On the other hand, at work on Saturday night, I started getting a headache. Dave said he refrained from coming up to say hello to me because I “looked angry.” I got off work at 1:15, got paid and was on the road home by 1:45. Couldn’t sleep due to pain. Really couldn’t sleep. Lots of pain. Ended up having to cancel tubing with Karen on Sunday due to lack of sleep and pain, and I almost never cancel things due to lack of sleep and pain anymore: I’ve learned to be a trooper. But this was bad. Pain set into my teeth. Jaw swelled up. I broke down and got some Orajel from a pharmacy. Been living on a diet of ice, Orajel, ice cream, whiskey, and painkillers. Only cleared the pain from one side of the jaw. Finally got my health insurance to clear an appointment with the dentist for this evening.

After an exam and x-rays, the verdict: I’m a stressed person. Ha. Ha. In other words, my bruxism (teeth grinding/jaw clenching — e.g., why people often think I look angry) has gotten so bad that I’ve severely damaged the nerve in the right side of my jaw. Surgery is recommended, but with surgery it is more than likely that I will permanently lose all feeling in the right side of my face and mouth because the nerve is so badly entangled there. In an attempt to not need the surgery, I’ve been fitted for a mouth guard, which will arrive next week. The guard goes in my mouth on my lower jaw, but also externally along my jawline. I’m supposed to wear it not just during my sleep, but also during the day. Sexy. It looks kind of like this:

And did I mention that my health insurance didn’t cover the mouth guard, so I had to pay $400 out of pocket? It’s a happy day.

I’m a hot gimp sex freak. Soon with bonus mouth guard. I’m not just funny lookin’, I’m lookin’ at ya funny. What’s next, universe? What strange little quirk are you going to slip under my hammer toes next?

Forgive me if you weren’t around in my life as 2002 came to a close. Forgive me, also, for having deleted that journal last year (), which means I don’t have anything online to link for reference. If you weren’t around or just don’t remember, you’ll have to take my word for this or ask some of the many who were.

I’m speaking specifically of November in 2002. After spending Halloween in the hospital from a Lamictal side-effect induced suicide attempt, after getting pissed at psycho-pharmacology and going off all my meds, and still in the midst of a raging case of not sleeping, not eating, drop-my-pants-and-fuck-me-please mania.

But first I have to mention that my doctors are always asking me about the pain in my ass; even with people who have ME, pain like this doesn’t tend to just appear in one region out of nowhere. It usually takes a catalyst. Particularly because I went from acute pain the weekend after Thanksgiving, 2002 (12/1/2002 is the exact starting date) that eventually ebbed to what is now five years of chronic pain in the same location, my doctors have always heavily queried me about what I was doing around that time that caused the pain. And I never could come up with an answer. I didn’t fall, I didn’t have a car accident, I didn’t lift or move anything heavy — nothing.

This going to get relevant to so many things in just a moment, I swear.

What I was doing around that time was fucking. A damn lot of fucking, with several partners. Come to think of it, November is and always has been my most promiscuous month. But that aside, I wasn’t just fucking, I was particularly looking for hardcore fucking, and one night, I finally found it.

Sunday, November 17, 2002. Went to hear my friend dj at the Blue Room in Adams Morgan. There, according to the private journal entry that I left myself the following day, I bypassed the lay I thought I was going to get (someone I’d been flirting with for a few weeks) for someone I met that night. Actually, two someones. Twins. U.S. Men’s National Soccer player (defender) and his twin brother, the team’s PR manager (at the time), both of whom were high off the win earlier in the day against El Salvador. As it turned out, it was the player who hit on me first, but once he found out I was into kink (mania=forward about desires) he said there was “someone I had to meet.” He then introduced me to his brother. We got to talking. Brother is into kink exactly like I am into kink — I’m a switch in that “I want to wrestle so much most people would think it is rape” sort of way, and so is he. He likes it hard, I like it hard. He likes bondage, I like bondage. His brother ditched the girl he had been with. The player ditched the girl he had been with. When the bar closed at 1.30, we headed back to their hotel, the Marriot at Key Bridge in Arlington. The bedroom overlooked the Potomac.

I had the fuck of my life. To this day, it remains the one and only time I have orgasmed solely from penetration performed by another person. (I’ve orgasmed a few times via penetration alone when I’ve used toys on myself, but I don’t count those because it’s just masturbation.) It’s still up there in the top five fucks of all time. To quote my journal entry from the next day, “I am covered in bruises and I am sore from head to toe, and I still have not slept.” I remember that soreness, but I remember, too, that I did sleep later that day, for a few hours. And the pain started to subside.

