Rough transcript:
Not that my health
matters, any more or less than the health of a soldier fighting for the life of
the women and children in a town matters.
He, she matters as a tool, a scalpel to the surgeon matters. If you don't understand that were dead,
because you don't understand what we’re facing.
You don't understand what the next 200 billion children are facing. You don’t understand we’re right on the edge
of the cliff, if we haven't gone over it already in 2012.
This is not the time
for normalcy and hasn't been for a long time.
If you don’t
understand that my health matters only as the health of a soldier in a
life-and-death fight matters, then we’re dead and your part of the problem. Right
now, with so much broken, and so little time, love is tough, or it's not love.
By going back through
the archives of ‘start loving’ blog one could, including I could, check the
history of my symptoms. I don't have the time.
My earliest recollection of starting to feel like my body was, well,
something was very wrong was the end of 2011 after the second of the 50 days,
two 50 days of strikes that year. Bear
in mind that I've done probably 8 to 10 major hunger strikes over the last
decade with this now sixty-year-old body; but I don't know that my symptoms are
related to the hunger strikes. But I
suspect they are.
Late last year 2011,
early 2012, a collection of symptoms started to wear on me quite significantly
- frequent stomachaches like I’d been punched, or, I now realize, like there
was an open wound. Just an ache, not queasiness, I don't recall
nausea. But it hurt, day after day, not
throughout the day, but periodically throughout the day. Seemed to be associated with eating but not
any particular type of food; not really even any particular quantities. My stool was rarely solid. I’d be kept awake for half an hour and as
long as 2, 3, 4 hours by what's called restless leg syndrome, I guess it
is. There were unexplained periods
lasting hours where I didn’t have the strength of the ragdoll.
Finally by April this
was weighing on my ability to contribute, enough that I went to the medical truck
for we homeless, to my dear Dr. Cardile.
She'd been asking me to get blood tests for a long time. I associated that with expensive medical procedures
and I told her that I'm unwilling to have significant monies spent on my
person. She understands that. But I was finally so debilitated for so long,
and realized that maybe there was some low cost fix, that I said okay, I’ll go
for some blood tests.
Well, the results
were to be back a week later, and totally unforeseen by me the first death fast
began, the ‘weapons test’ death fast as it turns out, and I thought, I won’t be
here two months from now so why go bother Dr. Cardile?
A week ago, not
seeing this current death fast coming this time either, my teeth are beginning
to shatter from lifelong nocturnal grinding, I saw the medical truck near my
new location at the Canadian Tar Sands Embassy, and nurse Penny who had drawn
my blood for Dr. Cardile said, ‘No, no, you're not going to this truck, you’re
going to Dr. Cardile, she wants to see you, now. Go see her tomorrow.’ I said okay and several days ago saw Dr. Cardile
who said – you’re anemic and usually that's associated with internal bleeding
for someone your age. We reviewed my
symptoms which by 2 weeks ago were all recurring, the symptoms I recounted
earlier in this video. ‘Yup,’ she said;
and some other symptoms too gross to be mentioned on this video. Low iron can be associated with the restless
leg. Within the last two weeks now, on two different nights, has kept me awake
for a good 4 to 6 hours, quite agonizing.
It’s the kind of stuff they do when they black site you, it is quite
distracting from my work, my ability to my work; quite agonizing. Very tiring.
But there are tests
that they do now to zero in on the cause, and that’s the blood work now in
progress. I’ve read up on this little
bit - she's trying to figure out whether it's internal bleeding, could be
cancer, could be diet, could be kidney, and Wednesday morning I have an
appointment to go back and see her; she'll have the results by then and there’ll
be more to report.
So I went in for a
dental referral and by the time I was done this week they've taken more blood,
sticking me about eight times to find a vein that would work; I sure don’t have
the body I used to. They took my vitals
including weight, and I miscalculated, I'm only 9 pounds overweight weighing in
at 164 with my clothes off and 155 is my zero body fat weight, at least, it
used to be; which means I've only got about 18 days from day one. On or about day 18 I expect to be starting to
bite into and sometime thereafter, brain.
Most or all the fat should be gone by then. I calculated that I had twice that excess
body fat but I don't, it turns out from the scale.
So with the heart,
with the anemia, with a lower body fat, I’m likely to be fading much sooner
than I have before.
