As I get older, I am entering the territory of having Parkinson’s Disease and possibly dementia related to that. Of course, that assessment is not from a doctor; it is my own conclusion based on evidence that may or may not be simple paranoia. Of course, paranoia is a symptom of both Parkinson’s and Parkinson s-related dementia.
Lately, I have made some paranoia-inspired decisions that negatively impacted my life. In February, I thought I was going to die from sepsis caused by a kidney infection I had after passing two small kidney stones and getting a urinary tract infection from the lovely experience. A few hours in the ER revealed that my urologist had completely healed the infection the week prior, and I was simply reacting to the burning sensation as I emptied my bladder, which was later cured by the urologist giving me pills that turned my pee blue and made the burning go away. Overreaction to a symptom that didn’t mean what I thought it meant.
In May, I had been routinely monitoring my blood pressure and got a reading of 40 for a heart rate. 40 beats a minute is possibly going to be fatal, according to my experience of listening to my mother, a registered nurse of 40-plus years, telling about her ER nurse experiences. I also didn’t feel very well. So, knowing I was probably overreacting again, I went to the ER again. Five days later, I was home from the hospital having had surgery to install a pacemaker. That time I got turned into a cyborg and discovered that I was right about something due to my paranoia. It probably saved my life.
But then, two weeks later I was back in the ER because of lightheadedness. a thing clearly listed on my doctor’s orders as a thing to go back to the ER for. This time is was only dehydration. So, again, not as bad as I thought it was.
Then, a week ago, I had a charge on my checking account that I couldn’t account for. It was supposedly Microsoft billing me for something. So, I called the number provided to ask them what it was for. Well, the number was not in service, and it was recently canceled. So, I called the bank’s online security number. My debit card was stopped, and a replacement was put in the mail. And he asked about lost checks. I told him about one of those that disappeared from the mailbox, and my checking account was closed and transferred to a new account number too. Perfect for end-of-the-month bill paying. I finally have access to money again since yesterday’s mail.
Having paranoia is a bad thing concerning things yet to come. Like dementia. But it isn’t all bad. It made me potentially head off worse things. There really are bad things that can happen from online scammers and identity thieves, though it turns out the charge was legitimate, the Microsoft folks just refuse to identify it through my Google Chrome email. And certain concerning symptoms often lead to worse outcomes than I managed to have, though the low heart rate really could have stopped my heart.
Catch a Falling Star 
Imaginary Friends
When you know someone has an imaginary friend, something like Elwood’s six-foot invisible rabbit called Harvey, don’t you immediately think that person is crazy? I do. But I have imaginary people as friends. I think most writers do. So am I crazy? Probably. But hopefully it is a good kind of crazy.
It began with imaginary friends from books. The Cat in the Hat was my friend. Jim Hawkins was my friend, as was Mowgli and all the members of the Swiss Family Robinson. They entered my dreams and my daydreams. I told them my troubles the same way I listened to theirs through their stories.
I began to have imaginary friends that came from my own imagination too.
I used to tell my mere human friends about my friend Davalon from outer space. I told them that he was real and secretly visited me at night to talk about being able to learn about humans on earth by walking around invisibly and watching them. I got so involved with these stories that my sixth grade class began saying, “Michael is from Mars.”
When I was a teenager, I began having conversations with a faun. His name was Radasha. He was a creature from Greek Myth, a sensual Dionysian creature who, in his child body, was both younger than me and way older than me. I didn’t realize until much later in life that he was the result of my repressed memories of a childhood sexual assault that I was the victim of. I could talk to him about my fear of nakedness. I could tell him about my blossoming interests in naked girls and their bodies. I could talk to him about all the things I was somehow too terrified to talk to my male friends about, even though none of them had the same reluctance to discuss sex. Ra was imaginary. But he helped me heal.
Then the story-telling seriously began. I used Davalon as one of the main characters in my novel Catch a Falling Star. I created Torrie Brownfield, the baby werewolf to express the feelings I had as a boy about being a monster and secretly terrible and deformed. Torrie is a normal boy with a condition called hypertrichosis. I am working on The Baby Werewolf now. And then there’s lovely Valerie Clarke. She is the main character of Snow Babies which is a finished novel, edited and proofread and ready to publish. It is I book I will have to find another way to publish since the recent death of PDMI Publishing. She is not a me-character, based on my own thoughts and feelings. She is based on former classmates and students who told me things that express the sadness and isolation of growing up female. So she is even more imaginary than my other characters.
They become real people to me. They have their own point of view. They talk to me and I learn things from them. But they are imaginary. So am I crazy? Yes… as a loon. And happy as Elwood P. Dowd to be that way.
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