No Wine, No Weed

How stopping smoking and drinking has changed my life

Sunrise in Prescott Az

It began with an episode of A-fib, which isn’t supposed to happen because I take 50mg of flecainide acetate twice a day to keep my heart beating in rhythm. But something triggered the electrical system, and my pulse shot up to my max. I wrote my cardiologist an email telling him that the drug wasn’t working and I can’t take metoprolol because it puts me into hibernation. My pulse will go down to 40 with that shit. I knew he wouldn’t respond to an email, it’s an insult to a doctor to do that because of patient privacy laws, but, if Linda asked if I’d contacted him I could honestly say that I had. I figured he’d just put me on a higher dose or a stronger anti-arrhythmic. I began experimenting with whether I can control it by cutting out triggers and getting more exercise.

The first time I went in with the issue, the cardiologist didn’t ask me anything about diet or lifestyle, when the issue could easily have been low electrolytes. I know that now, but then I did not. He went straight to the lowest dose of flecainide acetate, and it worked like magic. I was good a new. The doctor assured me there would be no side effects, but I knew that was a suggestion for a placebo effect. Of course there are side effects to almost any medication, and with an anti-arrhythmic, one of them is it can make the pulse rate run low. My pulse can run down in the fifties and even high forties when I sleep, and if I take even a quarter dose of metoprolol, I can go even lower.

When I began to educate myself on a-fib I found that an anti-arrhythmic makes me feel better, but doesn’t address the cause of the afib. These meds manage it, for a while, and then they don’t, and one moves to a different medication or gets an ablation, which may or may not solve the problem by destroying the tissue causing the arrhythmia.

The truth is that when I masked the symptoms, I was not motivated to do anything about the problem because it wasn’t there. So rather than go straight to the doctor for more symptom management, I wanted to see what I could do to decrease the symptoms without the meds, but you don’t just go off an anti-arrhythmic drug, because it’s dangerous. Instead, I cut the dose in half so that I was getting some symptoms, but could experiment with managing it with breath work, increasing nitric oxide, stopping known triggers, and upping my exercise.

After a couple of weeks I had a pretty good handle on it but couldn’t make it go away, so I went back to the 50 mg twice a day, but now without alcohol and weed. I started going to bed early because there wasn’t much to do without the social lubricants I have always enjoyed so much. Now the role of the medication was to give me a window of time in which I could do everything I knew how to do to solve the underlying issue, not to make me forget there is an underlying issue.

I began to notice that dinner is not really very social without the wine and weed. We were used to sitting around the table and splitting a bottle of red, while I would slip out onto the deck and do a pipe hit two or three times, so that going down the stairs was more exciting, and I was more engaging company. Without drinking or smoking, though, it was just eat and wash the dishes, and after that, what? I didn’t feel like writing. Weed always makes me want to write, though, according to Linda, I don’t write as well on it as when I’m straight. I understand this.

I long ago realized that a focused mind works by eliminating what is not moving the reader toward the point in a linear process. Weed allows all the material normally screened out, to be allowed in, which can be highly entertaining. The mind relaxes back away from the single focus and into a carnival of connections and associations which can surprise and amuse by combining in unexpected ways. It was this teeming life beneath the surface, swirling in my mind, that made me want to sit down at the keyboard and play words like music. That the writing was often incoherent to other people wasn’t of much concern because I wasn’t trying to prove anything with logical cause to effect process. I was exploring writing as being like painting, evolving away from realism and into surreal, or abstract, images. Without the drugs the mind eliminates what is not the point, and the rest goes into the unconscious, to be processed in dreaming.

Another change I made was moving dinner forward to close my fast at 5pm, rather than eating at seven or eight, drinking wine or a margarita, and then snacking on cheese or chocolate, or sometimes ice cream and shortbread. I stopped all that and became bored, and boring. I began walking up the mountain every day until I’d burned seven or eight hundred calories. I am closing all my rings on the exercise program, the hardest being the six hundred calorie move goal. The stand goal is easy, because, when I get up, I already have a couple of hours toward the stand goal, because of getting up to piss. It’s an old man thing.

What I began to notice, though, was that Linda is not enjoying my company that much anymore. She is moving away, socially, into her iPhone, showing less interest in cooking dinner (our deal is she cooks and I do dishes). Tonight she was playing games on her phone, so, to be irritaing, I opened a can of sardines and dressed them with red onion and mustard. She will not come near me when I am eating sardines. It was a passive aggressive response to her waning interest in the new me.

She is getting bored with me, and, I must admit, so am I. I was a lot more fun when I was high. On the other hand, being boring in one’s habits is probably good for staying alive. I’m not ignoring my underlying issue, now, just because there are no symptoms. I am doing what I can to fix it. I know something will kill me, but dying isn’t what scares me. Like Jerry Seinfeld’s dad said, when Jerry asked him about his fear of dying, “What do I care? I’ll be unconscious.” What scares me is losing independence.