I finally tried mounting my RAM mounts and my GoPro on the front basket of the bike. This seems to give a decent angle of view.
I have a RAM X-Mount for my iPhone. It’s the same mount that I use on my motorcycle.
I use the iPhone for music, and for maps. I don’t text or take phone calls when I’m riding, but having an easy view of the phone makes it easy for me to pull over and answer the important calls and ignore the calls that I can ignore.
Lucky for me I live just off the new bicycle path on Beach Ave. This isn’t a half bad path, but it does get very congested in the summertime. And the nice thing about reducing car traffic to two lanes, one in each direction, is that the racers and speeders have had to find a different place to go.
Vancouver is the bicycle theft capital of Canada. And such my bicycle lives either in my apartment or in my office at work.
Yes, this is what I wear when I ride my bicycle. I don’t own a single piece of “lycra” or “spandex”. I ride to and from work. I ride to and from the supermarket of coffee shop. I go out for dinner on my bicycle. I don’t like the idea of having to change from my “riding clothes” to my “destination clothes”.
Dresses, skirts, and kilts are what I wear. I don’t think I’ve worn a pair of pants on a bicycle since the mid 2000’s.
I ride for comfort. I’m not setting any speed records, nor am I setting any endurance records.
My earphones block much less outside noise than you average car. Most cars these days are extremely soundproofed. With my earphones on, I can still hear cars coming up beside me, I can hear emergency vehicles blocks away. I can hear car horns and voices. These are all things that I wouldn’t be able to hear in the typical everyday Econo-box car.
I’ve done some minor upgrades on the bike, mainly being that I replaced the cable operated disc brakes with hydraulic brakes. I’ve replaced the stock seat post with a shock absorbing post. I have the front and rear baskets. The next upgrade I’ll probably do is upsizing the disc brake rotors from 180 mm to 206 mm.
I’ve always loved bicycling over cars and even motorcycles.
I think there are two reasons for this.
First, as a kid living on military bases, a bicycle was an easy way to escape and for me to get away from Richard or my grandmother.
Second, my father’s temper behind the wheel turned most car trips into anxiety inducing adventures in road rage.
When I had my bicycles I could go for rides and not worry about coming home or needing rides from Richard.
Okay, so I’ll talk a little bit about the procedure itself.
If I am approved, I hope to undergo the injection method as opposed to the oral method. Yes, both methods are supposed to result in a painless death, but I favour the injection method due to the swiftness.
Which ever method I’m allowed to undertake, I have to initiate it. Whether it’s drinking the glass of barbiturates or pressing the trigger button for the dosing pumps, it’s the patient undergoing the procedure that has to initiate the procedure.
With the oral method you consume a large amount of barbiturates in liquid form. This is supposed to induce unconsciousness and eventually cardiac arrest. Time to death varies from person to person. This is not the way I want to go. I can’t even stand most over-the-counter or prescription pain killers. And the idea of dying from a drug overdose doesn’t appeal to me.
The injection method is almost clinical in its efficiency and swiftness. There are three or four drugs used depending on the drugs selected.
The first drug to be introduced would be Midazolam. Midazolam is a sedative. This is not used to render the person unconscious. This is really just to make the person feel comfortable. Face it, no matter how intense the desire to die, when you’re lying down on your literal death bed with the cannula in your vein, anxiety can become your enemy.
The next drug to be introduced would be Propofol. Propofol is typically used prior to the administration of anesthesia in surgical procedures. For surgical procedures Propofol is usually administered at a rate of 2 mg/kg. In my case, if I was going for surgery I would get a dosage of about 180 mg. However, in the case of M.A.i.D. I would be receiving a doseof 1,000 mg. At this dosing level I will be put into a very deep coma and would lose consciousness and all sensation.
The third drug to be introduced would be Rocuronium. Rocuronium is a neuromuscular blocking agent that targets striated muscles. The Rocuronium would act upon my diaphragm and cease my breathing.