But pleasure is not without its consequences. To quote my journal from a friends-only entry dated November 27, (the only entry available to friends where the encounter was mentioned):

A few weeks ago, I went to this very trendy bar for the evening.

I encountered a semi-famous, dashing young man who was heavily into bondage and in town briefly due to his very public, jet-setting job.

After several hours of very lucid sexual discourse, we leave the very trendy bar and go to his incredibly expensive hotel with a fabulous view of the city, where we embark on wonderful kinky adventures until the sun comes up.

I catch a few hours of sleep between the spotless white sheets, then leave him to chat on the phone with CNN.

Immediately after this night I start experiencing… symptoms. I ignore them.

The itching, the flaking, the tiny white spots begin to drive me mad.

Finally I can take it no longer, and check my sources.

It is confirmed.

The expensive hotel, the semi-famous man… they gave me one of the most embarrassing sexually transmitted diseases you can acquire.

It is nothing so exotic as herpes. I am not suffering from syphilis. HPV — well, we will not go there.

No, it is nothing so extreme.

I have fucking head lice.

My incredible luck still holds. The clock ticks, the world continues to spin, and time has not yet run out. Wash my sheets and bring on the next one as I spin the bullet chamber and raise the gun to my head for another go.

But, the STD was not all!

My most recent ex-boyfriend at the time stopped talking to me (good riddance) after he learned of the liaison. We’d been broken up for four months, were still friendly, and he knew I was now seeing (lots of) other people. That Monday evening, in a fit of rushed, hypomanic excitement, I felt the need to tell — no, brag — directly to as many people as possible about my good fucking. I told the man I had been flirting with previously (he congratulated me and continued pursuing me), I told various friends who giggled and rolled their eyes at me, I told a friend who said he envied my pursuit-of-pleasure antics, and I told the ex-boyfriend, who said I had severe psychological damage, that I was incredibly fucked up, and that he didn’t want to talk to me anymore. (Perhaps it was poor judgment to tell him, but in retrospect, only something that incredibly painful would cause him to stop talking to me, which is what we both actually needed.)

So far, the one night stand had given me head lice and caused the loss of a friendship. Can the chamber roll further in the pistol? Yes, as a matter of fact, it can.

The day after that last journal entry was Thanksgiving (11/28/2002). I had what I still consider to be the happiest weekend of my life that weekend, thanks to Caesar and Soundclash, but it was after babbling for hours into my microcassette recorder at the end of the weekend that the pain started to set in. Once I had gone to sleep and awoken on Monday, I could barely move. I couldn’t sit at all. Thus began the pain in my ass.

Physically or emotionally, did anything taxing transpire between the night of the one-night stand on November 17-18, and December 1? No. Ten days between activity and pain. There is no direct mention in my journal of the sudden onset of acute pain in my buttocks, though I mention being in a shitload of pain (no specific location) on December 2 and state on December 8 that I’ve entered into a complete relapse of physical health (all the progress that had been made in autumn’s months of physical therapy was gone). By the following month, I was back in physical therapy and had received cortisone shots in my ass and thighs. Some of the pain subsided a few days after the shots, but what I consider to be the core of the pain — a spot I imagine to be about the size of a golf ball, and located at the top of my left femur — has not gone away. It is always, always there. The pain ranges from a three to a ten, but since 2002 has not gone away. Additionally, there is pain in around my tailbone, particularly on the right side, which I learned last August was from a bone spur.

Bone spurs don’t just randomly grow on girls in their twenties who don’t have bone diseases or suffer traumatic injuries. There has to be a causation. My causation? There is no way to prove my hypothesis and I will probably never know if there was something there before, or if it happened that night. But it seems as though the fisting highly aggravated my coccyx, actually causing it to become damaged. My rheumatologist confirmed that any injury would have flared, been sore but not very noticeable, and then pain would have onset when my body’s attempt to heal itself failed. 10 days is a reasonable time period for a 21-year-old female body with chronic illness to attempt to heal a bone injury, not succeed, have an osteophyte (bone spur) grow as a result (the excruciating pain from Dec 1, 2002 through February 2003 that prevented me from even sitting down), and then for the coccyx to grow a bursa to protect itself from the osteophyte rubbing against it.

Yeah, you got it right. In November of 2002, I got royally fisted and fucked; I squirted and screamed and enjoyed every minute of it. Which is great, because nearly five years later I still have the pain in my ass to remember it by… which is amusing, because I can’t even remember the brother’s name.

