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Three minutes into the movie I'm watching... Doctor to Matt Damon: Your aortic valve is shot. My Mother: Maybe you don't need to watch this. Me watching Ford v. Ferrari:  Good morning! Yesterday I had a shot injected into each eye. I do this because I want to keep my sight. I also do this because I very nearly lost everything that mattered to me last year without realizing exactly how sick I was. My mother, nephew, and niece kept me going. It should also be said that the doctors, nurses, and techs kept me alive. I am fighting every day to get better. My reconstructed heart and the body that contains it are getting a lot of TLC from me. Sometimes it's frustrating, especially when I hurt all over and feel like hot garbage. When I first got out of the hospital, I had to regain my ability to walk, write with a pen, and knit. Three years of self-paced maths, physics, engineering, astronomy, and German are making a very slow comeback. I am relearning music theory and rehabilitating my instruments. My studio is being de-junked so I can make things again. I even successfully wrote a grant for a press, which is now here and I am anxious to unbox it. You know what? I'll take it. To do any less is to reject the gift of the love I saw when I was in the hospital. It rejects the effort put forth by people who stepped up to tell me this is Life 2.0. Back to those shots. They probably sound horrific and I may have left some of you back there. They are not that bad. They only hurt a little after the numbing agent wears off and I usually sleep through the effects. But as fun as it is to talk about getting needles in my eyes as an Ooh! GROSS! thing, there is so much more to say that is really important. I have made progress. My eyes are getting better. We celebrated that as much as we could in a very busy clinic. This is one of the parts of my care that feels good. These are good people. (Hat tip to my surgeon and his staff as well.) One of their staffers went to the mattresses ("When Harry Met Sally" reference for those of you wondering) to be sure I would be able to get the meds needed to make this happen. Their kindness broke me in a good way when I needed it. If you are healthy, breathing, alive, and able to enjoy what loveliness there is, what gifts you have been given, and the scale in breadth and depth of how beautiful humanity can be, please embrace that. If you are in pain and this occluded all of the above, please get help. Sometimes I wonder what I might have missed if I hadn't gotten sick by dint of taking so much for granted. Here's a video of chickens wearing pants to show what a weird, wonderful world we live in. <3 |
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