The final drug to be introduced would be Bupivacaine. Bupivacaine would cause cardiac arrest and stop my heart.
So basically the Midazolam is to calm me down prior to the Propofol. The Propofol is to shut my brain down so that I am unaware of the resulting asphyxiation and subsequent cardiac arrest. With the advent of cardiac arrest, arterial blood pressure in my brain would drop to nothing which means that even if the Propofol were to somehow wear off, I would never regain consciousness.
I’m not exactly sure how long after my heart stops before I will be pronounced clinically dead, but it wouldn’t be too long.
The interesting thing is, it won’t just be me dying. It will be P.S., Captain McRae, the man in the sauna, Captain Totzke, my father. There will be no more depression. There will be no more anxiety. There will be no more night terrors. There will be no more grinding my teether. There will be nothing.
I am an atheist.
I don’t believe in magical special friends or an invisible father figure peering down on me from the clouds.
I may be an atheist, but I’ve never had issues with my morals unlike men of the cloth like Captain Father Angus McRae or Brigadier General Roger Bazin.
Being an atheist means that I don’t believe the the great beyond, or the magical city in the sky. Conversely I don’t believe in the fire and brimstone pits of hell.
When I die, I will simply cease to exist.
Will I miss anything after I am dead? No, I’ll be dead.
Will I be sad when I die and will I be full of regret? No, I’ll be dead.
Life is not a competition to see who can live the longest.
You live the life you have.
You do the best with it that you can.
Life is not a miracle. There are over 7 billion people on the planet.
Society is weird in the sense that if I’m out riding my bicycle and I get hit by a car, “oh well, life goes on”. If I go snowboarding down a mountain and crash into a tree “Oh well, he died doing what he liked to do”. If I had developed a drug habit and died of a heroin overdose, everyone would be talking about how rough of a life I had and how it wasn’t fair that I died. Yet if someone undergoes severe psychological trauma society gets all sanctimonious if the topic of suicide or M.A.i.D. comes up. I can go scuba diving with the sharks or skydiving out of a perfectly functional airplane and society is fine with that. Struggle with the fallout from being sexually abused as a child on a military base, gotta keep on struggling. Apparently it builds character.
If this had been 40 years ago, just after the abuse but prior to Captain Totzke getting his hooks into my brain, yeah, maybe counselling or drug therapy could have worked.
I’m fifty years old in a few short days. I’ve had the events from CFB Namao playing back in my head non-stop since 1980. And I think the effect was made even worse by the fact that Captain Totzke and my father both blamed me for what happened and they both blamed me for allowing the babysitter to go after my younger brother.
So it’s not just the untreated trauma from sexual abuse that I’m dealing with, I’m dealing with the fucked up counselling from the military social worker that I receive back then and the scapegoating. Yes, the release of records by DND did vindicate me. But that doesn’t undo the damage done. In fact in some ways knowing that DND and the Canadian Forces knew the truth all along makes the pain even worse.
So, when do I intend to go to sleep?
Well, March 2023 would be the soonest.
But realistically it will probably be closer to 2025 or 2026.
I don’t know what the criteria will be or how many tests I would have to undergo. I would imagine that there would be more than a two question multiple choice questionnaire .
I don’t know if my current physician would be willing to prescribe me the medications or even cannulate me and connect the IV lines and the pumps. Even though I would have to push the button to initiate the process, my doctor would be the one who would have to insert the cannulas and be ready to do manual injections if something went wrong with the pumps. This might cause some physicians to not be willing to participate.
I would like to stick around a while to see what happens with my class action lawsuit. But I do fear that DND and the Department of Justice will try to drag this matter out for as long as possible in the courts. I have no intention of waiting 10 years.
Place of death? More than likely at home in my own bed. Lay down for one final sleep and never wake up again.
What happens after?
Hopefully I get to go to medical school or a body farm.
