Light As a Sharp Object

The rain falls. It bashes down the daffodils. But oh how I love rain. So I forgive what it does to the flowers. And they will Spring back, I believe.

My life is evolving into something else, the shape of my days changing, for thanks be to some miracle, I am having fewer migraines. It was hard to even call them migraines, as if they were a plural, because life had become one long migrainoid event. Even today I do have something of the aquarium eye, but overall have had the longest reprieve in the past few weeks. My days can take a new shape. (I feel like a stiff newt dancing in a summer shower.) I still must avoid flat screen tvs in stores, staring at fluorescent lights, the beams through the Venetian blinds, light as a sharp object, but am able to do so. Somehow I am skirting the migraines.

When I feel anything coming on, I begin drinking copious amounts of water, because I suspect perhaps some of my pains are from a struggling gall bladder and so I try to help it by diluting the body. It would come as no shock to me that I have issues with bile. And gall.

There is the ongoing tragedy of the hundred year old trees being cut.
Meanwhile, the light falls. I mean the rain.

I have begun going to the gym. I am writing things, watching flowers work their way above ground. The mate has two job leads, one in New Mexico and one in Washington State, and meanwhile his current job goes fine, so we hang in.

My biological father may have cancer and in a week will come the appointment with the dermatologist which will tell us more. I lie awake at night thinking about this, worrying about this. His was not a fair life. How do some lives get so much suffering into them?

Yes, while I was there visiting with him in February, I kept thinking he had cancer, that on top of everything else he has cancer. There was a growth on his neck that had gotten larger. But as I sat there across from him, at the wooden table in the dining commons, I thought ‘If it is cancer maybe it is helping him, maybe it has stimulated some tremendous immune response that is helping him, alleviating his suffering, keeping the pain from his failing liver at bay.’

He has that phoenix liver…it rises from the ashes and renews itself.
And when someone is on their death bed why would you worry about a lump on the neck which looks like something an old log in a forest would grow? I am only dealing with this possible diagnosis of cancer because a man who has more lives than a cat, once again rebounded after his trip to the ICU, his days and nights of moaning delirium, after the doctors said to say goodbye, after the ministers had come. How much can this man, my biological father, creature from whom my own genes originate, survive?

I have to wonder. And in that wonder, is hope for the world.

Then again, who wants to lie awake at night thinking about these things? I suspect unpleasant thoughts sometimes prevent you from sleeping also. We have so many things thrust upon us now. So many things erupt and sprout from us, the mysteries and misfortunes abound.

As do the miracles.

Life itself goes on. Spring comes. My mother renews her contract with the earth. She will grow her garden Helios again, and if I am lucky, I will be there at some point to help dig, water, plant, weed, or harvest.

Bellicose Varicose

Today the honeybees woke up in NJ and swarmed about. The first flowers opened, purple crocuses with yellow centers. The kitten piñata Shaka Zulu lay in the garden napping. Blueberry the cat, her son, brought his first mole to the doorstep. The creature was still warm, like a tiny precious seal of the earth, his soft little flippers. I said a little prayer for him or her and laid it in the flowerbed with the crocuses, so at least its bones could come back as flowers.

It’s always something. For the past two weeks I have been elevating my leg. It didn’t like flying west a month ago, now it doesn’t like anything. That season when I ended up at the ER multiple times was followed by a strange array of symptoms, from cardiac shuddering to a skin cancer scare to an infected eye to heel fissures to migraines to this lump in my lower left leg. It had seemed like a lump in the muscle and would flare up and down during the month, like everything else wrong with me. Finally, I was getting better in most ways but the lump was getting worse, and that night after I got off the plane in Seattle a few weeks ago, I could barely use my left knee or leg.

The week that followed found it stiff and swollen and me lying awake at night in pain, thinking it might be a tumor and they might have to amputate if something was not named, was not diagnosed and treated soon enough. (Actually, I had had one doc check it the year before but he was not sure what it was and I described it truthfully as the least of my complaints at that dire time.) This time I had two docs look at it and one considered it might be a cyst, though he did not do a very thorough exam. The other doctor was pretty certain it was a deep varicose vein. I had never heard of deep and excruciating lumpy veins. (There is no sign of it from the surface.) He recommended an ultrasound and a visit to the Vein Care Center to be certain. Also said to try compression stockings and an herbal supplement, this surprised me to hear an MD recommend an herbal supplement, but cool. Then unintentionally I made things worse by having too much fun trying out my parent’s wii. (pronounced wee, whee, Ouch!) The wii that broke my knee. Who knew helping a penguin catch fish while balanced on an iceberg could be so satisfying? But what the wii really taught me is that humans have not evolved to play video games with their feet.

The gulping of more ibuprofen. Then I flew east. My leg really did not like the flight. I read about varicose veins and didn’t really like what I read. I am in pain now and so I alternate between taking good walks which I think are essential for overall health, and then keeping the leg as high up as possible when not walking or cooking. My leg is up now. Last night it was crying in the night. It whimpers. My knee whimpers.

I recall when my otherwise healthy brother, the one I feel somehow avoided the family genetic health ailments that the females suffer, ended up with a condition that made his knee look like a skull. He was very brave. I teased him that he was pregnant in his knee and that his homunculus would pop out. He had to have surgery. As a result, he missed his opportunity to dress up in colonial gear for some historic family reenactment.

