C24.

This is part of the #Dungeon23 challenge in which you make one room to a dungeon every day for a year. In an effort to link my memories to the creation, I am also writing a personal journal entry with each room that may or may not be related.
You don’t have to read that part.

C24 .

A map using the DungeonScrawl website. Check it out.

Access to this room can be created using something to break down the thin stone wall between this area and C23.

The entirety of this room is covered in throbbing roots covered in a thin film.

The roots are spiraling out from a large hole in the southern wall.

There is enough room in the center of the hole that someone can crawl down the hole and see where it leads.

It goes down to level D. Ooooh. What’s down there!? Find out in a couple of days.

If a player is infected with Ceruleorus extract, the film on this plant will cause them fear when they smell it, and pain if they touch it. Whatever this plant is, produces a chemical compound that kills Ceruleorus fungi.

One with the proper skills could harvest this chemical and use it to treat a person infected with Ceruleorus fungus.

3/29/23

So the gallbladder story I promised.

PART 1 GETTING SICK

Years ago I was going a show called ‘The Time of Your Life’ by William Saroyan. I played Tom, a sweetheart of a man who falls in love with a prostitute named Kitty. It was a pretty big part for me, and was during a time when I was working pretty consistently.

A week into the run, I had these terrible stomach pains. I had just gone vegetarian about a month before the show had opened, so I figured it because of the abundance of beans and leafy greens that had found their way into my diet. Thinking my body would adjust and it would go away on its own, I did nothing about.

It lasted for a couple of weeks, but it did indeed stop. I don’t know why, -all I knew was that I would absolutely NOT go to a doctor to get it checked out.

Why would you do that, you idiot?

Because I was working, and in acting, if you’re working you’re generally more terrified of not working than anything else. So you just keep going no matter what, and avoid dealing with shit that could potentially keep you from doing what you love and the potential opportunities that come with being on stage.

It’s a stupid mentality. But I didn’t understand that at the time.

I made a lot of bad decisions during this time period, and missed out on a lot of events and moments that I regret. But not getting my stomach checked out is probably one of the biggest mistakes I ever made.

But you said it went away…

Well it came back. Repeatedly.

Every couple of months I would get unbearably ill. I’d be immobile from the pain in my stomach. Then after about a day or so, I’d find relief and go back to living life.

Did it bother me that my urine looked like Coca-Cola during those times of illness?

Yes.

But I was working and I didn’t want to go to a doctor, who would obviously tell me something was wrong and ultimately take me off stage.

Additionally I was terribly afraid of medical bills. Gail and I had just gotten out of debt and off of welfare a couple years prior and I was scared getting sick would send us back. I didn’t want to go back to that.

So I put my head firmly in the sand.

This went on for a little over 4 years.

That’s right, I would get sick every other month, for 4 years before I felt like we were safe enough financially that I would even tell a doctor about what was going on.

I’m an idiot.

PART 2: FINALLY GETTING IT CHECKED OUT.

At the time I went into the doctor’s office, I wasn’t in the middle of one of my spells. I was doing “okay”, but I did tell the doctor everything I just mentioned and more.

You’d think that she would say, “Hey bro, you’re fucked up. Your body is wrecked.”

But they didn’t. They did a blood test, which came back pretty great, and told me I needed more Vitamin D.

But what about the stomach pains?

They told me I probably just had acid reflux and gave me some prescription grade antacids.

Yeah. I told this doctor everything, including my urine sometimes looking like Coke, and she gave me mega Tums.

Which did nothing. Because that is 100% not what was wrong with me. But they didn’t really care to check it out sooooo back to work.

Fortunately, my body was totally done with me, and wasn’t going to let me get away with this anymore. The next show I worked on was going well until two weeks before we opened, which is crunch time. I got really ill, high fevers, stomach pains, just nasty stuff. I went to one rehearsal and people looked at me like I was dying. It sucked.

Gail and I both decided that if I went in to the same clinic in the middle of one of these episodes, they’d get a better idea of what we were talking about. So we went to the same clinic, now much sicker, in hopes of getting treatment.

I saw a different doctor than my regular one, and this guy gave me a pain medication.

That’s it.

And it didn’t work.

I even told the guy that I feel like it’s my gallbladder, and he responded by saying I didn’t seem to be in enough pain for it to be that. Looking back I should have turned on the ol’ acting skills and hammed it up to get the point across.

