this is just a rehab post. i met with doctor brown (who is black) on friday. several weeks ago, after much badgering of the doctor staff at the clinic, I had put myself on a super aggressive methadone tapering schedule (2mg's down every week). which means, for those whom fractions are mysterious, i am cutting off a larger and larger percentage "chunk" of my dose each week. i was warned by both Dr. Len and Dr. Brown that this was a bad idea. and hey, guess what? they were right. for the last two weeks i've gone back to sleeping very little and having horrendous bouts of anxiety, along with muscle twitching and body pain. ...i thought i'd just tough it out but man...i can suffer through a week, i can suffer through two weeks, but...getting on to a month of feeling horrible was starting to really grind on me. so anyway, i'm sitting there in the office, across from Dr. Brown, an old black man whose skin looks so dry and papery, it's practically mummified and whose eyes are two different colors (one is watery grey/blue and the other is, i swear to god, orangish/green.) He's a great guy. Very sage-like and wise. Basically he told me "You're not going to pull this off. Stop being stupid. There isn't any need to suffer like this, be patient, be smart." so, i've now UPPED my dose from 9mg back to 10mg and will hold at this level until my body adjusts and then go down ONE mg and see how that is tolerated.
while all of this may just be boring medical blahblahblah, for me this back and forth struggle between a fast, painful taper and a longer, methodical taper has been very very difficult. i equate it to whole host of personality traits, both strengths and weaknesses being tested. Am i tough? And which is tougher? to suffer out the quick detox? or make the hard, smart decision to taper responsibly? Or am i being weak to go back to the slow taper? is it me giving in? giving up? I think about this all the time because after having made a few monumentally stupid decisions in the past year, I'd really like to start making some smart ones. so...anyway, i guess i feel good about what happened during that doctor visit on friday. not happy, but at least resolved and ready to move forward. plus, it's not like a single milligram increase suddenly has me floating on cloud 9, humming show tunes...i still can't sleep through the night. i still have anxiety and a frustratingly high resting heart rate (for someone who's in as good as shape as i am, i should be LOWERING my resting HR...not waking up with it beating wildly in my chest. on that note, i can't wait to see how my body finally settles down after all of this methadone bullshit. i have a feeling that come january or so, when the detox is finally complete, i may be in for a pleasant surprise and that all of this hard training will rapidly reveal itself in my running. anyway, this is a long post about stuff that no one wants to read...but i needed to flesh it out in text so as to get a better sense of where i'm at on this stuff.
i still harbor this sense that, despite the extremely high accolades DJ Shadow's albums have accrued over the last decade of internet circle-jerking, on a serious note i think that future generations will look back at "preemptive strike" and "endtroducing" as two of the more remarkable moments in modern music history. no more music talk for me.
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