Of course little moles and mice have souls.
Does pain have a soul too?

Werewolf Girl Needs A New Home

My dreams last night were interesting to me, maybe not to you, but I would certainly listen to yours if you wanted to tell me.

Is the blog an imaginary friend for grown-ups?

In the dream there was a theater just down the block from me, much like my favorite theater Idiom. A woman and I were rehearsing our roles as werewolves and trying hard to get the voices right. Actually, I think she was a vampire and that was territory that had been much further explored so she was drawing from some rich theatrical history and I was simply trying to get in touch with my primal mammalian roots. There was much laughter, and I had yet to really figure out what a werewolf girl sounded like. The woman and I left the others at the open air rehearsal and went back to clean up the theater which looked like a toy room wrecked by enthusiastic toddlers. After all was put away, I saw that what I had put at the top of some stacks of boxes and papers were the two old antique photo albums that in real life I brought back from my grandmother’s house in Virginia after she passed away.


While I was traveling I was unable to write, unable to keep up with myself.
Upon returning to The Burble of Suburbia, central coastal Jersey, I was immediately thrust into a battle with people who were cutting down healthy hundred year old trees in our neighborhood. Storming into the Borough Hall did no good, nor did glaring at the men with the chainsaws, calling the planning board, emailing every local office including the Mayor, taking photos, leaving phone messages all over town, contacting a reporter, and praying and hoping. The horror was only magnified when it came to light that the deforestation was done under the auspices of the Shade Tree Commission which got a $25,000 dollar grant to do the destructive deed. They even called it The Rejuvenation Project. It was, in truth, by definition, a Decimation Project, but these are the same citizens who elected George “Mr. Clean Air Act” W. Bush. The trees were felled; the top soil and moss destroyed, and the woodpeckers, owls, and hawks will have to find somewhere else to call home.

And so will I.

Triggers

The lurching. Is it hot tea hitting the empty stomach? The Venetian blinds in the shower? Something coming out in the steam? Should I bleach the showerhead?

Twelve hours back in NJ and the migraine was with me. Before bed there was a loud humming. I asked my mate if he could hear it but he could not. It was so loud it seemed to be almost like hands pressed against my ears. But maybe it was just me? I had flown into NJ from Seattle, had the altitude of flying left my head in a hum?

And it is not like I did not have migraines while in WA. But they followed the old rule, just appearing during my period. They were visual, and they affected my mind. I saw blurry fuzzy bubbling things on all the edges of my sight, and sometimes hallucinated cats. Sometimes the cats were real. I tried to say “relatives” and the word “elephants” came out. Not once, but twice. And I kept repeating “Math man exam, math man exam” while trying to say just “math exam” or “math test.” But the pain part only crept in a few times and I kept it at bay with ibuprofen, 600 mg almost every day.

But now in NJ, today as I got in the shower, the lurching sickness hit again, and I have to wonder if there is an environmental factor. But I don’t know how to start looking. Everything has holes in it.

And So We Shall

March 4th, the only day of the year which is also a command. And so we shall.

Flew into Newark airport late last night and was blessed with a gentle flight and nearly unnoticed landing. Had left Seattle at 4pm, flown through clouds piled like icebergs, passed close by Mount Rainier and on over frozen America where night was swiftly falling. The plane was only half full, what a rarity. I was served a delicious turkey hotdog with a packet of yellow mustard and some baby carrots and then tried to take a nap but kept bumping my head against the window and straining my neck so I gave up and read The Stranger and the New Yorker, keeping current with events in Seattle and New York City, none of which I plan to attend any time soon. Voyeurism I suppose. Let’s see what other people are doing while I float 35, 000 feet above the planet.

For two weeks I was fully engaged in nonstop living, my time in the Pacific Northwest divided between visits at the nursing home where my father resides now, appointments with my own doctors, and playing with my niece and nephew who are so new to the world, along with my friend’s children who range in age from 1 to 7.

I did not stop to do any writing, though I was sorry not to. I did not sleep either. I neglected to write letters, to write in my journal or on the blog, and my only word output consisted in scattered posts to facebook about what fun the babies were being as they sprawled on top of me eating apples while I read The Three Little Pigs. The youngest child running into any room singing, “I see you.” His three year old sister twirling and dancing through multiple costume changes as she shed dresses around the house, spinning a happy dervish, tippy toes, tippy toes. The one and a half year old nephew grabbing me by the finger insistently saying, “Nuhm Awn” (his version of “Come On”) as he leads me to the playroom for more games with trains.

Seattle and Bellingham had so little winter that they were deep in blooming Spring. The streets were lined with pink trees. The earth was abundant with the landmines of bulbs: crocus, hyacinth, anemone, daffodil, and soon soon the tulips.

In NJ we have a flurry of squirrels. Mounds of dirty snow. Snow which hasn’t given up the ghost. But the ducks paddle on an ice free pond. Shaka Zulu the kitten piñata comes to the garden and lies down for a nap in the oak leaves.

Any day I do not write feels a little lost to me.
Here I am. I am back.