A follow up to today’s earlier posting “turning point”; again, a lightly edited version of e-mail to family and caregivers.
As an addendum, a note on yesterday and last night.
Yesterday went from 3:05 am through 6:30 pm, and I was busy essentially all the way through, almost as busy as Tuesday. Incorporating the new table in my bedroom into its new services, which meant moving lots of things around from other places, and re-thinking the physical arangements of these new, very different, rooms.
Getting a grocery order. Taking out the trash and the recycling. Collecting problems with the way things work on my new iMac (still many oddities), to talk with Ned Deily, good friend and tech adviser.
Who then came to install a new printer and test it out. Eventually, I scanned one of my collages and made a copy of it, to display (using removable adhesive stickers, not holes in the wall, which have to be done by the maintenance guys) on the wall of my bedroom.
(It now turns out that only one of all of my comic homoerotic collages — there once were exhibitions of my work — that I have with me here is not X-rated, and so they can’t be displayed in a place where people (like the various service workers at Avant) might come across penises in art, so only this one (“Prison Break”) is now displayed in my bedroom. Sorrow.)
Then in the middle of the day was the appointment with Luis Alvarez, my nephrologist, with all the bad news.
I collapsed into bed at 6:30 and then slept, soundly, with lots of high-quality sexual dreaming, to 6:34 in the morning. Wow. Felt ready to attack a new day with gusto, on a strangely new schedule (I haven’t started a day so late in many years). Morning vitals suggested terrible things in my subliminal world: bp 162/105, very high for me, heart still racing at 96 bpm (something of which I had no sensation; but then we’ve known for a long time that I have absolutely no perception of atrial fibrillation or just waves of high blood pressure).
(Note: I can bring my bp way down through self-hypnosis, but then I’m off in this other state and not conscious at all, so I can’t actually do anything then. But I can (usually) “go away” on call, as a kind of parlor trick; its genuine value is that it can take me away from most kinds of pain.)
So a strange random day today, just picking at things that come up. Sort of aimless. I think I’ll just let that play out, let my my subconscious run the show.
(Yesterday I told Ned the story of when prednisone saved my life, from a potentially fatal asthma attack — note: I no longer even have asthma — and then (apparently) wiped out all of my conscious memory, leaving me on the streets of Palo Alto without any idea where I was or how I got there or what I was doing. But I still remembered how memory works (I’m a part-time cognitive psychologist, after all), and was able to believe that my subconscious would get me wherever I was supposed to be, if I just trusted it and did whatever fanciful thing it came up with. Just followed my instincts. It got me home on the streets of Palo Alto, and then to the parking area in the back, upon which I (still in subconscious mode) drove my car to the linguistics department at Stanford, just a little late for a faculty meeting.
A colleague who doesn’t know his name or yours or what your meeting is about is something of a challenge, but I maintained it was a medical thing that would pass away, and I otherwise appeared to be the Arnold Zwicky they knew. So they trusted me, rather than having me carted away to Stanford Hospital. During the meeting my full memory rushed back. To everyone’s delight.
No, I don’t know when it’s a great idea to follow your subconscious wherever it leads, and when it’s stupid, silly, or dangerous. I do wonder if there’s any actual literature on “hunches”.
July 31, 2026 at 8:05 am |
“Morning vitals suggested terrible things in my subliminal world: bp 162/105, very high for me, heart still racing at 96 bpm”
That was yesterday. I have now bounced back to normal: this morning’s vital signs had bp just a bit above my target range (134/80) and a wonderful resting pulse (58 beats per minute). And I had 8 good hours of sleep, with lots of pleasant sexiness in it. This is some kind of triumph of mind and body working together, quite remarkable, really. (Note, however, that this isn’t anything I *did*, but something that *happened to me*. I would certainly have willed it, if I could, but my subconscious just brought me this gift.)