mercuryfern

Sick

For a long time, I've been age inappropriately conscientious of optimizing my health.  Who reads Prevention Magazine when they are twelve?  (Me.)  In middle school, I became a vegetarian, I guess mostly because animals are cuddly, but honestly, I was also very pleased to know that I was significantly reducing my risk of heart disease.  I'm not, and wasn't then, the candy bars and soy burgers sort, either.  Oh, no, baby, I maximize my nutrient density.  Don't even make me talk to you about antioxidants and B vitamins.   When I worked at a greenhouse as a teenager, I refused to apply the pesticides lest I increase my cancer risk.  In college I toted hot herbal tea in a glass jar which usually managed to leak all over something.  No tumblers for me: plastics offgas, especially into hot liquids, and I was concerned about those compound's influence on my long term reproductive health.

All of this does make a little bit of sense when you consider my mother is ill with a chronic immunodeficiency disorder which varies widely in how well it responds to conventional medicine.   Excersizing regularly and eating well are central strategies for managing her health.

I just found out that a dearly beloved friend has terminal cancer, albeit in remission.  This is the woman who taught me to cook.   She is a macrobiotic chef, the most conscientious eater I know.  No one in existence is kinder to their colon than she has been; where does it get off turning on her now?   Another friend, a marathon runner for god's sake, is living with not dying of the same disease.  What the hell is going on, universe?  People who take exemplary care of their bodies are not supposed to get sick like this.  Why else did I spill so much milkthistle tea all over my goddamn books?

I saw the movie Rent a few weeks back and was struck by the line, "living with living with not dying of AIDS"  (Notice how I alluded to it up there.  No, not plagiarized.)   Living with not dying: reminded me at the time of my mom.   True, there are times when she can't get out of bed, when she runs a fever of 105, when she is rushed to the hospital for emergency surgery, but most times, she is fine; full of energy and ability.   A stranger wouldn't know that she is sick.  She looks so healthy on her good days that associates resent her nonnegotiable need to cancel superfluous commitments when she has a bad one. 

Turns out I know quite a few people who are living with not dying.  Catastrophic diseases assail our beloveds, without sense, without reason or cause.   It is fucking unfair, and I am enraged almost beyond obscenities.

Even more nonsensically,  these folks get up again to stand blinking in what might be the eye of the storm or it's departure, who knows, and find themselves, of all things, living; maybe with renewed appreciation or wisdom or some other crap, I don't know.  From where I sit, though, it doesn't seem like being sick changes a whole lot one way or the other.  I like this better than imagining disease as a penance or a purifying spiritual journey. 

Living with not dying: it's a possibility, but not an unmanageable one. There is hell to pay, to be sure; I'm not claiming to know from physical pain first hand.   But c'mon, we've all read Buddhist texts during one existential crisis or another: life is suffering, is it not?  Our hearts break of loneliness or rejection or betrayal, our grasp on widely experienced reality crumbles under inexplicable weight, and our bodies fail us in malicious untimely ways.   We are neither damned nor made sacred.  The fates shit on us and we handle it the best we can, which, wouldn't you know it, is the perfect way for us, and all the while, there life is, spectacular and ordinary and profound.   Snow falls beautifully, siblings fight, the light hits the water just so, dinner burns.  God is in the details.   This moment, the only thing we ever own, opens and lasts.  We live with not dying.

My mother's illness, Rheumatoid Arthritis, is hereditary.  Her diagnoses came when she was 24, the same age I am now.  For a few months I've been having mysterious pains in the fingers and wrist of my right hand.  RA can begin this way, aching in the joints of your digits, a weakened ability to make the twisting motion required to open a jar.   I am not fatigued the way she was during that first undiagnosed year, though.  Maybe I have just been typing too much in a bad chair, or riding my bike too long.  Not that it matters.  Being without health insurance means I can neither confirm nor deny  such suspicions.   Splurging out of my own pocket for an appointment won’t even help because if a doctor does find anything, besides not being able to afford treatment, I will then have a preexisting condition on the chance I ever do get insured.   As if a chronic degenerative disorder wasn't occasion enough for warm friendly conversations with one's health management professionals.

I've always assumed I would inherit my mother's disease.  This is slightly irrational, because though I have a greater chance of developing RA than does the general population, the numbers still sound a strong probably not. 

Varying amounts of fear rise to meet the thought of my presumed fate.  Influenza or even a bad head cold can reduce me to incoherent sobs:   I hate body aches I hate them I cannot handle this I cannot handle a lifetime of dull throbbing pain everywhere and constant exhaustion and side effects and the loss of mobility and wheelchairs and hospitals and surgery.  Other times, like now, getting sick is just a card I might be dealt: bad, but inevitable.  There are others in my hand.   I'll live.

talk radio

“Yes, Kelly from Kansas City, you are on the air.”

“Yeah, ah, hi, Mike.  I, ah, work at a mental hospital, and most of the people at my place are schizophrenic, but, I mean, ah, they say that guy was bipolar, and those people, when they are manic, are really dangerous, you know?  So, I can’t blame the cop, I support him 100%”

I used to follow news very closely.  I read newspapers, magazines, played hooky from 7th grade to watch C-span.  When these weren't enough, I read books, threw myself into debates, went to protests, circulated petitions, took classes.  I looked down on everyone then, but most of all on the people who didn’t have any opinions, didn’t bother to stay informed.  How could they imagine the details of their own little lives were worth attending to at the expense of striving for a better world?

