Catch-22
“Pursue whatever it is that you want to do with your life.
It is the only secret to happiness that I know except for maybe true love,
that and maybe having the amazing health insurance plan that our congressmen have.”
― Lewis Black
There are so many questions about my actual status I thought I'd take a pause from our regularly scheduled programming to lay it out for everyone -- and myself -- since I am now under 72 hours from being released from Folsom Correctional into a wheelchair and/or walker at home…
Cue Lewis Black--fuck HIPPA, the author approves release of the following information.
Stardate: 2025.245
Medications
Tylenol -- daily human limit
IBuprofen -- 800 mg/serving
Gabapentin -- 1200 mg/day
Robaxin -- not sure, don't care
Decadron -- done
Amlodipine -- 10 mg/day
Pepcid--daily
Colace--daily
Blood thinner -- subcutaneous injection/daily
Zyrtec--as needed
Metamucil--Orange flavor, daily
Swamp powder--As needed for the hairy boys
Testing
CBC -- normal, mostly
BMP -- normal
CMP -- normal
PSA -- normal, requested
Imagery
Lumbar MRI -- L34, L45 issues
Thoracic MRI -- clean
Cervical MRI -- C67, issues
X-rays
Procedures
Single, guided epidural, Cortisone, ~ L45
No dietary restrictions -- Fuckya
Wheelchair ops--unrestricted
Walker ops--unrestricted
I’ve made it to the end of physical therapy and to the maximum extent possible, release from a modern physical rehabilitation facility. An occupational therapist has completed shower operations with me on five separate occasions, clearing me to sit in the shower with a hose and nozzle, to clean myself, unassisted by external human intervention…yay?
Wheelchair operations consist of transitions from bed to wheelchair, from wheelchair to shower, from wheelchair to toilet, from wheelchair to car, from wheelchair to chair, from wheelchair to wheelchair--the permutations are now endless…
Walker operations consist of transitions from bed to walker, from walker to seated surface, from walker to platform, up (strong leg goes to heaven), from walker to platform down (weak leg goes to hell). I cannot stand independent of the walker, which means I'm still holding on. Which means the walker is worthless to me if I want to use my hands…something I find of great importance.
Folsom has been far different from Attica. Folsom has treated me with respect and human dignity. Everybody is wonderful and does their job cheerfully, respectfully, and highly professionally. Many here have worked the same job, with their same colleagues, for three decades. They hail from all over the world, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Pakistan, Puerto Rico (my doctor), and of course right here in the United States.
The providers, who are the backbone of the rehabilitation are the PTs and the OTs.
PT
Bethany--common sense
Caitlin--less pain
Kaitlin--more pain
OT
Elizabeth - showers/transitions/wheel brakes
Adair - NuStep, and posture Nazi
Being released from Folsom means I am free to pursue whatever therapy I can convince my insurance company to pay for. Or I can pay for it out of pocket. The rehabilitation center has worked with my insurance company to ensure I have the latest and greatest equipment waiting for me at home. It has been ordered, approved, and shipped.
Insurance has approved either a wheelchair or a walker but not both. I opted for the wheelchair.
Insurance has approved a commode to place above my toilet to ensure I have handles to hold on to during my transitions…insurance will not pay for shower seats to place in my shower. I'm on my own there. Luckily I can afford the $55 to buy one, or maybe two…other modifications to the shower, such as handrails and usable shower fixtures, are on me.
OT has taken the time to discover my confidence levels in each of the operations I am learning. At home the most daunting task, for which both myself and the OT identified, was the standing 180. Standing and rotating 180° in order to sit down on the toilet. I have mastered the movement…not without pain…but with sufficient balance and understanding to successfully complete the maneuver safely. As I think about the operation, and I think about the standard daily operation of one each, GSD*, in the 100 lb weight class, I'm hoping during the 180 transition, she does not decide to come in for her morning body slam. I’ve thought about telling my OT about this potential scenario, but I'm afraid her head will explode and we might get set back a week as she goes into “problem solving” mode.
Gentle readers I have mentioned the imposter syndrome I have now faced down for several weeks. I am sequestered in a facility that is caring for individuals facing huge changes to the lives that they have been living. These friends have lives that will never be the same. I anticipate my life returning to normal where I will once again run and jump and stretch the back of the net on a free kick bending it just like Beckham.
