buggery.org

I am climbing, slowly, out of a moderately-deep hole I fell into several weeks or months ago, I don’t recall when exactly.

It’s not a depression as such, just a mild state of dysphoria that has been going on for a while, too long. If I were really depressed I’d have done something about it a long time ago but instead I find myself in this grey area — call it seasonal affective disorder, world-weariness, fatigue, dismotivation, or just ennui.

I’ve been blah for so damn long that it looks like wah to me.

I’m beginning to suspect that my HIV treatment regime — specifically the efavirenz — is taking its toll. I’ve been popping 600mg of this stuff every night for the last six years. I’ve described before its weird, sometimes hilarious, mental effect, however I’m now seriously worried that it might be slowly, imperceptibly, fucking with my mood, my cognitive abilities, my ability to think and concentrate — it’s messing with my head, man!

Anyhoo, I talked with my doc last week about a change, and will be saying “sayonara” to efavirenz soon. Not immediately, as I’m going overseas in a couple of weeks’ time and I’m not prepared to risk coming down with new and thrilling side effects while overseas, so I will pack my current medications with me when I fly to Brazil later this month, and I’ll enjoy the splendours of Copacabana Beach under their technicolour influence.

After I get home in early August we will tackle the change, perhaps preceded by a brief respite from treatment altogether — I am deeply attracted to the idea of a treatments break, something I’ve not had for a dozen years.

Meantime, change will come. A redesign of buggery.org is in the wings — just a little tweaking and fiddling to do before I flick that switch — and in the real world, despite the downward tug of my medication burden, I’m pulling myself up by the bootstraps the best I can. Change is good.

Yesterday I donated my brain to science.

Both Brent and I decided a while ago to volunteer for a project called the Australian NeuroAIDS Brain Tissue Bank, or “the brain bank” for short. Basically what this means is that we have signed up to have our brains removed and used for medical experiments. The good news is that we get to retain possession of our grey matter until we die, but after that we’ve agreed to have all manner of unspeakable acts performed on our lifeless corpses to remove the brain, the brain stem, and samples of CNS fluid, lymph nodes and god-know-what-else. I wrote an article about the brain bank for Positive Living a while ago.

So yesterday morning we trundled off to the Alfred Hospital to have our heads measured, our bumps catalogued, and to be subjected to all manner of physical, neurological, cognitive and psychological investigations. This will become a yearly event for us from now, as the idea of the project is to collect ongoing data about the cognitive functioning of people with HIV, which will be used in future medical research along with the stored brain tissue. It’s a brilliant, if slightly creepy, project, and both of us were quite unhesitant in wanting to get involved.

Several things I learned yesterday:

• I’m surprisingly good at recalling sequences of numbers, both forwards and backwards.
• I’m not so good with pictures.
• I have no reflexes. None. Zip. I’ve known for some time that I don’t have a patella reflex (that’s the one where the doc taps you on the kneecap and your foot moves) but it turns out that I don’t have any involuntary reflexes anywhere. Apparently this is rare but no cause for concern.
• My blood pressure is way too high at 150/100. This came as a surprise as my BP is usually really good. But yesterday it was sufficiently elevated that the doc seriously contemplated shipping me down to the ER for further tests and antihypertensive medications. Eventually we decided we’d leave it for a couple of days and I’m going to see my regular GP about it. This has me quite worried seeing as how my father died of heart disease.

Following our altruistic endeavours in the name of human advancement, we went down to Docklands for the Sydney-Carlton match. The second outing to the footy in two weeks, and a much more enjoyable experience, seeing as how we won and all. I’ve had rather a bad run of luck with the games I’ve seen live in recent times, so it was a nice change to be able to sing the old team song after the final siren, even if it was only Carlton we beat.

Just for illustrative purposes, here’s a picture from last week’s game, Darren Jolly in full flight, but I don’t recall anything quite this exciting happening so maybe it’s the camera angle (click to enlarge).