If I seem cavalier about death, it’s probably just that I refuse to be afraid of death.
The fact is everyone dies. Death is a normal part of life. There is no escaping death no matter how much you want to wish it away.
I don’t want my body pumped full of chemicals and stuck in the ground.
Send me to medical school and let the students learn.
Cut my brain apart and try to figure out why I never ended up on the streets with addiction problems.
Put me on a body farm and let the forensics investigators learn their techniques.
Okay, so I’m going to delve a little bit into the topic of M.A.i.D. and why I am hoping to be able to avail myself to this procedure.
Let’s face it. I’ve been through quite a lot in this life. And what I’ve been through has left me with some very significant long term psychological issues.
Major depression and severe anxiety would be the most significant issues that I struggle with. Yes, the medications that I am on now have calmed the storm, but the storm is still there. And the storm always will be.
Depression and anxiety have genetic roots. And if I had to say who I inherited what from I’d say that my depression came from my father’s genes and my anxiety came from my mother’s genes.
I went through 1-1/2 years of very depraved and graphic sexual abuse. I went through about 2-1/2 years of “counselling” with Canadian Armed Forces officer Captain Terry Totzke, who was anything but concerned with my mental well-being and was more concerned with keeping the secrets of CFB Namao under wraps, even it that meant depriving me of the psychiatric care that I needed at the time.
My childhood was spent living in the household of a rage fuelled alcoholic with his own inner demons that he could barely deal with.
Because of the meddling of Captain Totzke, I have issues with gender identity and sexual orientation.
I have a lot of people living in my head, and none of them are pleasant. They keep coming back in unwanted flashbacks. If somebody touches me unexpectedly I react. I don’t like being touched. Period. And it’s very hard to be intimate with someone when you don’t like touching.
P.S., Captain McRae, the man from the sauna, Captain Totzke, Earl Ray Stevens, they’re all up there. My father, Richard Gill is up there screaming and yelling about how I fucked with his military career.
I don’t like sex. I guess the lessons that I learnt from 9 to 11 was that sex was disgusting and wrong, just as I was disgusting and wrong for having done what I did on CFB Namao when I was 7 to 8.
Even though I now understand that the mess on CFB Namao was far larger than me apparently enjoying what the 15 year old babysitter was doing to me and in turn allowing the 15 year old babysitter to molest my younger brother, I can’t rewire my brain. Nobody can. There is no erasure procedure that will remove all of this crap.
I don’t want to learn how to deal with it or cope with it. I didn’t ask for it, I didn’t want it, and it’s not up to me to live with it.
Death isn’t something that I’ve just begun to long for recently. It’s been with me since the days of CFB Namao.
The problem though is that no matter how much I really wanted to die, working up the will to follow through is something else.
I have come close in the past. You can’t go through what I did and not want to die. I know of two men who took their own lives due to the events on CFB Namao. How many others took their own lives we’ll never know. There is no way on Earth that the Canadian Armed Forces will go overturning the stones of history.
The closest I came was back in 1994. What stopped me was the image of P.S. and my father holding hands and laughing their heads off like they were buddies.
In the days and years after CFB Namao I must would frequently fantasize my own death and that after my death the police would investigate my father and off to jail he would go.
The more I learnt about suicide over the years, the less inclined I became to commit it. Most suicides are not successful, and if you think you’ve got problems prior to suicide, depending an how bad you botch things up, you’re going to have significantly more problems after.
Suicide is messy. And it’s often not quick. And it’s really not fair to those who discover you and who have to clean up the mess. And it often leaves those who knew you with all sorts of unanswered questions.
In the early aughts I started hearing of medically assisted suicide in places like Scandinavia and I was fascinated. Most if not all of the countries that offered medically assisted suicide didn’t often include depression. It wasn’t until the late aughts early ’10s that I started hearing about medically assisted suicide for depression.