It’s been a few years since the details of my own little life have pushed everything else out of my brain.  I don’t even feel guilty about it anymore.  Snippets of what is happening outside my head make it through while I am scanning around for a good radio station, not even, just a song I don’t despise, not even, I am pressing the button out of habit.   

When I heard Kelly say she worked at a  mental hospital, I stopped, because those two words make me sit up and listen every time.  Maybe this will make sense of it, will make it real, will chip away at my shame and isolation.

Apparently a man was shot, maybe on a plane, maybe for threatening somebody, maybe for saying he had a bomb.  I didn’t listen long enough to really find out. 

I’ve met nurses like Kelly, I’ve been in their care.  They will not let you go to the bathroom, they will not let you wear shoes, they will not let you drink water, they will not they will not they will not. 

They will take blood for vague reasons.  The kids who are on meds need to have their levels checked, sure, but you are refusing, you are involuntary, so what, exactly, are they doing with so many vials from you?  The soft parts of your arms turn black and blue after just a few days, everybody’s do, but your veins collapse sooner than most, she is looking and not not finding, she is missing, her aim is bad, you joke that you would be a stunning failure at heroin addiction, she is not amused, asks you can you stop moving your leg like that and you make full on unsmiling eye contact, “No, I can’t.  You are hurting me.” 

Yes, lets be honest, you are angry.  You shouldn't even be here, this is fucking rediculous, you are fine you are better than fine you are beyond coherant and on into brilliant.  It’s not as if you are claiming to have authority over your body, though.  The male nurses are stronger than you even when not working in goups of four, even without the aid of straight jackets, padded rooms, four point restraints.

Anytime she asks, you give her your arm, make a fist, relax.  Teeth clenched with rage and fear, you hang your dignity on little acts of defiance.  Telling her it hurts, telling her a bit maliciously, true, implying she is doing her job poorly, yes, gets you a look you’ve gotten before; from her, from other nurses, from doctors, from authority figures and caregivers various and sundry.  It will frighten you that time, it will frighten you every time, but not until ten years later will you quite understand. 

If a cop puts a bullet in your brain, she will support him 100%.

Update

A voicemail was waiting for me when I got off work:  My father-in–law is hospitalized with pneumonia. 

Last night, my husband told me his dad started drinking again a month ago.  "As long as I'm drinking whisky I'm fine.   It's beer that gets me in trouble.  I'm staying the hell away from beer, don't you worry.  Whisky, though, whisky's no problem."

Thomas and I both think he's decided he'd rather die of cirrhosis than emphysema.  Can't say I blame him.   Well, yes I can, he's leaving four children and nine grandkids.  His wife, while admittedly my least favorite person on the planet, probably deserves not to watch her husband drink himself to death.  Deserves is not the word I'm looking for.  Sounds too much like something she might say.  What does any of us deserve, really?   Not to be typecast as an irredeemable asshole by our own spouse so she can enhance her wholesomer than thou self image, I might argue.  While we are talking about who deserves what, allow me to propose that having every dish one cooks for one's in laws ignored if not outright mocked is not treatment consistent with what I have reason to believe is my very low level of karmic debt.  The absence of glittery holiday sweatshirts in a wardrobe is not to be mistaken for a deficiency of hygiene or morals.

As I was saying, I think we all can agree that, drowning in a dry room, your lungs filling with whatever it is they fill with over the course of years months days while you fight harder for every breath, this is an awful way to go.  Maybe it’s only because the degenerate drunk in the family is my favorite relation by a long shot, but I’m inclined to sympathize with the desire to cop out of that fate.  And the accompanying hectoring.

Rick took the whole extended family to an indoor waterpark last weekend.  Over beers in the jungle themed bar, my husband and his two full sisters gave Jodi, their newly discovered half sibling, the lowdown on childhood in Chez Rick.  She cried.  Julie, the legitimate daughter only six months Jodi's junior, might have been a little mean, the way women in this family are, sometimes only out of habit, to other women.  Julie is vicious even to her eleven year old son's girlfriend of the same age.  You've gotta figure a bonus sibling from just bairly before Rick was married to Patti is gonna get hazed something fierce.  It doesn't help that Rick is his best self to this blank slate of an offspring.  He apologizes when he swears in front of Jodi, calls her nearly every night for no reason other than to chat.

I wasn't in attendance at the waterpark shindig, though Thomas tells me Julie’s husband wished out loud that I was there.  They do like me, in their own way.  I might not be Christian enough, I might not be trustworthy with children, but I have my charms, I am missed. 

Strange to say, I miss them, too.  I don’t like them most of the time, but I do love them, even Julie, even Patti.   It should be a comforting realization, but as is often the case, the epiphany comes too late.  My existential crises has taken it’s toll.  Barring the involvement of deities or groveling the likes of which I have heretofore been incapable, Thomas and I are getting divorced.  He’s leaving me, of all things.  If you’ve been following along, and noticed my absence of late, that’s why.  I’ve only got so much stomach for introspection just now.