This was one of the scariest weeks of my life. If I had known that it was something that was going to pass, it wouldn't have been so agonizing. I guess I actually still don't know that it will pass, but I'm not bed-ridden at the moment, so things are looking up. I had to go back to the doctor again yesterday because nothing was getting any better after Monday, and in fact I had developed a bad sore throat and earache in addition to my other maladies, and he gave me not one but TWO shots in the ass to make me better. Cortisone and antibiotics. I swear I felt better before I even left the doctor's office.
But anyway. This whole week when I knew nothing was getting better, and I couldn't get out of bed or move my head, I had a lot of time to reflect back on my poor health habits over my lifetime, and also about how I had been feeling sick in the lymph areas for almost six weeks now, despite a course of penicillin in December and a few days of new, mega-strong antibiotics. I got to thinking about all the throwing up on Monday, and how the few moments after I had just vomited were glorious because I felt cool and not nauseous for a while. I got to thinking about how I'd been needing to take Vicadin every three hours and how that second hour after I took the Vicadin was the best, when I could read without any outside noise even entering into my mind, and seemingly drift off to sleep for a few minutes and then open my eyes and they'd be on the same word as they were when I closed them. I tend to enjoy, also, that feeling of moistly sleeping. Sauna sleep, fever sleep, where you are so fucking hot you are steamy, but not so sweaty that you're drenching the sheets. Or at least, if you are, you don't notice it.
It all gets old pretty fast. I got scared this week. I've never gone to the doctor, and not gotten better before. I started thinking I had lymphoma, and for all I know I do, but the thought of having to go in for treatments that make me feel that way all the time, just for a chance at life...
I can't imagine feeling the way I felt this week, and having it be the reaction to the CURE for what is wrong with me.
Around tuesday night I just started crying. Crying when my mom was mean to me, when my brother made me feel guilty for having to miss work, whenever I woke up and I was cold because of the fever I'd cry (this happened four times a day at least), when I sneezed and it hurt I'd cry. Every time I woke up and I didn't feel any better I cried. I cried at the Avon breast cancer walk commercial. I cried at a feed the children commercial. Tonight I cried at a little black kid's piano recital being played through a cell phone to his mom on a commercial. I remember this phenomenon after my brother's wedding, crying at everything.
Sickness is making me sad now. Monday was the worst day of this illness for me, and I spent half of it throwing up. If that is what it's like for cancer patients on a regular basis, well that's a part of why everything is making me cry right now. I spent so much time this week thinking about being sick, and allowing my mind to wander around that subject: people dying, having to leave kids and families and their lives behind for some unknown place; the courage everyone involved has to have. I don't feel like I have it. All week I told my mom, "I couldn't do this if it were longer than just this week." Yesterday after my shots I told her I was not going back to the doctor no matter what. What kind of quality of life is that, spending hours every day in the doctor's office? What must those people have, who do that, that I don't, that makes it worth it for them? Am I just kidding myself, that I wouldn't do the same thing?
Anyway, with the exception of today, I have eaten less this week than I normally do in one meal. So the ten pounds are gone. That was a nice side effect. My normal diet consists of only things I can buy from restaurants, and since my stomach is the size of a walnut right now, now is a good time to stop that. I don't know what i am going to eat, but I have to start seeing the food in front of me twenty years from now: cancer cells. I have to look at McDonald's french fries and see bits of green and orange suspended in bile floating in the toilet. I have to look at Pizza Hut and see a bloated, dead heart floating in formaldehyde in a jar. I have to look at fried chicken and think of not being able to move my neck and being able to feel my lymph node through my skin. I have to look at Jello pudding and think about how all I will ever be able to eat if I keep eating Jello pudding is Jello pudding.
Argh... I have to look at the Diet Coke machine and think about sweating so much that my bed smells like dog.