But the reality always was that even if European and Scandinavian countries were allowing people to die who only had mental issues such as depression, there was no way I was going to be able to afford a flight over there.
So my hopes and desires kinda took a back seat.
And besides, I was just about to start discovering the whole rancid truth about CFB Namao and about who knew what back then. The more I learnt about CFB Namao, the more I decided that I needed to stay alive to at least clear my name and see this mess through to a conclusion.
In 2019, something in the Canadian media caught my eye. Due to a court decision in Quebec, the Government of Canada was expected to amend the Criminal Code of Canada to allow medical assistance in dying (M.A.i.D.) in circumstances in which the person requesting M.A.i.D. was experiencing pain, but was not near the expected terminal end of their life. Prior to this, M.A.i.D. could only be given if a person requested it and that person was expected to die naturally in the imminent future.
Parliament passed the amendments to the Criminal Code of Canada in March of 2021 to allow M.A.i.D. in cases where death was not imminent. However, what caught my attention was that the Senate, in reviewing the bill, had determined that to not allow a person suffering solely from psychiatric issues to request M.A.i.D. could be seen as a Charter issue.
Parliament has until March 17th, 2023 to pass the required legislation to allow M.A.i.D. for psychiatric issues such as depression.
Well, it’s now 2021. I’ve somewhat cleared my name. I know that the Canadian Forces knew full well what happened back in 1979 to 1980. I also know why it was buried.
I have a class action lawsuit that is heading before a justice in the spring of 2022. The class action came about due to the release of Captain McRae’s court martial transcripts and the Canadian Forces Special Investigations Unit investigation, both of with indicted that the military police in 1980 were full well aware of what P.S. was doing with younger children on the base and that it was Captain McRae that had taught P.S. and encouraged P.S. to behave in the manner that he did.
I don’t know what the rules will be in March of 2023. I can’t imagine it being something as simple as just walking into your doctor’s office and saying “Doc, I’m depressed, I want to die”. There will more than likely be a barrage of psychiatric tests and evaluations. I will probably have to convince the majority of a panel of at least 3 medical professionals that I am sane, competent, and that I am suffering.
If I succeed, then there will be all of the arrangements. I still don’t know what all of the details will be.
After returning back to work I found that the benefits of 10 mg were wearing off around noon. Yes, work is stressful and demanding, so that was probably what started to nullify the effect of the 10 mg.
Being on Escitalopram is different. I’ve honestly never felt like this before in my life.
Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I’ve been given a 2nd chance at life, or have been allowed to start my life over from some arbitrary starting line.
The Escitalopram hasn’t fixed anything. It hasn’t made me “happy”. What it has done is raised the floor to which my depression would drag me down to. I do get somewhat depressed still, but it’s nowhere near as deep as my depressions used to go. I’ve had this untreated depression for far too long. There are also far too many factors that contributed to this depression. I now believe that I was predisposed to depression from my father’s side of the family. Depression can run in families.
The anxiety, which has been a constant companion of mine since the late ’70s had been toned down substantially. I haven’t woken up grinding my teeth once in the last couple of months.
I find that I can concentrate better now and when something disturbs me while I’m in the middle of a thought, it doesn’t completely derail my train of thought.
The dark thoughts are still there, and they always will be. You can’t go through what I’ve gone through and not carry those demons around.
Captain McRae, Captain Totzke, Mcpl Gill, P.S., Earl Ray Stevens. They’re all still up there too. But at least now I can more or less ignore them for the time being.
Even though the Escitalopram has calmed the waves of my emotions the war still rages on behind my eyes. The time for fixing these issues was back in the early ’80s. Not 40+ years later.
But, we’ll have to see how things work out. I’m 50 now. The average life expectancy for a male in Canada now sits at 80 years, so that’s about 30. Most of the men in my family have dropped dead early though, so I’d say that I might have a life expectancy of 70 years. But there are still other factors at play. So let’s just agree that I’m not getting a second chance. I’m just getting a bit of a respite in the final 1/4 of my life.
