Where would I be without my two a.m. sweat-drenched epiphanies? Yesterday’s appointment with the new (to me) specialist and the anxiety it produced must have been playing on my mind last night. I awoke, shivering and nauseous, but momentarily clear in the head about my nervousness. There was quite the list of reasons, most of which have slipped away in the process of waking. Which is fine, for a change, since the ones I recall are enough for me to think about. I don’t want to be sicker than I am now; I don’t want to be in more pain than I am now. And right now, getting better for the long-term means getting much sicker in the short-term.
Who in their right mind would choose twice weekly injections of a drug specifically designed to kill everything in its path? And a painful shot at that? Ok, not everything in its path. And we’ve established I may not be altogether in my right mind at all times. But still, I’ve drug my heels about antibiotics since my early twenties. I harbor a strong pre-Lyme hesitancy about antibiotic overuse and its being a significant contributing factor to our demise as a culture. I recently read some interesting articles about MRSA, Norway
I digress with increasing frequency these days. I fight my instinct to comb over what I write and tinker with it, check and recheck for wrong words, wrong usage, the language issues that creep into my speech. But I resist the urge to tinker for the same reasons I allow the digressions: there’s not much use fighting them and these entries should reflect not only what I think my brain is up to but how it’s really functioning. Granted, I’ve written all of these during my best early-morning hours. It still takes me far longer than it should to string these words together. But I couldn’t do it at all after noon.
Using Word to draft these posts cheats, in a way, though I could take the auto-correction feature off and see how terribly I’m really typing. I can see the letters rearrange themselves on the screen as if by magic when I’m reversing them or throwing them together in a barely recognized heap. It’s only technology, which to some today even still would seem like magic with the things we can do, smart phones, blue tooth devices for them and our cars, gaming devices, homes.
One of the Christmas commercials this year assured me (in shouting voices) that the only gift that would not be greeted with raised noses of sneer would be this voice-recognition software that types as you speak, among other things. How can it capture punctuation, a necessary means of maintaining order and clarity as well as a subtle means of communicating tone or irony? What would Jonathan Swift’s reaction have been to this? To use the software to compose an open letter to the public, only after first discovering its pitfalls so that he could most effectively bring home his point? Ending all sentences with question marks and all inquiries with periods? No, that last would probably have been too facile for him, though it’s the best I can muster at the moment.
I remembered this morning, as I sat on my porch and let my mind wander, that at one point yesterday I’d started to go off on a ramble about feeling how my body and mind had betrayed me, in ceding to the onslaught of spirochetes. I’d lost the train of thought entirely yesterday when I’d struggled to find a word or a phrase and couldn’t, then started down an unrelated path instead.
I still feel that way, betrayed. I suppose I couldn’t deny being easily distracted, as well, but I’d been referring to betrayal, of not being able to rely on my body to push through and get whatever needed doing done. I’d been reminded of that yesterday morning, I don’t remember now what I’d been doing. And then later in the afternoon as I got ready to go to the doctor, the tremors in my hands and neck picked up. Sleep had eluded me, of course.
Before I got sick, this would have been a small consideration. I trusted my body entirely to get me through anything. And that which doesn’t kill us only makes us stronger, right? Wrong. At least in the short-term for me. I had to sit down and rest yesterday before finishing getting dressed. I’d gotten as far as my underthings and one sock, and I fell back onto the bed with my right knee still raised, poised at the ready for me to finish putting on the other sock. Thankfully winter cold eventually roused me. Had it been summer, I may have just called to cancel the appointment altogether. Or, with my luck, been suddenly overcome with the sleep that I’d been chasing since eleven in the morning.
This was the third rest I’d taken since getting out of the shower. I’d had to sit down to put my lotion on as soon as I’d gotten out of the shower, and then had gotten light headed and weak-kneed while drying my hair.
This morning, I began not knowing if this new course of treatment is the right thing to do. I wish I could say that all has become clear, that I now see how ridiculous it is that a relatively strong and active young(ish) woman takes two hours to get ready to leave the house. (And as one who values her time this rankles all the more since I certainly don’t close the door behind me to greet the world feeling refreshed from having spent three hours resting in bed nor looking like Heidi effing Klum having spent two hours getting ready.)
All remains unclear because I know that as bad as that sounds, I’m really quite fortunate to still be driving myself around, to still be able to shower and dress without assistance, to have any hair left to wash and dry. But these last vestiges of health and independence could fall under the ceaseless, munching spirochetes and whatever damage this a-bomb of an antibiotic stands poised to bring forth. I don’t want to get sicker, but I can’t sustain this half-life either. Maybe looking forward to jabbing me in the bum a couple of times a week will help offset my wife’s caretaker burnout.
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