The northlondonhippy

Greet­ings and salu­ta­tions. Hello. Wel­come. Yes, I am still alive.

Well, I’m as alive as I can be, fol­low­ing my recent health troubles.

For the last 15 days I’ve been suf­fer­ing with seri­ous back trou­ble. I could barely walk for the first week or so, every step was pure agony. Sit­ting was agony too and lay­ing down was impos­si­ble. I was well and truly fucked.

I’ve been see­ing a chi­ro­prac­tor and I think he’s helped a lot. I’ve had count­less adjust­ments, start­ing with a home visit because I couldn’t get to his office. I’m walk­ing well now and have much less pain, I’m hop­ing to return to work later in the week.

This episode really freaked me out, I was prac­ti­cally crip­pled. I couldn’t even make it to the loo with­out assis­tance from Mrs. H, I couldn’t get dressed, pre­pare a meal, do any house­hold chores. I couldn’t even sit at my desk and use my iMac, I couldn’t use my lap­top for the first week or so. If it wasn’t for my iPhone, I would have been com­pletely cut off from the world.

There’s a sense of panic and des­per­a­tion that one is over­come with in these sit­u­a­tions and I was no excep­tion. As I sat upright on my sofa, for the fifth or sixth night, des­per­ately try­ing to snatch an hour or two of light, unsat­is­fy­ing sleep, dark and dan­ger­ous thoughts would bub­ble to the sur­face of my brain.

What if this is permanent?

What if this is the begin­ning of my slow, grad­ual health decline lead­ing to my pre­ma­ture death.

What if I don’t get better?

What if the excru­ci­at­ing pain never ends?

What if.…

I found myself hav­ing mini-panic attacks, hyper­ven­ti­lat­ing slightly and relief not com­ing through the codeine or spliffs.

Though my back may be improv­ing, I find myself filled with a lin­ger­ing, nag­ging depres­sion over my future.

Is this the begin­ning of the end?

They say that every sec­ond after your born, you are one sec­ond closer to death, so in the more gen­eral sense, the end has no begin­ning; or rather the begin­ning of the end, begins at the very beginning.

But that’s not what I mean. I just have this hor­ri­ble, deep feel­ing that my best years are well and truly behind me. It’s prob­a­bly true, as its undoubt­edly true that I’ve lived more than half my life already as the chances of me even com­ing close to 90 are slim to none.

I’m feel­ing my mor­tal­ity and I don’t like it. I feel like I’ve aged in the last fort­night, like my years have finally caught up with me. I don’t feel youth­ful, as I always have, instead I’ve felt like a decrepit old man.

The thought of a slow, painful slide towards death fills me with dread. I don’t want to suf­fer through a litany of minor and major health prob­lems until one of them finally snuffs me out. That just sounds horrible!

I sup­pose death is very much on my mind because of the death of my cat a few weeks ago, which I wit­nessed first­hand in all its mis­er­able, tor­tur­ous glory. While her death was mer­ci­fully quick, she didn’t go gen­tly into that goodnight.

Watch­ing her con­tort and strug­gle against the hand of the grim reaper has had a pro­found effect on me, though I am still try­ing to deci­pher what exactly what effect it has had. I’d never actu­ally been with any liv­ing crea­ture, human or ani­mal, at the point of death until her pass­ing three weeks ago.

My younger brother, who is far more spir­i­tual than I could ever hope to be, says I absorbed some­thing from this expe­ri­ence, which man­i­fested itself with my back trou­ble, or per­haps was this was the trig­ger for it. I can’t say I am convinced.

When the chi­ro­prac­tor was tak­ing my back­ground and his­tory, one of his first ques­tions was if I suf­fered any trau­mas recently; my cat died about a week before the real pain started, though I had sore­ness in my back a few days before it really hit me.

The chi­ro­prac­tor said that my back trou­ble was build­ing up over time, that the inflam­ma­tion had wors­ened to the point of spasms in my back mus­cles, caus­ing acute pain.

Is this a coin­ci­dence of tim­ing or defin­i­tive cause and effect? I couldn’t really say. You could con­vinc­ingly put across either side of this argu­ment and I just don’t know.

All of this has left me hat­ing aging and mor­tal­ity even more than before and I didn’t think that was pos­si­ble. What’s a self-confessed sociopath and ama­teur nar­cis­sist to do?

Keep hop­ing that some­one works out a way to down­load my brain into a com­puter after the death of my body, so I can con­tinue to exist, in dig­i­tal form. How else can I hope to keep post­ing dri­vel here through­out eternity?

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