they are in very short supply.
I know that nobody here gets out alive. But as Glen Campbell’s wife said when talking about Glen’s Alzheimer’s, it’s better to die some other way.
I know there are people who will think I’m an asshole for saying this, but I wish that Malcolm Young’s body had ceased to function when he had a stroke in 2012. Then at least he would have remembered the people he cared about the most up to the end.
Hell, I think it would have been better for my father if he’d died at the point when he had his stroke. He struggled for six more years after that, although he had vascular dementia as opposed to Alzheimer’s. Still wasn’t a picnic by any means.
I think about those fools who feel that people my age (I’ll be 52 on February 15) aren’t “allowed” to be fans of shows like Supernatural. To them I say, fuck you. I need a world where magic is real and the two people who love each other the most in the world save each other always.
I wanted to talk first about those folks who come to Jared Padalecki and spill their guts to him. Jared is the actor who plays Sam Winchester on Supernatural. He lives with depression, and he created the Always Keep Fighting organization in order to help bring awareness to mental health issues and end the stigma on people who live with them.
These folks who tell their sad stories to Jared come in two classes. Some of them mean well but are very desperate and don’t have very good social skills. They tell Jared how much the AKF campaign means to them and tell him an awful and depressing story. This is inappropriate on their part, but they aren’t trying to be bad.
It makes me sad when I read things about how “pathetic” these people are, because I used to be one of those people. I still have the tendency when I get really depressed and am having high suicide ideation. I just try to confine it to dark and miserable posts rather than spilling it out on someone like Jared.
I would never go to a convention or meet and greet and try to tell the person or people I was meeting my life story at this juncture. I did send a brief bio to Jared for one of those mass emails for his birthday or such. I kept the gory details about my previous self-harm, which did leave scars, or my fight against my tendency to self-harm out of it. Reading such things would only make him feel sad and helpless. It wouldn’t do any good.
There is another class of people who want to spill their guts to anyone who will listen. These people are walking wounded too, but they aren’t the sort of sad souls I mention above who are simply desperate to be cared about but are severely socially impaired.
This class of people are sociopaths. The focus isn’t on their feelings of connection with someone like Jared. Their focus is literally “look at me!”
I’m not saying these people aren’t damaged. They are. However, they do not feel emotion in the same way a person who is not a sociopath does. A sociopath does not feel empathy. When a sociopath says they love someone, what they mean is that they are obsessed with that person. In truth, the person means no more to them than any other possession.
These people are good at pulling the “poor me” card to get attention. Where the first class of people would be saddened to have hurt Jared, the second class of people wouldn’t care that they did, so long as they get the attention they seek.
I dealt with such a person during the past two years. This person attacked me by going to various Tumblrs and leaving nasty replies to threads I’d commented on regarding things I’d written on my own Tumblr. It took a while to figure out that all the attacks were coming from the same individual using several sock puppet accounts, but when I did, I was not surprised at who was behind the curtain.
The reason for these attacks was because this individual, whom we’ll call Victoria, felt threatened by my expressions of sympathy towards the object of her obsession. We’ll call him Mitch.
When this individual discovered that Mitch was terminally ill, she went on and on about how terribly devastating this was to her. It was so awful that she had to stay home from school and nurse her wounded feels. There was a red flag in all this. Not once did she say anything about how sad this situation was for those people who were actually close to Mitch, such as his children and grandchildren, or his brother Mac, who is not only his business partner but his platonic soul mate.
Victoria had a plan to get backstage when Mitch and Mac’s band came to town so she could give Mac a long letter she’d penned about her miserable existence and how the only thing that saved her was being so deeply in love with Mitch. Her plan, which I seriously hope she was never able to implement, gave no thought to how tremendously uncomfortable such an action would surely make Mac feel.
Victoria was not planning this ill-conceived plot because she is overly emotional and misguided. I have actually had occasion to converse with her online, where of course she pretended to be friendly to me. I can assure you that she is emotionally cold. She does not care about Mitch, she cares about having other people praise her for her devotion to him. She said to me “I haven’t thought about what I’ll do when he dies, but I’m sure I’ll be okay.” That sort of statement is the hallmark of a sociopath.
Let’s look at this from Mac’s point of view. His brother, the other half of his soul, is critically ill and there’s nothing he can do about it. Along comes this young woman, young enough to be his grand niece or even great grand niece, telling him that she is in love with his dying older brother and she wants to give him a letter all about how much Mitch means to her.
Mac is a polite person. He would probably force a smile and thank her for her thoughts, all the while feeling like ice was climbing up his spine. If he read the letter rather than tossing it in the trash the moment she left, it would not make him feel good. It might just make him sick, or it might make him angry that this self-centered person felt the need to dump her problems on him without regard for the fact that he is constantly grieving for the loss of his best friend. He might feel conflicted, telling himself that he shouldn’t be angry at such an obviously sad and pathetic person.
In other words, spilling your guts in this fashion to people who are themselves struggling is an erroneous act at best and a cruel one at worst. Some people who do it are misguided. Others are malevolent.
When I had the opportunity to attend a meet and greet with Chris Isaak, one of my longtime musical heroes, there were so many things I wanted to tell him. However, I knew his time was limited. If I were ever lucky enough to be able to spend any significant amount of time with Chris, I would go into detail about why his music meant so much to me. I confined my revelations to telling him that Blue Hotel was the first of his songs that I heard, and when I introduced my son I said “Ian here was born in 1990, so he’s been listening to your songs since before he was born.”
Chris told me that his father had made the guitar case that he’s carrying in the picture that I had him sign. I said that was wonderful. I knew his father was a very important person in his life. If I’d had time, I would have told him that my father suffered a major stroke too. If there had been time, we probably would have bonded over talking about such things and maybe even developed a real friendship. Unfortunately there wasn’t time, so I respected his time.
Folks, what this boils down to is the fact that these people who mean so much to you have problems of their own. They have limited time and their emotional resources have limits as well. I have no doubt that Jared would love to help each and every one of you personally. I know he feels sad because he can’t.
For the people who actually care about Jared but may have dumped your problems on him, don’t beat yourself up. You will know better in the future.
There’s nothing I can do to change the actions of those who don’t care how their actions affect other people for the simple reason that they don’t care.