I’ve ridden bicycles since I was young. I can’t remember exactly when I learnt to ride, but it was on Canadian Forces Base Shearwater.
The nice thing about growing up as a child on military bases is that the living quarters were governed by the Government Property Traffic Regulations. These regulations capped the speed limit in the living quarters to 20km/h. Automobiles also had to yield the right of way to any pedestrian on the streets. So riding bicycles on base was a very safe thing to do.
We also had yearly bicycle rodeos put on by the military police. Every kid that rode a bicycle on base was expected to take part.
And almost every kid on base rode their bicycles to school. Hampton Grey on Shearwater had a large rack. Guthrie School on CFB Namao had a large rack. And Major General Griesbach School had a large rack. CFB Downsview was the only base that I lived on that didn’t have schools on the base for the military children. We had to go to school in the local public schools. This meant crossing some very major streets like Keele St., Sheppard Ave., Wilson Ave.. No parent and no school board in their right mind would allow a child to ride to school in those conditions.
The first time I ever rode a bicycle in the civilian world was when my father was stationed at Canadian Forces Base Summerside in PEI. We didn’t live on the base, we lived in the city in housing that was on long term lease to the Department of National Defence. Military rules applied to the housing, but not to the streets. So things were a lot more dangerous but the City of Summerside was very small. There were still a lot of quiet streets and farm roads to ride on. There was also the cemetery that I could ride around in.
I was hospitalized in my first ever bicycle accident. But that wasn’t due to cars. Someone stuck a stick in my front wheel as I rode by.
When we moved to Canadian Forces Base Namao, it was safe to ride on the streets again as we lived on the base. Even when we moved to Canadian Forces Base Griesbach, we lived on base so it was safe to ride around on base. CFB Griesbach was located within the city of Edmonton, and Edmonton is very much a city in love with the automobile. Being a pedestrian or a bicycle rider in that city is very much having a death wish. It was very seldom that I rode a bicycle in the city of Edmonton.
When we moved to CFB Downsview in Metro Toronto, bicycles were my freedom. I could bicycle downtown whenever I wanted. Yes, Toronto had a good bus service, but bugging Richard for bus fare to go anywhere was like trying to wring blood from a stone. In all of the years that I was eligible for a student bus pass, Richard never got me one. And it was just better not to ask for money as you’d get a lecture of oh just how much money you were costing him and why didn’t I call my mother for money.
I would say that most of my bicycles came from scrap. Posting season on base, which typically lasted from late June to early September meant that old bicycles were often left curb side for trash, or were dumped at the large dumpster usually by the arena or the Canex. On Downsview the dumpster was over by the base auto club. Most of the bikes were in decent condition and required very little in the way of parts or repairs to fix.
I can’t really offer any explanation as to why bicycles were thrown away so frequently on military bases other than parents would promise to buy a new bicycle for their children at the new base as a means of getting the children to be more tolerant of the posting. A bribe if you will.
And no, none of these bicycles were really of any valve. Mainly Supercycle 10 speeds or Sears brand name bikes with only a coaster brake on the rear.
Riding in Toronto traffic really wasn’t bad back in the ’80s. Either that, or I was just plain lucky. There was no such thing as putting you bicycle on the bus, or even taking your bicycle on the subway. Riding to downtown from the living quarters on base which were close to Keele St. and Wilson Ave was about a one hour ride each way.
Every now and again when I had cash, it was a treat to go to Centre Island and ride around from one end of the island to the other.
One of the first lessons that I had to learn when riding downtown was how to cross over the street car tracks. Whatever you do, you don’t want to try to cross the tracks going parallel with them. You need to cross the tracks at a slight angle so that your wheels don’t get sucked into the groove on the rail. Pissed off a couple of street car drivers before I learnt my lesson.
