The May of Discontent, Part II

 Over the weekend, I posted -- and then quickly deleted -- a message about how I can no longer write, nor did I have the desire to do so anymore, and that I would figure out what I wanted to do with this site in the coming months.

May has been incredibly difficult for me. Getting off nicotine has been awful. It's not something I can accurately describe to anyone who has never had to do it. I don't even know how to describe it, actually. It feels as if you, as a sane human, are slipping into insanity in real time...and you can see it happening but you cannot stop it. 

Over the course of the past several weeks I have felt like a spectator, a passenger in the car with myself as I'm going through life, and a horrified passenger and spectator at that. I have not been myself. I have not been a person I want to be, or a person that I like and identify with -- it's like looking into the mirror and seeing a twisted stranger or an evil twin staring back at you. I have not felt safe in my own mind and body, and at times I have absolutely, without a doubt felt that I have been a danger to myself and others.

And it's all because of a lack of nicotine.

Some of you will laugh at this, or make jokes that if that's all it took to push me over the edge, then I must've been closer than anyone realized, har har har, etc. And, maybe -- maybe -- there's a little truth in that. But, the much larger truth is that when you have had a substance in your bloodstream for over 25 years, you don't realize how much that substance takes over and what it regulates or otherwise controls.

Like it or not, nicotine regulated a lot of things in me. It gave me a creative drive, it sharpened my mind, and it was an appetite suppressant as the larger things -- but it also let me manage my stress and anger, it regulated my sleep and bowels, it changed my senses of taste and smell, and apparently -- among other little things -- kept my mouth bacteria under control.

I mentioned before that as soon as I quit vaping, my mouth broke out into blisters, sores, and swollen gums. This is apparently a side effect experienced by something like 30-40 percent of people who quit smoking or vaping, and I have never heard it mentioned or talked about before. Because nicotine is a natural disinfectant, your mouth biome goes nuts when it no longer has a constant flow of nicotine being inhaled through it, and it takes some time for your body to regulate it and get your mouth back to normal. Most people overcome this within a week or two at most, but for others it can take up to a month.

Guess who has been fighting it for nearly a month now? Me.

It has only been within the past several days where it seems -- seems -- like the mouth problems are finally starting to go away and heal. As recently as last weekend the mouth pain was so awful that it awakened me out of a dead sleep. Nothing really helps it -- brushing multiple times a day would make it feel a little better for a short time, and mouthwashes were absolutely brutal as they would amplify the pain tenfold. Daisy got a few different mouth sore soothing mouthwashes for me to try -- one of them had the consistency of NyQuil and did absolutely nothing, and the other had hydrogen peroxide in it and hurt so bad that I screamed and almost blacked out from the pain.

Yeah, I'm not kidding, the mouth stuff was awful. 

I couldn't eat a lot of things -- anything that had sharp edges or would crunch felt like I was chewing razor blades. Because my tongue was covered in blisters and so irritated, my sense of taste almost completely disappeared. I would taste vague hints of whatever it was I was eating, but that's about it. Anything that was overly salty or acidic (except, interestingly enough, coffee) would bring a torturous pain that was unreal. This extended to the blandest of things at times too -- ketchup, for example, when I ate some on fries. The acid in the ketchup was brutal and I just couldn't do it. Anything vinegary, peppery, or spicy at all was a no-no too. Carbonated beverages would feel like they were attacking each and every blister personally.

What finally made it go away? Eh, I dunno. Time and Advil?

It's not all the way gone yet. My sense of taste is still very dulled and it feels like there is a film coating my mouth and teeth that just won't go away. But most of the pain is gone. Most of the sensitivity is gone.

What remains at this point, almost a month in?

My patience and reason are slowly returning. My kindness is slowly returning. My body is relearning how to regulate its own sleep. Muscle memory for vaping is starting to go away. My bowels are starting to completely re-regulate themselves. 

My desire and ability to write are slowly returning. I told Daisy that if I lost that, I'd rather blow my brains out than continue to live without that drive. 

My stamina for, well, life is slowly returning. My skin looks clearer. My breathing is clearer. Even my back spasms and pain have mostly gone away. I don't know how much of this can be attributed to a lack of nicotine, but, well, I'm not going to complain.

So, as I slowly crawl up out of this haze, I am able to poke up my head and look around at everything else going on without being blinded by a chemical dependency.

