Episode 45: Phone Sex, Narcan & Speculums! 💥

I’M SO VERSATILE, I’m like a Swiss Amy Human!!! MY SORTA-BROKEN NERVOUS SYSTEM!!! Date someone whose voice makes you calm… or wet… IDEALLY BOTH!!! Sexy Sexy Time!!! SKETCHY BASEMENTS!!! ROMANTIC-ish log cabin GETAWAYS!!! OVERSTIMULATION!!! Medical terminology!!! HORMONES!!! Sitting alone in a room and meditating FOREVERRR!!! SEXY CLIFFHANGERS!!! VULNERABILITY!! COURAGE!! Willing sex Guinea Pigs… (but like, not as weird as that sounded)!!! RISKY MOVES!!! & INAPPROPRIATE THINGS, APPARENTLY, ACCORDING TO OUR LAME OUTDATED VIEWS OF PLEASURE AND ECSTASY AS WRONG IN SOME WAY… ohhhh don’t even get me started.

Excerpt:

“Alright folks, so you know how sometimes I say like I’m exhausted and I didn’t want to do a show this week. Well, au contraire, my friends, this week I’m PUMPED. I mean, I’m still completely exhausted. But, I had a wild week and I’ve got a lot of thoughts and feelings and insights to share. Are you ready? Nope? You couldn’t possibly be ready for this, that’s like saying, “Ohh have you prepared for hurricane Olivia?” “Nah bro, we don’t even know how. It’s just going to be an uncomfortable surprise, or a really realllllly pleasurable one if you do it right… know what I mean…” Ok ok. So first. Let’s go over the cut-and-dry events of this week! Said no one interesting ever. Instead, I will be leading you on the wild goose chase of tangents, metaphors, confusing irony, sexy sexy time, nervous system dysfunction, log cabins, phone sex, complements, orgasms, technical descriptions of effective polyamory and full frontal… snogging.

Alright, are you with me. Let’s GO!!!!!

Ok, so my week started with finding out I was directly exposed to covid. I mean like DIRECTLY. And I’m fully vaccinated, of course, I work in professions that constantly deal with the public. But folks as we all know by now, ALL BETS ARE OFF, and not in like a fun sexy way. No, in like the: you just won the world’s least ideal poker game and the other players at the table are straight tripping and you think you should probably make a break for it and hide in a room for a week, way. So! I scheduled myself a nice little PCR test almost 2 hours drive away because that was the only one I could get, and I held up in my room for a couple of days and watched my clock. No, not literally, I always have like 14 projects going on… I mean who do you think I am?! So, I worked on one or two of said projects, of course, and scheduled my tests. Not just the covid kind, because if you remember from last week this week I was meeting a lover I haven’t seen in months for a little getaway in a log cabin in Connecticut, and I also had to schedule some sexual health testing, like any responsible health-conscious polyamorous human does. Folks, I cannot stress this enough. Safety is so important, because safety is sexy, and then you can just theoretically relax. Ohh don’t worry, we’ll get back to that. Anyways, onward!

So after driving all over creation, and shopping in preparation for 3 days in the woods, and having a speculum jammed up my… well you know where that one’s going. I’m sitting in the basement of an ob-gyn office in Pittsfield, yeah, Pittsfield. And laughing and talking with the woman who is clearly super psyched about my views on pleasure and safety and honor, and I look over at the wall across from me, in this sketchy basement, and the poster says, “Do you need to carry Narcan?” And I’m like, "Hey, I was meaning to do the free class at Fairview on Narcan administration but I missed it and I think they canceled them because of the pandemic." And the exceptionally lovely woman whose hand is now somewhere someone’s hand wouldn’t normally be if you were having a conversation with them about how to prevent overdoses, is like, “Hey! Yeah! We can register you to carry it if you want us to.” And I’m like, well heck, two birds, one stone. Awesome. In case you all were unaware, if you live in a place where there is a dense population being ravaged by the current and ongoing opiate epidemic, and you are a sober person that deals sometimes with people with addiction in regular daily life, which let’s be honest, is probably most of us whether we know it or not…. you should be carrying Narcan. If you suspect someone of an overdose, the first thing you do is of course dial 911, followed shortly thereafter by administering the drug you now carry that knocks off the opiates from the receptors in the brain that have latched onto them. Thereby ideally, stopping the overdose, and if someone is not in a state of overdose, the drug is relatively harmless and is processed out of the body.

Alright, so even in the most strange situations, I’m still trying to constantly learn more and improve my chances of being useful. Check! Moving on.

So I’ve now run back and forth all over creation. Luckily, with a negative PCR test in hand. And I’ve barely managed to effectively make it to my client meetings and pack wayyyyyyy wayyyy wayyyyyy more than I will need for 3 days in a cabin. And I’m only 2 hours late to the sexy rendezvous. Now here’s where we get to the…. Olivia has overestimated her nervous system's ability to regulate after all of this stress and little does she know she’s headed for a really really weird crash.