Also, riding a bicycle on a skating rink is doable. I rode my various bikes on the ice at Nathan Philips Square a few times.
After CFB Namao, I was a very lonely child. I didn’t have any friends to speak of. But I had bicycles. And a bicycle could take me away from home and away from Richard and his dysfunctional household.
I briefly stopped riding when I was 16. That’s the year I moved out of the house and on my own. Working full time to pay rent and buy groceries left little time to ride. Bruce and Ed both helped me get my driver’s licence. Ed took me to a notary public so that I could swear that I was living on my own and thus get my learner’s permit without needing Richard’s permission. Bruce and Ed both took turns at teaching me how to drive.
I never liked driving. I never really liked cars. Cars to me always equated with anger and drunk driving. Richard was a menace behind the wheel. Angry. Pissed off. Short temper. Would dump the clutch just to own the slow poke blocking his lane. Brake checking was a hobby of his. And this was when he wasn’t drunk. There was one immature thing that he’d always do if a slow driver “blocked” him. He’d pull around in front of the driver, slow down slightly, and drive slowly to the next intersection with the intention of making the driver behind him get a red light. As soon as the light would turn amber, Richard would then gun it through the intersection.
All told Richard totalled one car in a DUI collision, caused significant damage to another one of his cars in another DUI collision, and drove yet another car into a ditch when he was drunk. The first collision sent me to the base infirmary for stitches. The second collision caused me to get a fat lip the I told the other driver that Richard had just come from the base mess. I was in the car once in Toronto when he rear ended a Jaguar luxury car at a red light. He blamed the collision on me as I had asked him for a ride to work and he was missing an episode of Dr. Who and was in a hurry to drop me off and get back home. In June of 1990, when he took Bill Parker and I to the bar at the Sheraton Inn, he rear ended a civilian police car on Keele street as we were driving towards home on the base.
All told, I’ve only owned cars for 6 years of my 33 year driving life. I had a Plymouth Horizon from the summer of 1990 until the fall of 1992. I had one Volkswagen Rabbit for a few months in 1995. I then bought a better condition Rabbit in late 1995 and owned this until I moved back downtown Vancouver in the summer of 1999.
I’ve owned motorcycles for more years of my life than I’ve owned cars, but not by much, maybe 8 years total.
And all through the years starting when I first moved to Vancouver in February of 1992, I’ve owned bicycles. There’s just something about a bicycle that makes me feel safe. And happy. And content. Maybe because it’s the only vehicle that I don’t associate with Richard.
I can go where I want, when I want. Bicycles are very simple to repair and maintain. They need no gasoline, no oil, no expensive spare parts. It’s not that I’m poor. It’s just that I’d rather eat and travel than blow my money on keeping the oil barons and auto barons swimming in pools of money.
Bicycles don’t get stuck in traffic.
I’m a bicycle rider. I’m not a cyclist. I don’t partake in vehicular cycling.
I try very hard to stay away from the word “cyclist”. The corporate media and the automobile industry have used the word “cyclist” in a very negative sense to portray all bicycle riders of every gender, age, and ability as being “cycling elites” racing around on $10k carbon fibre bicycles. The corporate media and the automobile industry love to rile up car drivers in order to thwart bicycle lanes and bicycle infrastructure in general that would benefit bicycle riders of every age, gender, and ability as there is no way for the corporate media and the automobile industry to profit from something that doesn’t benefit them.
Vehicular cycling is a phrase that I detest with all my being. Vehicular cycling calls for a bicycle rider to pretend that they’re a car and to drive like a car would. Absolute rubbish. In many states in America they have different rules of the road for bicycles. Some states allow bicycles to treat red lights as stop signs if there is no cross traffic. Other states allow bicycles to treat stop signs as yield signs. Some states even have very strict passing laws for bicycles requiring car drivers to either cross the dotted line to pass or at the least pass with 2 to 3 metres of clearance. It’s going to take a lot of effort to change provincial laws here in Canada, but they need to be changed if there’s any hope of increasing the number of bicycle riders in our heavily populated urban centres.