So I left, still miserable, still with no idea what was going on with my body.

The producers of the show told me I could take a week off because they trusted me, but I needed to be back for Tech Week, which is when the technical elements of a show meet the performance elements. It’s a stressful time, and they just wanted me ready and healthy.

After a couple of days, I healed up, pee’d some more brown urine, and thought I was going to be okay.

I know I keep coming back to my urine, but when I did that it usually meant that my body had filtered something terrible out and I was in line for some healthy days again. It was like a fucked up sign that everything was going to be okay. I know that’s fucked up.

I went back to rehearsals and met the costumer and we picked out some clothes for the show. I thought the worst was over and I’d finish another run just like I had every other time.

But instead I went home, took a bite of a sandwich, the first decent meal I’d had in a week, and immediately felt my body start to shut down again.

PART 3. THE HORROR INSIDE MY BODY

Gail was beyond over it.

She’s put up with so much of my shit for years, and this particular issue was a thorny one for her. Since day one she begged me countless times to get it checked and I just ignored it. I’d tell her shit like “it’ll work itself out,” or “we couldn’t afford me going to a doctor,” or “I couldn’t miss a show.” All kinds of nonsense.

And when she finally got what she wanted and I saw TWO doctors, they did jack shit for me.

So when I took a bite of that sandwich and she could see that it was starting again, Gail didn’t hesitate.

She said “I want to take you to an emergency room. We’re going.”

And in a rare moment in our marriage - I didn’t resist.

We loaded up the family into the car and drove downtown to Northwestern Hospital - the most gangster mother fuckers of medicine.

If we gonna do it, we gonna do it right, you know?

The doctor who saw me was baffled to hear my story. He didn’t understand why neither of the other two doctors opted to look inside at my guts, particularly with my familial history of gallbladder issues.

He assured me we that we were figuring this shit out today.

I think the first test was an X-Ray. I can’t remember. When that came back, the doctor’s mood was different. He actually suggested Gail and the kids leave the room before he talked to me.

He said, “There’s a shadow that is causing us concern. It could be a tumor. We need to do an MRI to get a better idea of what the problem is. But this could be very serious.”

So that news sucked.

Gail says that while I was having this meeting with the doctor, she overheard two doctors talking about my test results and they were pretty bad. Of course this freaked her out. So now we’re all freaked out.

Don’t worry.

It’s okay.

It wasn’t a tumor. It wasn’t cancer. It was something much weirder than any of that.

What the hell was it?

Let me explain…

Over the four years that I was dealing with this, I was getting sick because my gallbladder was inflamed from gallstones. When it was inflamed it would get this thick slimy coating on the outside. This coating would become like new tissue.

This new tissue eventually started to brush up with my liver and the two organs fused together. This caused them to float down into my body a little and fuse again, this time to my upper colon.

Wait, what?

My gallbladder was fused together with my liver and my upper colon.

And because I never treated the gallstones, they had rubbed a hole into my gallbladder.

And according to the toxicology report, we later discovered that gangrene had developed in my dead ass gallbladder.

Basically I was rotting on the inside and my guts looked like Tetsuo at the end of Akira.

That’s fucked up.

I know dude I know.

For the next several days they assembled a whole team to figure out how to surgically remove my gallbladder, which was the offending organ. Their mission was kill the gallbladder, save the liver and colon.

But it couldn’t be done like a routine gallbladder surgery. They had to shear it away from the other two organs too. It was complicated.

And when there’s a very unique medical situation happening at one of the biggest hospitals in the country, everyone gets excited.

So I basically became a case study for students, surgeons, and doctors who just needed to see some wild shit before they retired.

Nightly I’d get a parade of students who had probably just seen images of my insides. They’d line up to see the elephant man and feel up his tummy. Old men with whispy white hair would be step in and say “Hey, you mind if I check you out.”

It was a surreal time, but I was also an actor, so I was prepared for it. I just wish I could’ve charged for tickets.

The eventual surgery apparently went for a long time, and they almost abandoned the laparoscopic technique and just split me open so they could make some progress. That would have sucked for my recovery time, and thankfully the surgeon working on me was a bad mother fucker. This cat managed to whittle a hunk of my gallbladder out, cut it away from my liver and colon, and then burn the rest.