Honestly, up until this week, I have still been in the invincible phase of my life. I knew at some point, that attitude would have to change. Up until now, if I wanted to lose weight, I would cut back on the food I ate but make it easier by making the rest of it crap. My mom would gasp and gripe at me about that but I would proudly inform her that I'm 24 and I don't have to worry about that crap. I knew it would have to change. It took one week. The attitude has changed. The invincible attitude, anyway. I've never been too much of a success at anything in my life, but I at least know I'm not invincible. Some rooty-poo bacteria probably would have killed me this week without the modern miracle of medicine.
You know, it always seems like I'm rushing to get somewhere. Passing an hour or a day or a year until I can be somewhere. Perpetually. It's always a conflict. Wanting to be somewhere else, but why? Somewhere else is in the future. My brain can't even wrap around it, all the possibilities that lie in the future, I want to get them. Change this or that and meet him or her, have this or that and go here or there. There's a natural drive, to get there, to think about that, focus on it, work on it. But so much of my life has gone by in that state, and what for? For a few minutes of living in the present- by accident! Because there was no way not to live in the present in those moments! It seems like a waste of time, and I almost had a mini panic attack thinking about the fact that year I will be 25. It doesn't seem older to me because I've been here for 20, 21, 22, 23, and 24, but for the amount of time I've spent really living, I'm still about 17. When I was 17, 25 was old. I mean you were an adult and there was a world divide between 17 and 25. It's only 8 years. I don't feel such a world a difference there. I'm stunted. Or something. Because I've been missing life. It's just gone on while I sat idly by and thought about what to do with it.
I feel an urge to cram it all in now, and it's funny how getting this sick seemed to punctuate that and also kick me out of my fat bad eating complacency state I was stuck in.
The night before I woke up sick, I went to my last resort: the twelve steps. I think they're a great concept, but as of this writing I will NEVER, ever admit the nature of my sins to God, myself AND another human being, at least not one I haven't already admitted them to. So by virtue of that refusal to comply, I can never get past step 5. But steps 1, and 2 are like the story of my life, and when I got to step 3 and internalized it, it changed my life, completely. It opened my mind and I seemed to go down a path (or notice the path I was already on) that led from one thing to another where I picked up another clue. But like anything like that, it wore off after a while.
Anyway Step 4 is where you write down everything, EVERYTHING about your life that you hate. So, the night before I woke up sick, I decided to just start. Nothing else had been working. I had hit a wall in my life.
The first thing it said to write was about resentment. So I started to write, and what first came to mind was stuff about my mother, and once I started I couldn't stop. I filled a whole page with things I resent about her, and then I was tired of writing and tired in general so I went to bed. As I was falling asleep, I talked to God and told him that I trusted him, and that I need him to change my life.
And, then next morning I woke up unable to move my neck.
So.
I've been thinking about that all week, how my mom took care of me all week, how she spend a shitload of money on my doctor's bills, and basically waited on me hand and foot all week, stayed home from school on the first day back to take me to the doctor, put up with my crotchety behavior and went to the store at 11 at night to buy me yogurt. I'm not sure how exactly that relates to my resentment writing about her, if there is supposed to be some correlation I'm supposed to be getting. Because the resentment shit I wrote is legitimate, believe me.
But I've also been thinking about how unhappy I've been with my complacency with my weight, and how terrible my eating has been. I was unhappy but not unhappy enough to change it.
M. and I have talked all week. I really love M. He is coming to get me tomorrow (if I still can't drive!) and he's going to read the Hobbit to me. All week he has been telling me he misses me. I wasn't expecting to get someone who acts like a boyfriend when I signed up to be the friend/f.b. but I guess I knew it would be more than that or I never would have been interested. Thing is, it feels like I stumbled accidentally on a healthy romantic relationship, one that is not all consuming but is there when you need it and want it. We discussed this last night, and he is actually the one who described this as "healthy." And I wondered if maybe romantic love itself isn't categorically a pretty unhealthy thing. And then... why does being in love feel so good?
But, lying next to him while he reads to me and hugging him in bed, that feels good in a better way. No, in a bigger way. I don't know. Either way, I hope this lasts for a while at least.
© beotch at
4:33 a.m.
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