My ride at the moment is an electric upright step through bicycle.
Electric because at my age my knees and hips are starting to show their age. And with electric I can go for longer distances. I can also dress up nicely for special occasions and show up not drenched in sweat.
Upright because much like my knees and hips, my neck is shot. C4-C5-C6 have advanced osteoarthritis, so no more road bikes with drop handlebars for me.
Step through because this works best with my dresses. Riding a standard “Men’s bike” while wearing a dress is awkward. Riding a “woman’s bike” wearing a dress is not much better. A step through allows my dresses or skirts to hang properly.
Shopping isn’t a problem on the bike. It has both front and rear baskets. And with what I don’t pay on insurance, gas, parking, etc. I can pay to have “heavy things” delivered.
And even though it’s electric, I do most of the pedalling. I usually tootle around in power assist 2 or 3. Power assist 5 is something I usually on use on the steep hills. The more you use the power assist, the quicker you kill the battery.
I do have a motorcycle at the moment. It’s a 650cc Suzuki Burgman. It’s a step through motorcycle. Yes, it looks like a scooter, however the engine displacement and the weight of the motorcycle means that ICBC classifies it as a motorcycle. And let’s be honest, scooters don’t do zero to sixty kilometres per hour in under 5 seconds. This motorcycle has no problem keeping up with traffic on the BC highways with the 120 km/h posted speed limits.
As much fun as it is, I still only ride it on occasion. Parking is a hassle. Motorcycles are an easy target for theft. Car drivers just keep getting worse and worse as the years go by. Collisions keep increasing each and every year. It’s just not safe being on a motorcycle on the public street. All it takes is for someone to pull a left hand turn, or a right hand turn into your path and it’s game over. Or some very serious life altering injuries to say the least. Because at 50 to 60 km/h, you might not be at fault, and you might be 100% in the right, but physics and Newton’s laws don’t give a rats ass.
On a bicycle, everything takes time. You can’t race around agitated on a bicycle like a car encourages you to do.
Everything is far more peaceful and serene on a bicycle.
You can smell everything.
You can easily observe everything.
If you see something of interest, you can just pull right on over and check it out.
Cars don’t encourage that, and neither do motorcycles.
So, I’ll more than likely be riding bicycles until the day I die.
The sad thing about my mental illness is that people like my father and Captain Terry Totzke were well aware of the struggles I was having, however it appears that it was more politically expedient to deny me of the treatments and medications that I rightfully deserved in the name of keeping secrets.
How bad were things back then in the early ’80s in Edmonton?
Well, I was supposed to have been placed in a psychiatric facility for children.
I was found to be extremely anxious.
I was found to be well beyond despair.
I was terrified of men, including my own father whom I thought was going to kill me.
I did not like being touched at all by anyone.
I was afraid of my grandmother who had been living with us and raising my brother and I during my father’s absences with the Canadian Forces.
My teacher noted that I did not fit in with the other kids at all. I preferred to be left alone to read books. My teacher did remark that the other kids would often use me as a scape goat.
I remember not having a lot of friends. The kids I hung out with were usually kids from other dysfunctional families living on base.
Alone.
And isolated.
Flailing around in the depths of my despair, my depression, my anxiety.
By myself.
Issues caused by my depression or anxiety would often be straightened out with a backhand or the belt.
I remember as a kid in the aftermath of CFB Namao and up until I was around 15 or 16 I always felt like I wasn’t inside of my brain. I always felt like I was behind myself, watching myself do things, and that I was powerless to do anything. Almost like I was watching a TV show.
Nothing felt real.
I frequently wet the bed right up until I moved out of the house when I was 16. It was only after moving out of the house that I never wet the bed again.
I had no hobbies as a kid, I had no interests.
For 42 years I suffered through severe depression and extreme anxiety.