This coming weekend, Daisy and I will celebrate twelve years of marriage. I worked over the Memorial Day holiday in order to be able to take our anniversary off work in exchange. Daisy took the day off as well, and we are extending our weekend by an extra day. We have lunch reservations at a local vegan restaurant that will likely be outlandishly expensive, but eh, it's our anniversary. 

On Thursday, we're ordering pizza from our favorite local place, and it is one of the very few times -- "rare and appropriate," so to speak -- that Daisy will get a full gluten crust, a full gluten anything, as she tends to avoid wheat when possible. However, it's our anniversary weekend, and I haven't vaped for a month, so...it's celebratory.

Last week, we went to see The Mandalorian and Grogu on its premiere-night-before-release showing of Thursday at 9:20pm. As you folks know, I do tend to book those premiere night tickets these days, primarily because there's almost nobody in the theater on those nights and because it lets us see the movie essentially before release. For some movies I really want to see them as soon as possible, and for others it's just a fun night out with the wife. Neither Daisy nor I work on Fridays, so a Thursday night date night is a little treat.

For those of you who expected a full-on, in-depth review of The Mandalorian and Grogu, you're going to have to go somewhere else for that. I thought the movie was fine -- it was fun, it was well-acted and the production value was great (read: it was pretty), but honestly it's skippable. It's a nice little bottle story that could've been the first 3-4 episodes of the next season of The Mandalorian on Disney+ and nobody would've batted an eye, and I think that is its main flaw -- if you're going to move this to the big screen, either do something mindblowing and universe-changing for the characters, or don't do it at all and just make it, again, the first 3-4 episodes of the next season of the show. Putting that into theaters seems a little...cash grabby. And this is Star Wars, owned by the Disney Corporation -- they have more money than God and no reason to be cash grabby about any of their properties. 

Am I glad I booked the tickets and we got to see it in the theater? Sure. It was fun. Daisy enjoyed it, and she is not a Star Wars person. But it's not something we had to do that was a non-negotiable thing. I do like seeing Star Wars stuff on the big screen when I can, though. 

Next week, we already have our premiere night tickets booked for Masters of the Universe, and I am appropriately excited for that. He-Man has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember, and the trailers I've seen make the movie look fun, which is something the franchise has needed for a long time. 

In other news, I have now become allergic to...something. 

Let me explain. About two weeks ago, when I was awake in the night playing games or writing here or who knows what, I ate something that gave me what seemed at the time to be a mild allergic reaction in my mouth -- my lips and cheek swelled up and my mouth became numb for a few hours before the feeling, eventually, subsided. With my mouth sores/pain still going strong at that time, I am not sure how bad it was because my mouth was already in pain and feeling raw and numb all the time anyhow.

Well.

A few nights ago I experienced the allergic reaction again, and it was stronger this time -- now that my mouth is healed up and like 95% normal, I could way more easily feel the swelling starting, the numbness and tingling forming, and this time...my throat began to close up.

Now, mind you, the one thing that I thought I had that was different than my normal foods was a new pack of sour blue raspberry Extra chewing gum...purchased, ironically, to give my mouth something to do because I'd quit vaping. I'd used it the night I'd had the mild reaction (and never thought anything of it at the time) and I'd had several more pieces of it the night that I had the strong reaction and my throat began to swell up, so -- this had to be the culprit, or so I thought.

That ruined our night, by the way -- we were supposed to have a quiet relaxing evening watching the new season of Married at First Sight on Netflix and eating dinner, leisurely, and my throat began closing up.

I will say that I have never had a food allergy before, to anything, to my knowledge. I have gone 43 years on this planet, closing in on 44, with relatively few allergies to anything. I have seasonal allergies to pollen, ragweed, etc -- and I have weather-related allergies to pressure changes and storm fronts and the like -- but never anything food-related. Randomly developing allergies to foods or flavorings or colorings, artificial colors/flavors or anything like that -- it has always been one of those back-burner paranoid fears. I've watched Daisy's mother randomly develop horrible allergies to foods she has eaten her entire life, just...out of the blue. Daisy's mother cannot have simple things like quinoa, bananas, walnuts or almonds, cinnamon, apples, and a long list of other things -- those allergies are all new, within the past several years. I have also watched nephews from both of Daisy's sisters have allergic reactions to foods so severe that they'd had to be rushed to the hospital or administered liquid Benadryl, epi-pens, or all of the above.

Good lord I do not want that at all.

