I wake up and the pain is unbearable and there is a parade going on outside. Parades are loud. Really loud. The shiny gold and white firetrucks blare their sirens as they pass by our yard.
I used to love a parade.
Because the pain was starting to lessen last night I thought today would be better but my head and neck are screaming their heads off.
I walk around the house looking for something. Inventory my drug list. Think about the hospital. Seriously I often find myself looking at things like witch hazel, or leather treatment, or the cats Prevention flea and tick pesticide and wondering if it will work.
What could possibly be medicine?
I have pica of the mind.
I drink a coke with lots of ice. To combat the queasiness and the fevery nature of the pain.
Yesterday when the neurologist saw me she rolled my neck up and down and twisted it side to side. The roaring pain caused me to burst into tears, though it wasn’t a burst so much as a rock leaking water from its eyes. She said, “dizziness or nausea?” And I said both but what I meant to also say was Pain Pain Pain Pain Pain.
But I was in too much pain to say Pain.
So now today my neck is screaming and screaming and so are my shoulders.
The head never stopped screaming.
I suspect the pain is damaging my brain.
I try to tell people I need help, the pain is too great, it is destroying my tissue.
I did not get those spots on my brain just sitting around and eating bonbons, people.
Because I cannot think of what to take, I drink my coke and in earnest begin to clean all levels of the house. Vacuuming, scrubbing the stove, changing the sheets, cleaning up after the animals, up and down stairs, twisting and turning. Every step and motion is agony and pulls at the frozen fibers of me and shoots pressure into my throbbing agonized head, but the alternative of staying still is not an alternative.
I try to outrun it by cleaning the house. It’s a dance. This cleaning.
Imagine me moving in space, enacting these motions, but the house has gone invisible.
It is dance as I spin and twist and move around. A dance of pain and yet the stillness is even more painful.
So the hope is it will pass enough that I can get down some ibuprofen or vicodin.
This way I feel, with everything from my ear to my shoulder to my leg and above all the head, screaming, reminds me that I died a long time ago. This is not life. So I am going to plan my funeral, because it already happened. Rest in Peace Stephanie Peirce. August 1969-November 2008.
Only did I really die in September 2007? That was when I first found myself sitting up alone in the middle of the night, in the dark on the edge of the bed, covered in a pain sweat, wondering what had happened. It took days for me to make it to the ER because my pain was so enormous (and my bp so high) that I was not thinking clearly at all. And people like my mate and my Mom and sister kept telling me to go to the ER but I couldn’t understand them. And then finally I did. The pain was in the right side of my back/shoulder. The docs and nurse could not find anything but bless them, they shot pain meds into my legs, and I got relief.
That was back when I was still experiencing the benefits of emergency medicine. I was in a Garden of ER Eden of Innocence, back when I believed that if I had intractable pain I would go there and someone would help me.
Would name it, would separate it out from me.
So was 2007 really my funeral? That was more like the date I was assaulted and left for dead. Seriously, it was like I woke up and was in a body that had been brutalized. I had been left for dead. Only the assailants were invisible.
But I limped along on pain meds and chiropractic and physical therapy and managed to handle many family matters involving my grandmother and father, and to finish graduate school and take a celebratory trip to Africa, and then came back and even got so far as getting started on hormones to hopefully help my cruel period, and even went to a job interview for a holiday season position at a retail store.
It seemed like I was going to go on with my life. But by the next week when the store manager called me back, I was in the hospital.
Today as I hobble quickly around scrubbing and dusting and smoothing, each movement a scream, I am taken back to how I was that November 2008. This is no different, that the soul would have to rise because the body was now the victim of some sort of unnatural disaster. I would have to lift myself up by the soul. And that is how I am now too. I mention this to my mate and ask if I should count the 2007 date or the 2008 date as my death. He is not sure but he listens, and then he confides, “I know exactly when I died.” “When was it?” I ask. “Nov 13th 2008” he says. Yes right in the middle of that month, a few days before my first ER visit, he was laid off for the first of what would become two consecutive November lay offs at two different companies.
That first November was when the bomb went off in our lives.
It is good my mate is solitary by nature, because he is all alone, as I am all alone. A wall the size of a mountain separates us.
I tell him I think we should do a ceremony. Some funeral. He says rebirth. I say yes but a funeral first. And he says maybe a cremation would be good. I agree. Ashes. So we will think on this.
(graveyard, Vermont)
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