I knew I was having problems and I knew I was floundering all these years. But you have to work hard and hide it, and pretend it doesn’t exist.
But the depression and anxiety are always there. Ready to flare up when you least expect it. Always trying to sabotage your life because deep down inside you know that your life is worthless and meaningless.
I’ve kinda skimmed along the surface of normalcy from the spring of 1980 until April of 2021.
It took the extreme stress of dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak at my work place to push me over the edge.
I’ve managed to keep employment due to my technical abilities.
Did my depression and anxiety come from the events of CFB Namao?
Not entirely. But I do think genetics played a major part. It would be a very safe bet to say that the paternal side of my family has depression encoded into its genes.
My anxiety is so bad that most of my teeth have been destroyed by grinding. I’ve already had one tooth extracted because I cracked it from grinding and I have a feeling that a few more teeth will need extraction in the short while.
Grinding my teeth was nothing new, I remember my father waking me up when we lived on CFB Downsview due to my grinding.
When COVID struck, the facility that I work at became a hotbed of activity. At first it was easy keeping up with the demands, but as weeks turned into months, the overtime went from being a treat to being a major cause of stress. The facility was designed in the late ’60s / early ’70s and construction was started in the late ’70s. The building HVAC systems meet the ’70s CSA standards. It does not meet 2021 standards. Being caught between parties that wanted todays standards flogged from 1960s technology was also very stress inducing.
So yeah, this was not fun.
Not fun at all.
But it did push me hard enough that I started to suffer constant panic attacks and anxiety attacks. My depression was hitting so hard that I was feeling physically ill and nauseated most of the time. I’d go to work and I couldn’t concentrate and I couldn’t think. My brain felt like it was on fire.
I ended up having to go on sick leave.
And this is how I ended up on Escitalopram.
Escitalopram is a SSRI. Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor.
Let’s be very clear, Escitalopram is not going to cure my depression, nor is it going to cure my anxiety. Those two issues have been with me for so long that they’ve more than likely fucked with my brain’s wiring.
The Escitalopram will not stop the war that goes on inside my head.
The Escitalopram will not evict Captain Terry Totzke, Captain Father Angus McRae, P.S., Richard Gill, Earl Stevens, or the many others who reside inside my skull.
The Escitalopram had a very noticeable effect on my depression and my anxiety. It has really turned down my anxiety. The depression is still there. However the Escitalopram has numbed my emotions. I find that for the first time in my life I can actually concentrate on matters and I can hold two thought simultaneously.
The thing about Escitalopram is the more severe the depression and anxiety, the more noticeable the effect it has on the person taking the medication.
And the fact that Escitalopram had such a drastic effect on me shows just how bad the depression and anxiety were.
I’m at 10mg right now. That might have to go up to 20mg due to the stresses of work.
Negative side effects?
Only two that I’ve noticed.
Getting to sleep takes a bit of work.
And I know, TMI, but I can’t orgasm at the time being.
Both of these are well known side effects of SSRIs
Sleep is becoming easier.
Couple of interesting things that I’ve noticed about being on SSRIs.
My dreams are fucking vivid and wild in a good way. My dreams before SSRIs were sporadic and were often nightmares. Now my dreams are different. More colourful. Playful you could say.
And waking up in the morning is far easier now. I’m often up before the alarms go off.
I don’t need naps during the day.
I’ll probably be on these medications for the rest of my life.
As I said, these drugs will not fix my brain. The damage has been done, and the damage is very extensive. I hope that my body doesn’t build up a tolerance to these SSRIs. Apparently the crash back into depression and anxiety can be pretty horrific.
And even though I am emotionally numbed at the moment, I can tolerate this better than drowning in the pits of despair.
But I also don’t want to spend the next 20 to 30 years of my live living with muted emotions while the war rages on in my head.
There is possibility of a solution, but I won’t find out what the rules are until March 2023.
Beeshive 