Wheelchair Boxing Round 3: is this tenacious?

Free from the ‘51’ (the 51 days of fever), and the fever and chills from Tuesday, I went to Boxing on Friday. I am thin...in places. I have ribs showing, am sitting on pure pelvic bones but have a pot and little tire and not quite sure how that happens (lying there for 51 days might have something to do with it).

It annoys me.

Things that annoy me get removed. Turn on the vacuum cleaners, and hand me the scissors: time for my home liposuction!

I have pushing myself hard since the fever, trying to get reserves, but working every hour. I have had some problems with high blood pressure and seizures, and the fever make things explode literally. Due to my camera being a ‘smart camera’ which tries to match skin tones, this bruise is about half as dark and just plain disturbing as the picture shows. There is another rupture showing up in the pinky, it starts in the crease and goes up half of the pinky. As you can see with this picture, I bleed every day, expanding territory of this particular bruise, and that is only the part you can see on the skin. When I overheat and blood comes to the surface, it gets gigantic. It seems like my body is playing a game of Risk, and slowly winning territory. This is called subcutaneous bleeding, I think. I did not hit anything, this bruise along with about 30 more visible ones, are just ruptures of my arteries from high, high blood pressure.

This is what dying looks like. I wasn’t going to take pictures of the things we now see, except that people who read the blog are so used to me ‘dying’ that the idea the ride is about over, and going to come to a complete stop, is alien. No, I am not an alien, or a sub-human that just keeps going regardless. I could die today, I already came close. My arms twitch constantly so it is hard to type. There is no ‘after Xmas’, or ‘Next year’ or ‘This Fall’ in the thoughts of Linda and I. Yeah, it might be wonderful, you think, to look worse than an infected junkie, and have the pain of having nails driven into your bones, and just go on like this. But human bodies don’t. They tend to generate what are known as ‘loopbacks’ which is the body saying “Help” but, for someone who can’t feel, only generates TIA inducing spontaneous high blood pressure.

I would love a long term gig but right now, no treatment, no doctor, and a hospital would likely kill me in short order (when they make ASSUMPTIONS, and my body works the opposite, that is a BAD thing), that isn’t happening. Sure, I have to live as if I keep on living, because I am not sitting here waiting to fall over. But I am fighting to get back each freedom in the same way I went to the fencing tournament AFTER I knew it might kill me: I want one more spin on the merry-go-round. I want one more 10K, one more Sakura-con (see Linda on how that is going), and with about 600 more postcards I get 5,000. That’s a good number, right? Yeah, the shop is shutting down, whether I want it to or not.

I am not a Goth, I AM GOTH. And no one is riding shotgun with me.

So, after seeing Sherlock Holmes and a few hours of sleep I went up to boxing. I went up because a) I need to lose that pot before Sakura-con (vanity, vanity!) b) I want to be as elite an athlete as I can be for my condition because I believe that will extend my life – even if that is 1/10 of what my condition was in August or Oct. last year. And c) I really want to go out of this life hitting and fighting DAMMIT! I want to be a wheelchair boxer again.

I managed to show up on ‘do sit ups, push ups and heavy bag until you vomit’ night. All right! We did 12 series of combo’s on the heavy bag before doing tight hitting as fast as you could and then strong blows are hard as you could. I couldn’t type afterward – I just needed to lie down and have body twitching.

When I started I felt FAT, but when I finished I felt better, not just because with eating only one meal a day, but I am on bone in my pelvis. But my arms still seem to work, and I was able to sweat, enough to maybe stop my hair from falling out. Enough to stop the skin peeling off of my face.

Linda said, of those there, I was putting the most into it, but then, I do. Ian held my heavy bag and surveyed the room while I worked on uppercuts, shovel hooks, overhead hooks, and power rights. I knew I would be in pain, since last time I was unable to sleep due to the pain from boxing. This time I managed to get four hours sleep (only to find out that due to working SLOWLY every day, the construction will now continue into Saturday – six days a week, starting TODAY until Xmas). I know that I will never be able to look out my window again. That is what is. I have wall scrolls to watch and DVD’s I play to cover up the construction noise.

The trick of making combination is to totally relax between the combinations, like letting your mind go into strategic mode, so you breath, relax. Then you take the power from the relaxed muscles and accelerate them to culminate into a point in time and space – WHAM, wham, WHAM, and relax with your guard up. It takes a half second to make three hits.

Ian is the right type of temperament for me. I told him, “You are doing 40lb jabs” while I was holding the heavy bag (throwing around boxes of books, the 80 pounds of books versus the 40 becomes memorized). He told me he could barely use his shoulders: jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, cross, power hook. “I did two killer workouts yesterday.” He said, “Why do I hit so hard when I am so tired?” jab, jab, cross, jab, back step, step into hook, triple jab and a rocking cross. He laughs, “Because I like it.”

Afterward I apologized for not coming due to the fever. For Ian, who knows me, it is not a big deal, two of his students, new ones overheard me and one said, “Oh my God! Did you go to the hospital?” Ian and I looked at each other like, “Newbies!” He knows this rocket is pointed toward the sun.

He had parasites from a trip overseas, as is working them out. I told him I will be back regularly I hope as I get ready for Sakura-con and the 10K. “You are the most tenacious human being I have ever met.” He suddenly said to me. I wasn’t sure what to say.

Ian has had about 75 bouts with I think 5 defeats. He came out of retirement in his mid-30’s to do a boxing tournament that required FOUR back to back full on bouts, which means you had to win all four in a row. He was at the final bout when a ref called a holding, and a stop, he lowered his glove, while the other boxer put all his weight behind a hit to his cheek, crushing his cheekbone and pressing his eyeball out. Ian went on to knock out that man and win the tournament. But, he said, it taught him that he was too trusting, and it was time to retire. And he calls ME the most tenacious human being he has ever met? Of all the boxers? Of looking himself in the mirror?

I want to live up to that.
Someone recently sent me an email saying they wrote so that I won’t be lonely. I write because I am lonely.

I want so much for this blog to go back to jaunty and saucy and research and observation of BEFORE, and I hope it will. Because all of that is a part of who I am. But so are the things which no one talks about, that shadow which falls over everything I look at, over everything good in my life. I live because I need to live each day as if I were to keep on living. But I also need to have a part of each day in preparation for dying. Except there isn’t any way to teach me how to do that. Linda has 3 support meetings in the next 10 days. I will meet a therapist for the first time, a meet and greet – they are accessible, so they are only available every three weeks. And what do the living, who observe and writing ‘stages’ know of this. What do they know of having what limited support group die, one after the other.

One told me, “Just because they say you are going to die, doesn’t mean you will.” Dead.

“Morbid wit, I like it.” Dead.

Another taught me how to keep blogging. He was the most obvious, slurred, even on the blog, so we brushed by, as I was full of symptoms and possible conditions, and that he could be me soon, it terrified, and he died soon after.

So boxing and being in pain and watching blood pool from parts of me is easy. Wham, wham WHAM! THAT is nothing. Letting someone in, knowing I won’t be there for them, and seeing them watch me with terrified eyes, how do I do that?