Your pain is your own.  I cannot share it. I can't even really comprehend it. I can only feel the edges of your pain, like cold air from a hidden draft. What I can do is join you in that night land, and love you. Your pain is your own. I cannot share it. I can only share your company. What is broken cannot be fixed.

What a world. Meat still tastes strange. After seemingly endless days of slowly drowning in the slough and oozings of my wounded throat, meat tastes too much like dying.

My throat is only sore now. There is still cauterized tissue. I expected the new skin to be tender, like a scar, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Or maybe it is.

I was told I overthink things by my boss. It was good to hear.

Rage and rage and rage. I didn't sleep well last night. Felt too cold, felt too hot. Insomnia may be a symptom of weaning off the painkillers. Or maybe I've developed negative associations with lying in bed. Horrifying.

I got some curtain rods that look like industrial pipe. Very wise of them. Black pipe is cool for a lot of things, but the challenge for curtain rods would be changing out the curtains themselves.

The curtains will create two rooms for Kelly and Barbara's joint birthday party. The living room will be the Forest. Metaphorically. It must be crossed to get to the reward of festivities. I'm excited.

It's a couple more days until I can get back on the treadmill, so I imagine I'll have time to do a few more things too.

Ender stayed home sick today. I took Remy to the bus stop. While I sat with my right arm stretched over the passenger seat, he leaned forward from the back seat and rested his chin on my arm. Ender and Remy both do this sometimes. It reminds me of when they were little. 

Makes me want to dispense wisdom. Alas, I have very little. I did tell Remy that there's a lot of bullshit you have to get through so you can get time to do stuff you care about. But it doesn't really go away, there will always be some bullshit.

Ben O and I were looking at the Top Ten Health Conditions study by Moody's Analytics. Depression and Mood Disorders seemed to be independent of a person's overall health score, and socioeconomic and behavioral factors.

Sort of means that even if you eat right, do right, be right, the brain remains vulnerable. I suggested we create a preemptive strike support group. Madness is coming. How will we meet it?

Day 10 of my recovery. Today, Day 11, I return to work. Day 14 I should be able to resume all normal activities: piano-playing, cat-fancying, boulder-hurling.

The suffering was illuminating. There were depths. Sleep was only a temporary respite. There were bouts of fever. The feeling that dominated all was of slow suffocation. Claustrophobia of being contained within my own body. My tongue was bruised like a raw strip of steak. my nose was no longer nose-shaped, it was a salad potato nestled between my bleary eyes.

I could breathe through my nose, despite the blood-soaked gauze. I could breathe through my mouth, despite the torn ragged tunnel collapse of cauterized tissue.

I could breathe, but it felt like I was stealing air. Like using a snorkel.

Now I'm back a work, wearing all black for some reason. Maybe I expect to start bleeding from my nose and throat, which can happen spontaneously for up to two months.

Or maybe I'm mourning being new.