Delays and Acute Bronchitis

I went to the emergency room on Wednesday to get treatment for what has turned out to be Acute Bronchitis.  I've been struggling with an upper respiratory infection since the first week of this month and with the Sarcoidosis, respiratory issues can be tricky at best.  Since Thanksgiving it had taken a dramatic turn for the worse and I spent the first part of the week looking for a free clinic to assist me and found none.  I'm on the mend (I hope) and resting, but in the meantime, I've gotten behind here at Zombie Bites.  I'll try to get things caught up in the next few weeks but I ask that you bear with me in the meantime.  Thanks.

From the Sketchbook Archives: Hopeless

Another sketch from the Sarcoidosis / Prednisone period.  If I receall correctly, I think this was the last of that set of sketches.  This piece encompassed my feelings at that time.

I was lost in a miasma of grief, fear, sorrow, powerlessness and hopelessness.  My life was irrevocably changed and many avenues of action and choice were forever lost to me.  I am still recovering from the events of this time period.

{Sharpie}

From the Sketchbook Archives: Sorrow

Here is another sketch from the period immediately following my sarcoidosis diagnosis and after the four months I took prednisone.

{Graphite and Sharpie}

Interior Life From the Archives: Panther Rattler

And now for something completely different...well not really.  The next few drawings were from the same period as my other Interior Life posts from Trail of Bread Crumbs: Sunrise, The Old Blue Man, and The Well.  However, the ones I'm posting here have a definite darker edge.  Welcome to my dark corners.  (Thank you Garth Marenghi!)

When I created this piece and the ones that will follow, I was trying to find some kind of balance between my commercial goals for my art and my emotional needs for my art.   There has always been a therapeutic aspect to my work as well as it being a descriptive litmus for the current state of my life.  Selling that out completely to commercial control seemed ill advised...that and I'm sure I'll never be able to affordable a proper therapist.  So why throw away a perfectly good tool for self analysis and growth?!?  Instead I tried to blend the two by making my emotional works a little more commercially presentable.  I'm not sure it worked all that well in the end as I am currently unemployed, but what do you do?  LOL.  Ah Life!

My idea here was of turning some of my darker feelings into functional illustrations.  This is me on a bad day...a very bad day.  I think this may have been the lurking demon of the steroid, Prednisone.  I took that hateful drug for 4 months and it took me years to recover from its effects.  I would not recommend it to anyone.  It made me psychotic and when I tried to explain it to my doctor he just looked at me and nodded and smiled.  So I did some research and learned what I needed to do to ween myself off it, then went to a nutritional therapist at the suggestion of my friend Su.

Prednisone is the reason I have very little faith in the medical community.  The answer is always - "yeah but you're alive".  QUALITY of life is also extremely important. I wish for anyone who says something like that to be required to take Prednisone until they've eaten their way to 35 pounds heavier in four months, are punching walls at least once a week, are crying themselves to sleep every night, and are laughing and crying at the same time whenever they have ANY kind of emotion...but YEAH...I was alive.
I was just out my F@%&#&^ mind.

(prying his white knuckled hands from the podium, he steps down from the soap box)  Oops...Sorry about that.  Prednisone was a bad experience for me and my doctor was apathetic about its effects on me.  Anyway - how bout that crazy cave creature I drew!

I was worried at first about posting this text because of the intensity of my feelings concerning Prednisone, but I realized that this text matches the drawing quite nicely.  So it stays. 

{Pen & Ink.}