Shaken and Released

I got sick this week, and it put me face-to-face with that darned companion, mortality. 

I woke up in the wee hours of the morning on Monday with terrible chills and a headache.  Up for an hour, back to sleep, back up a few hours later to throw up and then collapse onto a quilt on the living room floor, where I spent the rest of the day.  (I was so focused on just existing that it didn't occur to me to return to the bed.)  My husband quickly realized that I was not about to make breakfast for our children, so he called out from work and left the kids with their nana during the times he came home to check on me. 

It turned out I had a bacterial infection.  I had a fever, chills all day, a constant headache, every joint ached and part of my body throbbed with pain from the infection.  I was so weak that it was a terrific strain to even sit up, and I ate the soup he fixed me with my chin barely off the floor, just high enough so the spoon could clear the rim of the bowl.  I had gone from the version of myself where I'm 35, lively, always doing things and interacting with people all day, always planning on the future, to a new, unfamiliar version of myself in which I'm maybe 82, quite sickly, quite alone, not caring much about anything in the world other than water and a little food because I simply didn't have the energy to care.  Being sick showed me what illness can do to a person's vitality.  It's not just about the pain; it's about the energy left over after you've dealt with the pain, with the illness.  There has to be some liveliness left if we want to take enjoyment in the world, and if there's none left, there's not much of us left.  Then we're just a mind operating a body coping with illness, or at least that's all that was left of me. 

At one point, I got myself with great effort into the kitchen for a glass of water and a straw to drink it out of.  I remember my hands fumbling through the cabinet, and cursing the way I had to bend my aching wrist to get at them behind the olive oil, where I've never realized it's any effort to get at them.  I suddenly saw, instead of me, an elder in a worn nightgown, living alone in this state.  Alone and just making it through her days, day after day, so sapped by illness that she had no energy left to take interest in any of the beauty of the world, or children, or birds, or the sky.  Just staying alive, that's all.  Just carrying on, with no spark, nothing treasured except maybe a comfortable place to sit and a warm meal.  No striving except towards physical comfort from some source.  I don't remember feeling sorry for myself as I saw that I was like this woman I envisioned, I simply saw it.  There was no energy to be sad.  I just saw. 

During their visit to see me that first day, my little girl smiled over her shoulder at me as she practiced standing up while holding on to a chair.  My boy told me in his usual jubilant manner about what he had done at Nana's house and then showed off his wonderful Halloween costume for me, all smiles, before going trick-or-treating with his father.  For my part, I did my best to turn my head and aching eyes all the way over to where they were, which was a true challenge, as unreal as it sounds to me now.  I loved them and wanted the best for them as much as I always do, but it was a detached kind of love.  Lying there, sick as I was, it was a relief when my husband took them away so I didn't have to expend energy paying attention to them and trying to return their smiles.  All of this was exhausting.  I could love them from afar.  (I recognize that this post reflects a two-day illness; I have no idea how I would have felt after a week of only short daily visits from them.  I like to think that my heart would have broken.)

I've been sick before, but always - always - from illnesses my body could reliably recover from on its own: colds, flu, chicken pox, etc.  The one that got me this week held on with force into the second day, which is the point at which patients are advised to go on antibiotics, if they aren't already.  It's not that I would have died without the medicine, but if I had been fighting that case of that illness without access to any medicine, it could have gotten very ugly, requiring surgical drainage, removal of abscess, etc.  Not things my body can do on its own.

And that was the disturbing part.  That was the part that shook me from my snug little nook up in the land of Someday I Might Be Old and Maybe Need A Little Medicine...Maybe, down to the swamp where We Are All Vulnerable All of the Time And If It Doesn't Show, We're Just Lucky.