No joke.

They torched what was left inside of me, because it was too much trouble to remove the whole organ. So now my gallbladder is a worthless little nub of scar tissue.

Recovery lasted much longer than regular gallbladder surgeries.

I thought I was going to hop out of the hospital and get back to work. That was not the case.

When I suggested going back to work to my surgeon, he was like “You don’t understand, your body was not okay. You’re not okay. You’re gallbladder was Top 5 worst shit I’ve ever seen, and that includes the stuff they showed me in med school.”

I didn’t get it.

I kept trying to rush the recovery process to make it back for at least some performances of the show.

I could barely move, and had a tube sticking out of my abdomen, where bile would empty out into a little bulb. This was coming from the hole where my gallbladder was, and we were waiting for my body to close it up. But I still thought that if I could rip the tube out, eat the pain of bile seepage, that I would somehow get to perform again.

This is how fucking delusional I was.

By the way, bile seeping into your muscles feels like someone with flaming shoes is standing on your belly. It sucks. Do not recommend.

It was also during this time that I was introduced to oxycodone, which was awesome and also immediately terrifying.

I took one oxy and my first thought was “This is fucking awesome.”

And my second thought was, “I’m going to not take these while I’m recovering, save them up, and take them when I feel good.”

My third thought was, “Oh no this shit is clearly dangerous.”

Meanwhile I had a wife and two kids who kept talking to me like they were so thankful I was alive. Which, is basically the truth. I could’ve waited longer to get help, eventually gotten sepsis and died.

But I wasn’t hearing that. I was hearing “This is an obstacle to you performing.”

It wasn’t until the third or fourth visit with the doctor who fixed me, that I started to really listen. It wasn’t until it became clear that I was going to miss the entire show that I understood the reality - I needed to change.

PART 4: LESSONS

The show went on without me. It had to. It left me behind.

And I was left with three people who loved me, who I didn’t want to see because every time I looked at their faces it made me think of my own mortality. My own shortcomings. My failures.

It wasn’t until the show closed that I really came to grips with it. I was killing myself for theatre.

But I wasn’t just killing me, I was killing a husband to an amazing woman. I was killing a father to two incredible kids.

I was willing to run that dude into the dirt if it meant I could be on stage.

And the truth was, it didn’t even make me happy any more. I was unhappy with the theatre scene, and unhappy with the time I was losing with my family, but I kept doing it because it’s what I’m good at.

Look, I may not be a celebrity, or have a ton of TV/Movie parts on the old IMDB, but you can ask any person that’s worked with me - I’m good at this acting game.

But the truth was, that grind wasn’t for me anymore. The rehearsals, and the parties, and the “networking” at the bar until last call. It wasn’t fulfilling me any more.

I’d experienced a wake-up call and I needed to make a change.

I took a step back and really took stock of what made me happy in life, and whether I was better off focusing myself on something else.

I realized a couple of things.

One, I wanted to spend more time around my family.

Two, I wanted to focus more on playing tabletop role-playing games.

At the time, I was really getting into Dungeons and Dragons, and was running games for strangers online. Often the people I ran for were either new to the game or had always wanted to play but just lived somewhere where that was possible.

I discovered that I really enjoyed running games for people who normally didn’t have those opportunities. It feels really good to know you’re helping them get a communal experience that they may be starved for because of circumstances outside of their control. It gave me a feeling very similar to performing in front of an audience, but it felt so much less about me, and more about the fun we were having together, which honestly is even better.

But I still had a ways to go before we started Out of Depth Plays and this Dungeon 23 Project, and even before I started running Mothership games at conventions.

I still had a ways to go before I gave up drinking and tried to really work on myself.

Why?

Because after I decided that I was going to take more time to myself, more time to really dig into TTRPGs and do something new … I did another show.

I told myself it was a make good for the producers of the show I missed. I wanted to give them a good performance before I took a break. It felt like unfinished business and I was going to finish it.

But it was during this show that I caught the attention of a casting director, who thought I was the bees knees. That’s how I ended up getting a new agent who told me I was so good that I’d be working for the rest of my life. And then a month after that I booked a part on Chicago PD.

This business has a way of sucking you back in. Or maybe I’m really good at finding an excuse for sticking around just a little while longer.

Either way those are stories for a different time.

Until then…

See you tomorrow.