Sorry I'm not blogging very often; still feeling a bit distant/reserved from the blog after the messes with TypePad; and still a bit uncomfortable with its new interface, which is technically better but more complicated (which is of course distracting from the business of actually writing).
An interesting discovery, an uncovering, at my doctor's appointment two and a half weeks ago, which I've been thinking about a lot. The HIV consultant told me that the arthritic symptoms in my right hand – and, more importantly, depression symptoms – are increasingly regarded as being typical of hepatitis C. And he prefaced all this by saying he had been nervous – did he say 'scared'? – about telling me all of this….
Very odd, to me, but illuminating. It is odd that he would not want to tell me all this – out of, I suppose, concerns about predisposing me to depression? many doctors think that way – given that I talk about symptoms, experiences, problems, quite bluntly, clearly, professionally, with him and with the medical students we give presentations to, and to the psychologist. I'm practically a professional (although of course I did become a 'difficult' patient for two months this spring over the questions of treatment and its implications).
Of course what this actually means is the opposite of what he was worried it would mean – the information is liberating, calming. Think about it: if depression is a common symptom of hepatitis C – not a result of worrying about the infection, but actually a result of the infection itself – then much of my depression since I was diagnosed with it in the fall of 2000, and possibly some time before (it is impossible to say when I was infected – it could be any time back to the late 1970s – and it is hard to say exactly when the virus might have had an effect on me before my first 'acute' presentation around November 2000) is not a function of my own weakness, my own loneliness, the gray skies of Newcastle, the isolations of Hong Kong and Newcastle, the disaster of the Australian career collapse: it is a symptom, something that happens in the body as a result of the infection.
Yes, of course: I know that the causes are all mixed in together, and that the gray dimness of my life since arriving here in 2002 has created a lot of grayness inside me. But the liberatory side of it, the sense of distancing and objectification of the insidious depression: the sense that it has a source which is outside of me – that is very freeing, a great relief, and it gives me a valuable place to stand, from which I can perhaps have more control over, more impact on, my own life.
Not that I'm interested in psychotropic drugs – I still don't trust them, though they're better than they used to be. But the sense that I can perhaps strive against depression (which, in any case, I haven't felt much this year) without striving against myself gives me extra strength….
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And it is a rainy Sunday: but I would like to get work done. Before the alarm went off I'd already done some rather professionalized dream interpretation, using Johnson's Inner Work to help me.
And did I mention that I have this new, imagined, not completely impossible goal: that I could study to be a Jungian analyst?… although Jung liked for analysts to have already had other careers, and to be at least thirty years old or so, my age and problematic health prognoses may make this an implausible career aim. But the idea that I could do such a thing is rather fun to play with….
Paul Attinello 
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