The moral of my story is don’t have sex. Sex leads to STDs, loss of friendship, social stigma, severe pain, loads of medical bills, expensive medications, a breaking body, permanent disability, incontinence, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, abortion, children, violence, war, drought, plague, famine… and eventually the apocalypse, I’m sure. Alternatively, the apocalypse is supposedly coming any way, nothing is certain except taxes and death, and all the consequences of sex are — one way or another — possible without sex, anyway. So you could throw caution to wind and fuck your brains out, but don’t say Mama Cass didn’t warn you!

Of these, 37 are sexually transmitted. The others cause non-cancerous types of skin viruses, such as plantar warts (strain numbers 1, 2, 4 & 10), common warts (strain numbers 2 & 7), flat warts (strain numbers 3 & 10), and subungual and periungual warts, which share strains.

Of the 37 strains of HPV that are sexually transmitted, the two most common — causing nearly 90% of documented STD-related HPV cases — 6 & 11, do not cause cancer of the genitals. In fact, strains 6 & 11 may not even show any visible signs on the genitals (warts), and the infected person may recover from these strains of the virus without the infection (warts) visibly occurring. For those who do not recover from these strains, they may show warts in the genital or anal region at any time. Other HPV strains that cause visible external warts but are non-cancerous are 42, 43, 44, 55… These are regarded as low-risk strains. Women with more low-risk strains are thought to increase their likelihood of exposure to the high-risk strains, and are more likely to contract the high-risk strains of the virus than women without any low-risk strains.

There are 19 high-risk strains, of which 16 & 18 are the most common. The high-risk strains are the infections that may lead to cancer. Strains 16 & 18 cause 70% of all HPV-related cancers. The most frequent location for HPV-related cancer is in the cervix (almost 500,000 cases worldwide in 2002), while those infected who participate in anal sex also put themselves at risk for the second highest HPV-related cancer — anal, at approximately 30,000 cases worldwide in 2002. That year, approximately another 15,000 of HPV-induced cancers were vulvar or vaginal, while another approximately 10,000 were of the penis. In addition, due to oral sex with those infected with HPV, in 2002 there were approximately 8,000 cases of HPV-related throat cancer, and another 8,000 cases of HPV-related mouth cancer.

HPV strains 6 & 11, which do not cause cancer of the genitals but can cause genital and anal warts, can also cause warts to grow on the respiratory tract and larynx. This can effect the voice, as well as an individual’s ability to breathe as the growth of warts grows larger and blocks the passages. Multiple surgeries may be required over an infected individual’s lifetime, as infection (warts) with 6 & 11 in this region is recurring. Severe cases of infection with 6 & 11 of the respiratory tract and larynx have been known to cause cancer of the head and neck.

Infection of strains 6 & 11 in the respiratory tract and larynx is passed via oral sex, and can be passed when neither the genital nor oral region show warts. Indeed, this is true of all the strains of sexually transmitted HPV. For instance:

Condoms may reduce the risk but do not prevent passing the infection from infected skin that is not covered by the condom. The new HPV vaccine, Gardasil (Merck & Co), targets the four most common HPV strains: 6 & 11, 16 & 18. Gardasil is already on the market and will likely soon be followed by Cervarix (GlaxoSmithKline). The vaccines, though targeted to girls and women ages 6-26, is safe and recommended for boys and men of those ages, as well.

On a personal note, at last count I had over 20 strains, including many high-risk. My doctors are still recommending that I get Gardasil’s vaccination program going ASAP, since I turn 26 in four months. While it might not do anything, it might give my immune system a little boost in that department. Mightn’t hurt, at any rate, and since Medicaid/Merck have a deal going to cover everyone, I figure I might as well get poked x 3. See what develops, or doesn’t. Rather gamble with that than guarantee having another LEEP, any day.

When I get upset, have a relapse, get sick, or reach catatonia, the space between my eyebrows starts to twitch uncontrollably. Like now. Sometimes it’s my right eyelid — the one Caesar calls my lazy eye — but more often than not, it’s the space between my eyebrows.

Twitch, twitch, a little to the right. That’s how a spectator can tell Cassandra is not in the best of places. Not by the manic preaching — that can be a result of many things, not all of which are bad. Not by the slurring — that can be from lack of sleep, too much to drink, too much sleep, too many drugs, or whatever else. Not from the unsteady gait — I’m just a clumsy oaf when I’m not in tip top shape. No, just the little tics. It’s not unusual for someone to tell me they had no idea I was drunk or sick, until well after the fact. Because, usually, I can hold my own, even if I am spouting off to my boss about my uneven, floppy tits, and how I don’t particularly like working at the bar, but it’s sure better than being at home with my ex.

Ironically, it’s the nights I’m not blasted that I worry about myself. Like tonight. I can’t turn my mind off, I can’t sleep, no one else is awake, and I can’t stop thinking about all the sex.

