I’ve written 20 partial posts and deleted them all. My world got smaller as my health deteriorated over the last year. Cognitively, I’m playing catch up and while I can recite what my oxygen levels have been for the last week, I can’t remember a single line of poetry, except for a little Wordsworth:
I wandered lonely as a cloud.
Perhaps I return here because I feel a peculiar kind of loneliness. There is an isolation borne of chronic health conditions. I feel myself tense up when someone asks How are you? So tired of focusing on my health and ongoing issues, I’ve learned to mutter I’m fine.
I’m not fine, but I’m okay. And what is going on with me is survivable, so perhaps there is no need for a dramatic re-entry into my life. You were gone?
The tumbling down started last year when frequent hot flashes, cognitive fog, and insomnia started. Hormones, amiright? By the time I went the HRT route and got those symptoms under control, I got hit with tinnitus – a loud, high squeal at about 8000 Hz, sometimes manic cicadas, but always on. I went through some cognitive behavioral therapy to learn how to background the noise, and to learn how to sleep and work with it. Got that under control. Then got diagnosed with sleep apnea. I’ve spent the last month getting intimate with a breath robot (CPAP therapy).
If you read this and think holy shit, this person is a mess, I would swear to you that up until last year, I felt pretty okay. My chief indicators that I’m doing alright in my life have always been writing and running. If I’m doing those two things, I’m alright. They are activities layered in dust now. I finally started strength training again last week, but I’ve lost a lot of ground. And, as you can read here, my writing isn’t exactly hitting a bestselling list anytime soon.
Whatever image one might have of oneself, there will be a time when all will be brought into question. I’ve been humbled and demoralized. On the upside, I’ve gained greater empathy for people who suffer much more than I with isolating conditions and visible/invisible disabilities. That’s how it always goes – we don’t often feel in our bones for other people until we suffer ourselves. Humans, geesh.
For me there is only this: Begin again. And again. And again. I am adapting to the new guidelines and rules in my life that keep me sane and healthy, as most of us do. I’m going for a short run tomorrow and writing here. It’s a bit lumpy and unimpressive but life, like writing, is always a draft in revision.
I’m writing here, shortly before I render myself unconscious with an ungodly amount of pharmaceuticals. I’m down and out with a head and chest cold which makes me dizzy and susceptible to laughing at my own jokes. It might be that I already hit the Nyquil. Nowhere on the warning label does it say I should not operate a keyboard.
Surliness is often my go-to place when tired, sick, hungry, breathing. I have made the execrable error of filling my life with positive people – all of whom I must avoid when surly. I like to let my surliness and self-pity run its natural course, without the shame of it could be worse quips being blithely tossed my way. Unnatural stoppage could turn my feral surliness into something worse – a reasonable, circumspect person who always seems like they have their shit together. That would be wholly unnatural for me.
food. Which, to be fair, much of it was. Now I must get my jollies from smoothies with raw ginger and greens. No more spicy Mexican, onion-laden Greek, tomato-filled Italian food. I sleep on a wedge pillow, don’t eat three hours before bedtime, drink gallons of water, and stare morosely out the kitchen window, while washing another bowl of lawn clippings for my next meal.
I’ve been fortunate up to this point in my life to have the luxury of infrequent visits to medical establishments. The downside is that nearly every interaction I have with medical personnel is when something bad is happening. I always leave with a new syndrome or condition, feeling much worse off than when I arrived.
I’d been feeling depressed over the last month or so – the side effect of a long winter and the loss of my mother-in-law a few months ago. I’d been wallowing in self-pity about my inability to be a prolific writer. Sporadic writer is more like it – whinging on about being a caregiver of sick cats, of having no sense of self beyond the drudgery of laundry and dishes and ferrying people about. And how it felt like such a big deal to allow my brown hair to be sheared off to reveal the silvery gray beneath a few weeks ago. I am a little ashamed about that now. How trivial and superficial my anxieties can be.
The Green Study 