State of Irony
Just up through today, Monday July 26th, I have helped my Brother Grant and Brother-in-law Julian with computer problems; my Grandson Stephen with his request for Online Schooling; my Son Paul with stuff (I won’t discuss here); my Son Ryan with faxing data; my Mother with AT&T & Medical Billings and my Daughter Julie. Why do these acts fall under a state of irony? Well, if all these people knew I was being treated, along with everything else, for depression (and they should know being my relations), would they trust me with handling their affairs? To be honest, I myself do not feel that I am suffering from depression these days, but when Kaiser Permanente first started treating me for this problem, I was depressed…but more on that later.
My doctor at Kaiser wrote prescriptions for anti-depressants and a three month’s leave of absence from work. When that produced no appreciable results, he repeated the actions chiding me and telling me to straighten up and act like a man. Problem was I had to stop driving because I was falling asleep driving and during meetings at work. The second time he told me I had to see a psychiatrist (just once) so I went to see the guy (no couch so I was not sure of his actual abilities). He asked me what the hell my problem was and I told him I keep falling asleep and just want to be left alone. Then he leaned forward across his desk and with his best rat-boy like impression he sneered, “I didn’t ask you how you felt or what was bothering you; I asked what your problem was!” After waking up (because I kept falling asleep, remember?) I asked him to repeat the question. He was not amused but repeated it anyway in the same, rat-like manner. I reiterated that I couldn’t stay awake…and then proceeded to fall asleep again. Waking up one more time, I caught him telling me that “…there has to be more to it…you can’t sleep due to the depression”. I won’t tell you about falling asleep during this interrogation anymore; just picture it occurring within a time span of about every 30 seconds to one minute.
At the time, my wife, now a recovering alcoholic God love her, was still filling most of her days with extremely unique and imaginative ways of how to acquire money for purchasing liquor…so in self-defense (I kept depicting this small rat-like creature sinking his fetid tooth into my arm thereby giving me rabies) I blurted out something about her drinking being a problem. Keep in mind that we had been married about 25 years at the time when I tell you his final disposition (since my 45 minutes were up already) was “Get a divorce.” I answered, “Excuse me?” …and he repeated himself. To keep from squashing him like the little toad he was I just stood up and told him to perform a sexual act upon himself and crawled out of his office (I found myself on the floor after falling asleep again).
Now here’s the Irony in the suggestion that my lack of sleep was causing my depression; it turns out that once I found an actual qualified ENT at Kaiser, he diagnosed my Obstructive Sleep Apnea. He explained that my weight gain and lack of sleep (which he indicated had almost killed me) were caused by the Sleep Apnea and therefore, my depression was caused by lack of sleep not the other way around. Unfortunately, no one monitored me and my condition worsened again causing me to evolve from a C-Pap machine to a Bi-Pap (much stronger version) after I became the sole support for 9,000+ users; 24 hours a day; 7 days a week at work, but that’s another story for another day. I wouldn’t even state that this MAAS qualifies as a feel good story for you except for the fact that people seem to feel better about their own lives when they hear how much someone else’s sucked.
Next week's 08-02-2010 (#152) title: TBD
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