Chicken Little's Big Sister

I have been so afraid.

The task was simple~ to take some antibiotics in the hopes it would reduce inflammation in my skull. The past few years have made me acutely conscious of my head. It is always shrieking or crackling or aching and I am often found walking around as if I were the model for the Scream.

I used to hold my head for more existential reasons. Or when contemplating issues of social and environmental justice.

As a favorite poet Rosmarie Waldrop writes:

“You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands
because, you said, it could not be contained in itself.”

Mine has always been the kind of mind that was looking around trying to find the edges of reality. Trying to look beyond, beneath, behind. It sort of always seemed like this life was a theater set and that people were moving the props somewhat randomly.

It is good that I like being alone now so that no one has to see me looking like an Edvard Munch painting. (The Scream with a Migraine.) So the latest task in an effort to rein in my head sounds so simple. The doctor prescribes antibiotics. Says take them for 2-4-6 weeks. Then another CT scan.

I believe in antibiotics. But I have not taken any in the past six years, and for the past three years any time I try a medicine I have had about a 50-50 chance of landing in the ER

And so The Fear.

You know how I think of the head now? A rock filled with intelligent jello.
And not much more.

It is amazing we ascribe so much meaning to it.

One thing though, I don’t take mine for granted anymore. It is not a silent thing perched there. It gives me constant feedback. Like a drunken parrot.
Still, overall it is working fairly well.
And for that I am grateful.

An antibiotic is a living thing killing another living thing. It’s warfare. The mold eats the bacteria. The bacteria takes the other bacteria out into a back alley. Only one returns.

I was worried because I have suffered so much vertigo, and a side effect of the antibiotic is dizziness, but I talked to myself like a character in a gangster movie and so I started the pills. Down the hatch.

Not sure yet if the sky is falling.
It seems not to be.

Then again, I have always thought the sky reached right down to the ground and we were already walking around in it.