The patients here who have faced amputation, traumatic brain injury, disease, and other medical anomalies that has rendered them disabled, are not returning to their same lives. Nor are their family members who are here with them learning to cope with the care of the people they love as they transition to home care. The fear and uncertainty is locked in every one of their faces. I am completely lucid and at least from my own internal monologue seemingly without cognitive impairment. Yet I have no earthly idea how to create the active situation in my own medical care where we are moving towards the goal of finding the diagnosis of the condition that I find myself in. We still don't know. Yet I'm being discharged from a medical facility without any answers. If I can't do it with full mental faculties how can these individuals begin to look out for themselves in today's medical system?
People are strong, I'm not trying to take credit away from the many others who are going to take this on and step up to the challenge. We do this everyday. People do this everyday. That's why we are so resilient. That's why we continue to survive. I just don't know why it has to be so goddamn hard.
In Joseph Heller's magnificent treatise on irony and ridiculous nature of human endeavor when at war, the bureaucracies we create inevitably emerge In ways that thoughtful consideration of how decisions might actually have been made, that led us to these dead ends in logic and common sense, can break us. Heller's novel, Catch-22, it's funny because we relate it to dumb humans who are seemingly making decisions at the expense of Yossarian's sanity. That is not what's going on in this book.
A useful analogy from computer science is that which we have all witnessed when using a Windows computer. It's called the blue screen of death. It's when your computer crashes and you have to reboot. Skipping the basics of computer science, the real condition that your computer faces it's what's referred to as an “unhandled exception”.
Computers are nothing more than a series of electric circuits being driven in a very clever manner by an orchestration of commands to open and close switches governed by software that someone has written. I think of it as a series of countless trails through a forest with a hope that some of them make it through to the end in order to find the other side, and maybe something useful.
Some trails will make it, others will cross and double back, still others might end. Even though those trails were created by humans, when you find yourself on one of those trails, the humans are long gone. There was only the original logic upon which the trail was constructed, and it most likely was created with a single purpose. This trail should lead us to something of value, maybe a watering hole for instance.
In much the same way, bureaucracies are created without an understanding of the full manifestation of their end-state for everyone, and for everything. They're most likely a combination of requirements for singular objectives. Expanding beyond that we leave the realm of human understanding. They're messy to say the least.
We are trying to navigate a trail, the trail runs out, the logic in the circuit doesn't work, we run off a cliff, we hit the blue screen to death. Catch 22.
This is a failure of logic in the bureaucracy. We are no longer in the hands of individuals making decisions for whom we can blame. The logic in the circuit simply doesn't work.
For half our country the logic in the Democracy we grew up in, no longer works. That's why it seems, although obtuse to half of us, that the other half of our country would accept a slide into something that looks like authoritarianism. We want someone in charge to apply logic and common sense to situations that are simply leading to a crash. Something that humans no longer control. The logic is a ball of fuck that can't be unwound.
The Catch-22 is the blue screen of death. It is my end state from this rehabilitation center. I've completed all the requirements for graduation yet my problem has not been solved in the slightest. It is the end state of a bureaucracy running correctly but producing no valid result. It is the unhanded exception. It is the infinite loop.
To me it's important to preserve this understanding of the Catch-22. It's very subtle. It's not the situation at the Department of Motor Vehicles where you didn't bring the proper paperwork. That's the bureaucracy in action and it's a pain in the ass. It's also not the more well defined case, and more common definition of the Catch-22, where the rules have simply been changed on you as you're going through the process. There is logic behind each of those two scenarios. That is not what Heller was actually after. He was trying to define something, much like JD Salinger in the same era, was trying to define something that society was not yet ready to understand, depression and PTSD, in Salinger's case. George Orwell had an easier time, because he had a practical case study, when he wrote Animal farm. Kurt Vonnegut also had a case study for his epic Slaughterhouse-Five. All of these books provide commentary on the insanity of the human condition. Only Heller addresses the illogical pathway that leads to the crash. The trail just runs out. It was never programmed. It was never considered. This is what has made the search for artificial intelligence over the past 40 years impossible. How do you program every single potential path down a decision tree? How do you consider every potential circuit required to make every decision possible? Remember in a computer it's all going to be circuits…so every one of those circuits for every one of those potential decisions would have to be represented, explicitly. And to represent it explicitly means it has to be represented logically.
Can't be done. Unhandled exception. Catch-22. Blue screen of death. The logic ran out.
I get out of here on Thursday, then my treatment towards health begins…please follow along.