So for context, the big clarifier...

2 weeks ago I spent the week drenched in sweat and saliva, learning all about a new person, and also working 27 hours in 2 days creating a magnificent New Year’s feast, which was all very exciting, but also you have to remember that in my world of constantly almost dying for most of my life, exciting can also mean, OVERSTIMULATION. Which I directly without so much as missing a beat followed up by giving every ounce of my energy heart and soul into the throws pulling someone out of the pit of addiction, which I then directly followed with running around like a crazy person!

And so now here I am, reuniting with a lover I haven’t seen for months, and while I’m really trying to put on my absolute best face, I’m probably about one split hair away from a meltdown. Not to mention. HORMONES.

So of course the first thing we did was rip each other's clothes off!! Which was a delicious… mistake.

Now, here’s the very important part I’ve never talked about. When I had my second Picc Line inserted (which is a mediport, designed to keep you from having to be constantly stabbed with little needles every time you get an IV, and since I was in the midst of yet another round of IV antibiotics it seemed like the best plan. It’s a surgery, where they do not sedate you but numb an area of your inner bicep, and then make an incision and insert a catheter (long tube) up one of your central veins, while they watch it on a monitor to make sure the end of the tube falls directly above your heart, thus assuring the antibiotic will dump directly into your heart and be more effectively circulated through the body) So, why is all of this relevant, well, when they placed the pic line, and then flushed it, a common practice of running a syringe full of seline (water with salt) through the line to make sure it has a blood return and goes through properly. Well when they flushed it, the line moved ever so slightly and suddenly my tongue was heavy and there were stars everywhere, and everything started going black and I couldn’t breathe and I was absolutely sure I was dying, something had gone wrong. And, in fact, something had gone wrong. The line had moved and clipped a part of my vagus nerve. And, while I didn’t die, or lose consciousness, for the next 3 days I pretty much wished I had. My resting heart rate was 160, I was extremely dizzy, exceptionally nauseous, the most anxious I think I’ve ever been AND I LIVED INSIDE OF A PANIC ATTACK FOR LIKE 2 YEARS SO THAT'S SAYING SOMETHING, and my head was pounding, and everything, everything that could have been wrong with the world was wrong. See the vagus nerve is a part of your Autonomic Nervous System, this part of your body controls all of your automatic/unconscious functioning, like breathing, your heart beating, your digestion, and even arousal. The name "vagus" comes from the Latin, "vagus”: to wander, and aptly named this nerve wanders all the way down from the base of your spine to on women and men the erectile tissues of the genitals.

It also is part of the system that controls how we adapt and respond to stress.

So you can imagine… damaging that nerve… would be…. well nerve wracking, to say the least. Sorry bad pun, couldn’t help it.

Now, nervous system damage can also happen as a result of extreme physical or emotional trauma, like you know working as a chef, or being in a volatile or abusive relationship for an extended period of time. Check check check. Damn, well the actual physical damage was what eventually did me in, and it has taken me years to get back any semblance of normal function. Let alone the fact that please doesn’t equal extreme pain for me anymore! Or that I can actually sit and be in my body and meditate and slow my heart rate and breathe etc. But folks, when I joke about sitting alone in a room and meditating FOREVERRR… I’m not actually joking. I had to do that, if I ever stood a chance of recovering my ability to enjoy my life again to its fullest potential.

And sometimes I forget, that I’m still healing… and that damage was very very real.

So throw in some rough play, and a new location, and a partner I haven’t seen in a while, plus hormones! And it was an immediate recipe for disaster, or what I really like to call it: a profound learning experience.

So I’ve made dinner, and we’re catching up on months of being apart and I sit down to eat and suddenly my body becomes my worst enemy. I’m nauseous, dizzy, anxious, heart racing, and I can’t catch my breath. And I’m like, “Gosh darn it (y’all better believe I used much stronger language than that), I remember this feeling allll to well.” My nervous system was like, brooooo runnnnnnnnnn. And so I pushed through it, and my lover held soooo much space, while I completely fell apart. And they got me to sit down, and meditate with them, and sit by the beautiful fireplace. I mean folks this cabin was BONKERS BEAUTIFUL, like 10x better than the pictures. But I just couldn’t push through it and re-regulate my system.

Olivia’s dysregulated nervous system: 1, sexy sexy reconnection time: 0.

Not to mention throwing in a wholeeeee bunch of FEELINGS both is us were having about, my new lover, their new lover. Ohh right we both had met other people we had really strong connections with. To top it all off. And at 4 am, I finally got in my car and drove home to my own bed, my dog, my bathtub, and an episode of comedy TV.

And you better bet, that driving home in the FREEZING cold at 4 am. I felt like a failure. An EPIC failure.

But, I got home, and got in bed, and feel sleep, and woke up the next day to face it all again.

Ooooo sexy cliffhanger. I’m going to play you some music now, and you can hear the rest of the story after this brief music interlude. I promise it gets a whole heck of a lot better after the break…”