So, there I sat on the couch, with Daisy getting more and more concerned with how the reaction was increasing (mind you, this was hours after I'd chewed this Extra gum). She kept asking me if I needed to go to the ER.

"No," I said. "I can breathe fine--" I took deep breaths in and out to prove it to her. "It's my swallow hole that's closing up, not the breathing hole."

"It's the same throat," she said.

"Yes, but it is two different tubes," I said. 

Which is true. It wasn't my trachea that was closing up, it was my esophagus -- it was very difficult to swallow. 

I took two Benadryl -- which, because of paranoia, we always have in the house -- and within a half hour I felt the reaction stopping and I was beginning to get drowsy. I told Daisy that I needed to go upstairs and crash, because the Benadryl was not giving me a choice in the matter. I apologized for ruining our evening. 

I immediately threw the two unopened packs of gum I had left directly into the trash. Not risking that again.

I went upstairs and sat at my computer for a bit, catching up on Youtube, to give the Benadryl some time and to confirm that it wasn't just stopping the allergic reaction, but was actively reversing it -- fighting the sleep that it was trying to pull me into the entire time. When, after about an hour, I was actively feeling the reaction subside, I logged off my machine and settled into my chair -- fully clothed, sweaty, but near unconscious already, and passed out.

Daisy told me that she came in about an hour later to check on me to make sure I wasn't dead, and I told her I was fine and to go away, because I was sleeping. I do not remember this. 

I next awoke approximately four hours later, at which juncture I desperately needed to pee, but my allergic reaction was completely gone as if it had never happened. I used the bathroom and checked my messages to find a message from Mama asking if I was okay -- to which I replied I was -- and then I passed back out.

I awoke another hour or so later with horrible diarrhea (because, of course I did) and texted Daisy from the bathroom that my stomach was going nuts and I just needed to rest, so please let me do so -- and if she heard me struggling in the bathroom to try to ignore me. She was still downstairs and was talking on the phone, at length, to one of our mutual friends who is currently going through a messy divorce and needed some moral support. 

When I finally awoke, it was almost dawn. I had slept for what my Fitbit had declared was almost nine hours, had gotten up to use the bathroom twice, and had a very deep, sweaty sleep in my chair while I dream-battled Benadryl demons (figuratively; I just remember having some really bizarre dreams). But the reaction was over, and as a side effect I'd gotten some great sleep because of it.

Well, for the moment.

Later that morning, as we were getting up and starting our day, I had some chips to put something on my stomach. They were the Walmart-brand, Great Value cheddar-and-sour-cream ripple chips -- chips that I have eaten, no joke, probably 500 times from Walmart over the course of the past 30 years or so. I had four bags of them in the house and they tend to be a go-to for me for cheap chips when I do a grocery order. 

Immediately after eating, eh, maybe 1/3 of a bag of the chips -- mostly finishing the crumbs at the bottom of the bag that I'd been eating, in my office, off and on for a week -- my mouth began to go numb, lips and cheeks began to swell, and my throat started to close. 

My first thought was what the fuck, I'm allergic to the chips too? and then I realized that the days I'd eaten the chips up to that point -- including the fact that I'd eaten a bunch of them the day before -- had coincided with the days I'd had reactions. However, I'd eaten some of the chips in the middle of the night too, between reaction one and reaction two, and had not experienced any side effects. 

This reaction wasn't as bad as the one the night before, but it did seem to come on far faster. I immediately took a single Benadryl and it made the reaction subside quickly, but I was now left with a dilemma. Was it actually the chips? Was it actually the gum? I don't know. I didn't have anything out of the ordinary otherwise, and it seems strange to get a spontaneous allergic reaction to something in the potato chips that I've legit been eating on a fairly decent regular basis for the past 30ish years. 

The other factor is another gum, interestingly enough -- Big Red. I got a case of Big Red when I stopped vaping, because I like Big Red (it's about the only cinnamon-related thing I can stand). I chewed Big Red on all of the occasions I also had the allergic reactions -- however, I've also chewed half the case of it before those reactions with no effect whatsoever, so....who knows. 

I still have an open pack of Big Red in front of me and I am not going to risk chewing any more of it until I don't have to be on the clock for work anymore for the week and don't have anything else to do for the day, because I need a controlled environment. I still have the Big Red and I still have two unopened bags of the chips -- we're gonna find out for damn sure which one is the culprit.

So...yeah. Onward into the rest of summer, I suppose.