Mark Twain once said that he had been ridden out of town on a rail. If not for the honor of the thing, he admitted, he'd have druther walked.

Let me tell you about disability. If you get your druthers, politely decline.

One of my disabilities is agoraphobia. When I was four, I was raped and sexually mutilated by a group of upstanding community leaders including a sheriff's deputy. To this day, I get extremely nauseated by the smell of dimethyl ether (they used tractor starting fluid to knock me out, make me compliant.) To this day, I am incredibly fearful of uniformed officers with badges. Someone in mufti with a sidearm doesn't scare me; an unarmed security guard directing traffic in the parking area at the outdoors concert is of grave concern. And then there's the agoraphobia.

Doctor's Hospital - Columbus

In 1994, a physician at Doctor's North Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, performed a colonoscopy on me. Ever had one done? They're actually quite interesting. They lube up a camera on a long cable and shove it up your rectum. That sounds awful, but it's only momentarily discomfortable; having stayed up the night before drinking Golightly every few minutes to wash out your colon is the horrid part. The camera projects a colorful image on the screen, and it's like something from the Discovery Health channel. It's mostly pink and red, the inside of your colon, but wall of your colon is somewhat transparent (think of sausage casing, which is largely the same thing) and you see other colored objects as well. The doctor will see polyps growing on the inside of your colon, snip them off and collect them for later study to ensure that they're not cancerous.

All this is done under two chemicals - one a pain killer, and one a hypnotic. They don't want to knock you out when they give you a colonoscopy, because the colon is rather delicate - again, think sausage casing - and the hypnotic will allow you to forget the pain that's involved. On the other hand, I've had colonoscopies without a hypnotic, and as long as the doctor is reasonably gentle, it's no big deal. (Does this make it seem that I'm homosexual? It'd have been convenient if I were - a bisexual has twice the odds of getting lucky on Saturday night, as someone said - but no, I like seeing pictures of nekkid women, and pictures of nekkid guys aren't interesting at all.)

Idiots With D. O. Degrees

Back to Doctor's Hospital. The manufacturer of the hypnotic specifies how much you should receive, and states you should wait 45 minutes for the drug to take effect. This jerk decided that if he slipped a decimal point, and gave ten times the usual dose, he could proceed in five minutes instead of forty-five minutes. (I really wish the hospital would sue me for my accusations that they tolerate such a reckless idiot on their staff; I'd like to cross-examine them and get their answers on the record.)

OK, so you have a middle-aged man, who had been knocked out and raped at the age of four, once again knocked out and raped. And his heart stop beating. He dies on the table. That's not the worst thing in the world, to have your heart stop beating; doctors have that happen all the time (well, not all doctors have it happen every five minutes, but it's a situation with a known and fairly simple procedure to correct. In this case, they give you a agonist (which is doctor-speak for "antidote") so that the conditions that stopped your heart no longer persist, and then they goose your heart to get it started again.

The problem is, the agonist has this nasty side-effect of central nervous system damage. I first got a hint that there was something wrong a couple of hours later, when riding in the car back from Columbus to Dayton. It started raining, one of those late-April rain showers with the big ole raindrops that really go SPLAAAAT. Don't you really love those rainstorms? They're fun. They make you want to run out in your barefoot, spread your arms to the side like an airplane, face your nose straight up, and dance the snoopy-dance of joy.

The Joys Of Splatful Rain

Except it didn't work that way for me. I found myself trying to crawl under the passenger side of the front seat of the Valiant I was riding in, to hide. That didn't work. Maybe I could climb down underneath the glove box. Mighta worked if I was five; I was much too big for that. I spent the weekend hiding in a darkened bedroom, until Monday morning, when I needed to drive to work in Columbus.

Oh. My. God. That's a 45-minute trip, perhaps a 60-minute trip if you drive slowly. It took me more than 2 hours, and I never got to my workplsce because every time I came up to an overpass, I'd pull over and stop the car, climb out, and walk around the car three times, talking to myself. "Must... not... crash... car... deliberately... into... concrete... posts..." I wasn't a little suicidal, I was rampant. And like I said, I didn't go to work, I went to my apartment where I hid out upstairs in the dark. The phone started ringing Monday afternoon, then Monday night, then Tuesday morning, afternoon, night, Wednesday morning.

On Wednesday afternoon, there was pounding at the door. I peeked through the blinds upstairs and saw who it was. It was my best friend from work. I let him in. "Hey man, what's going on. You've got a lot of people very worried about you. There's an all-points-bulletin out on your van. I finally drove over here, and saw it was in the parking lot." He drove me to Ohio State Medical Center's loonie bin, where I spent the next 23 days. If you're taking notes, it's not a place I would recommend. Dartmouth, in Dayton, used to be damnably good, but it appears to no longer exist.

Dartmouth, Yeah, That's The Ticket

But this isn't a story about ancient events, this is just an explanation of how it happens that I'm agoraphobic. I don't recommend it to anybody, not even, as Mark Twain would say, for the glory of it. If you have it, though, you need a cave. You need a place that you can make cool and dark, and if it's humid, so much the better. And you need to exclude everyone else possible from the cave, unless you really and I mean really trust them. Sometimes, a wife will do things "for your own good." She needs to be warned that it should never be done while you're in your cave. If she thinks you need to be locked up in the loonie bin for a while, she needs to figure out a way to get you to another portion of the home, so she isn't invading the cave, and then try to persuade you. (Actually, while you're in your cave, you shouldn't need confinement, because when you build your cave you remove anything that might prove unsafe.)

At this point, though, the gummint wants to inspect our house, head to toe. I'd stand in the doorway of my cave with a shotgun and deny them entrance if I could, except that when it comes to the choice of fight-or-flight, agoraphobics land firmly, both feet on the ground, on the "flight" side.

The only advantage a shotgun might have is a deterrent effect. I could never fire a loaded weapon at another human, even one as dispicable as Adolf Hitler, David Duke or Betty Crocker. Except where do I flee to? My cave! And it's being invaded, proving that it's not really safe after all.

Suicide By Cop

Except there's this thing called "suicide by cop." When you come right down to it, it's hard to kill yourself without killing others as well - you know, with a bomb, or by arson, etc. The single most successful means of committing suicide these days is to insult and threaten those juvenile cowboys who walk around with a big swagger and a .357 calibre penis. Get them to kill you, and maybe you actually do society some good, because the cops will stop decompensating and beating up other people for the hell of it.

What the hell. Without my cave, there's no place I can live. Now, all I have to do is to figure out something that a cop would find threatening. Perhaps a gas can with a rag sticking out the opening?

Other Bloggers On Related Topics:
.357 calibre penis - agoraphobia - Better Crocker - cave - colonoscopy - Doctor's North - Columbus - Mark Twain - Ohio State - shotgun - side effects - starting fluid - suicide