Deteriorating

Scum and Chocolate Pie from Perkins

December 2025

I had a Rheumatologist appointment today at 10AM, a new doctor. I always tend to freak out on the long car ride to St Petersburg cold sterile offices. Some places my wife has gone, a old diner, the Christmas store that possibly runs year round, I still haven't checked, we need to go soon, and the multiple shitty strip clubs lining the sky. I hate doctors. I hate pain. Aching, dull, sharp, stabbing, 1 out of 10, what I treat it with, how long I have lived with it, why I didn’t fucking get checked out when I was younger and stupider and didn’t know. God I hate getting asked this question, Every fucking person I meet calls me a “miracle baby” for being born too early. I’m not special, but I’m not normal either. God I tend to go on tangents when I’m writing, wasn’t this about my Rheumatologist appointment?

Back to it, we had gotten free valet parking with the multitude of old freaks strung across the benches waiting. How can they drive. One especially old man, I can never tell ages, with a Vietnam veteran hat calls something out to my girlfriend as she is helping me into my wheelchair. What it was, I don’t particularly remember. I am writing this drunk. As we are going in, I notice the lack of security screening that I am accustom to at the many, many hospitals we have needed to attend for me. I look over my shoulder and ask Mari “They don’t have security screenings here? That’s weird…”

As we check in, the receptionist who like many of the other receptionist we have seen, think Mari is me, like I am just some empty husk of nothing, just a toy she brings around randomly. I don’t even think she glanced once at me. I just go back to reading my book, on account of not being needed yet. I was reading Robert Gluck’s “About Ed” and particularly about Ed’s struggle with pain and fatigue not unlike my very own at that very moment. Making me feel even closer to a ghost. Or the idea of a ghost? Knowing that there was, at some point, someone with at least the same symptoms and feelings about them, obviously a different diagnosis than me, still brought me some comfort. I remember relaying that part to Mari while we wait for the doctor to come in. Me, wanting to sob for an idea I had about how the appointment would go.

The medical assistant was terrible. I almost fell getting out of the wheelchair to get my weight. I could tell the assistant didn’t care. They never do about someone who breaks the youngest client age of 69 by 48 years. Which, as always lately, is less than the last time I get weighed at a doctors office. Before me and Mari got together I was 150 pounds. When we got together I gained a lot of of weight, I was now almost 190 pounds. And then after a few months of being good health wise, I got worse. 190 to 188. 188 to 186. 186 to 183. 183 to 180. 180 to 176. 176 to 178. Did I improve? Or was it just a lapse in celebrating too early. 178 to 174. 174 to now, 172.3 and dropping. If I get even a lighter I worry. It isn’t HRT weight distribution, which I had initially thought it was more of. This is different. A parasite eating my nutrients for its greedy, fat, gross self. None for the girl who needs to eat so bad. Yet can’t seem to feel good enough to eat a grilled cheese BLT she had been wanting so bad. For months, not to mention the chocolate mouse mousse she had heard and heard and was upset about not getting. On the long drive home it would have gone the way of the Perkins chocolate slice of pie Mari’s grandmother graciously bought me that was turned into a gross blob in Gertrude that was now a puddle in my stomach.

I feel like the chocolate pie. OR perhaps, the chocolate pie is finally eating away at me. Gross, nasty, dying. I almost wish I had some horrible disease. I dont know why I even say almost wish. I can bet that it is something bad. I hope. Which is hard to come by.

I had this huge plan to make this super detailed about my pain. I wish I could, I just cant.

My doctor sent me home with 100s of test that I can’t afford. Yet I need to. To live. just to die worse than normal.

My vision is getting worse. My joint pain is getting worse. I am worse. I can’t even bring myself to describe it now. I can;t bring myself to edit it.
You all know

Mari is fast asleep in bed right now. I am listening to our Leonard Cohen CD on repeat. I am writing because I can’t sleep.

God I could really use some gross melted Perkin’s chocolate pie right now.