Thursday, August 20, 2015

The Incredible Shrinking Man - Shake Rattle and Roll

315 pounds.

After the stroke, and getting on crazy pills for depression, and losing pretty much all appetite until I moved back home after being laid off in Dayton, I think I got down to 308.  I'm seven pounds away from my lowest weight in twenty years.

While I of course like this, it does come with irritants... I have to buy new clothes, because all the shorts and pants I have now look like clown pants.  I hate shopping for clothes.  Also, it's pretty easy to feel fat now, because it is easy for my stomach to feel full.  I guess I felt fat before and just ignored it.  After lunch today I felt like my belly was about to bust open.

(I try to eat lunch because my doctor said not to skip lunch if I skip meals.)

And then there was the earthquake.


It moved through my apartment from the foot of my bed to the head.

I had taken a dump and my medicine just minutes earlier (not at the same time, of course). But it was still pre-7 a.m., so I laid back in bed.  While dropping heat, I had a leg cramp in my right leg... I know it was just because of sitting awkward on the can, but my first thought was, "Great, here come's a seizure," because my seizures have all had a right leg cramp precursor.  Then I finished up and went to back to bed.

I remember hearing car alarms going off suddenly, like, a lot of them.  Then my feet started bouncing.  "Great, it IS a seizure..." I thought... but seizures tend to be hard to think through, and I've only had like three but each time it's hard to think, and I wasn't having trouble doing that.  I quickly did my stroke exercise... touching the fingers of my right hand to my thumb quickly in succession, and realized nothing was wrong with me.  I wasn't having a seizure.  And then the shaking moved further into my bedroom, and EVERYTHING was shaking.  Violently.  It was a 4.0 quake in Oakland, three miles from my apartment.  

After about ten seconds it stopped.  I didn't feel any of the aftershocks.  And then of course there were the deluge of news stories afterwards about how we're on this horribly dangerous faultline that will eventually snap and kill everybody in the Bay area.

It's comforting to know that I will probably die when my apartment building collapses, rather than slipping in the shower on a shampoo bottle that fell out of the caddy.  That would be so embarrassing in the afterlife.

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