Yeah, the sex. I can’t ignore the fact that sex is a big problem for me. Not just because I’ve made the mistake of making my money from it, but because many a time over the years, I’ve ended up in situations where I’ve based my self worth on it. And unfortunately, once the sex appeal starts working (in my favor), whether or not I want it to, I have problems turning it off. I start dissecting every little interaction from that standpoint.

Vlad used to get so mad at me about this: “Why can’t you ever just leave it (sex work) out of the equation? Why does everything always have to be about sex [work]?”

Because, I’ve based a lot of my life on it. I’ve overcome social phobia through it. I’ve used it to get jobs, to get money, to get meals, to get bills paid. It’s taken care of me over the years. Separating myself from my sex is impossible. Separating sex from work is nearly improbable. Separating myself from sex work, impossible.

But I’ve already forgotten where I was going with this tonight, except for the fact that I feel like I want what I can’t have, and I’m too timid to make things work out.

Thanks, WebMD, for making sexual outlaws at least somewhat acceptable. (I’d be happier if they didn’t say “if you must have anal sex,” among other things, but it’s a start.)

Because I have lost so much feeling in the nerves in my genitals due to my disability, actual sex, while pleasurable, is nothing but frustration topped with the insult of being covered in fluids that don’t stem from my own orgasm. I usually end up feeling like a fuck hole due to not being able to experience the physical result that I desire, and as a result, I end up acting like a cum receptacle. This generally pleases no one.

Sex therapists say there needs to be more communication: I need to tell my lover what to do to pleasure me. But unless you are a pure exhibitionist, which I am not, you get tired of telling your lover to just lay off and watch so that their eyes can learn what their fingers seem unable to. Even that, though, is of little use when my nerves are likely to shut off in one region at any moment and respond elsewhere instead. “A little to the left, up up, no not that far, now down,” only goes so far in a one inch square area before becoming utterly frustrating to the person who can’t feel it.

This is why I have a bucketful of sex toys, a constantly unsatisfied sex partner (minus first few weeks, give or take) no matter who the flavor of the moment is, and belligerent tolerance of couples-participation sex. But it wasn’t always this way, which is why I’m glad I started fairly early and covered a lot of ground before it came to this.

At three-thirty this morning I got a phone call from someone inquiring if I would meet up with them, bring them back to my place, and fuck them. I turned him down on the grounds that he is married.

The thing is, it doesn’t actually bother me that he’s married. I knew that when I first got involved with him in March. But I was throwing caution to the wind, then, and as I do when I’ve given up, I act on everything I feel or don’t feel. In this case, the lack of an ethical code of behavior in regard to his adultery and my cheating on the person I was with.

Cheating: I felt bad doing it to one person, and only one person. He wasn’t the first, and he sure as hell wasn’t the last, as that was back when I was 17. I’ve been cheated on in return, once so badly at age 19 that I somehow managed (mostly by default in the later years) to not cheat for four years (relationships: Republican, Fat M, Dr Maude). Maude, however, considers me to have been cheating, despite my severing our relationship prior to beginning elsewhere; opinions differ.

The point is, I have this serious problem upholding this moral principle. It is meant to be a Golden Rule deal: do unto others and all that jazz. But despite not wanting to get burned, I don’t curtail my actions. I very consciously make the decision to cheat because I simply do not feel guilt about doing so. It’s horrid, but other than the one person, I haven’t felt guilty yet. Aware that I’ve hurt someone, yes, and perhaps in retrospect wish I hadn’t caused them suffering, but actual remorse? Not for the action, just for the pain caused (which only comes if caught!)

But right now I’m in one of those periods where I feel my ethical standards need shaping up for the sake of, well, everything involving me. Not because I put value in the morals of this culture’s norm, but because I’m trying to play by the rules for a change. Loose morals, at least on me, have tended to go hand in hand with being loose with everything else, and right now I can’t afford to be loose with any of my resources.

Unfortunately, I still just want to get laid. Stupid Puritan ethics.

I can pick a few spots in the time line (this April, September-October of 2005) where there are three week gaps of no getting it on, but a full four weeks? I honestly think I have to dial the clock back to early autumn of 2001 for that.

After the Republican and I broke up in December 2000, I made myself promise to take some time off to get my head together. I didn’t date anyone for a full year, and kept away from sex for… I think it was six months. That six month gap at the age of 19 was the longest gap since I was 17.

That’s possibly problematic. It’s not like I’m dating all those people, I’m just fucking them. I’m being alone, but having sex, then going home and feeling good. Not empty, not alone, not lonely. But that’s after I’ve had sex. Prior to having it, I can be feeling unfulfilled and antsy. Sex is like a salve. But is it a solution? And what’s actually the problem?