It's been a horrible few weeks.
I continually adapt.
I endeavor to come up with coping strategies...to manage the emotional darkness this god-damned illness exacts.
I try to find words to metaphorically help describe my symptoms. Somehow that aids me as I live in this bodily prison. Perhaps it softens the cold, hard facts.
I tend to personify all sorts of aspects of life...and aspects that have no life...material things, like bikes and cars.
At times in the past year, I have gotten angry and have broken things...
...a full-length door mirror. (Boy that made a racket..and a mess.)
...a plastic Tums bottle with Tums still in it. (That just made a mess.)
...and earlier this week, while hollering some sort of frustrating obscenities, I chipped one of the window blinds as I repeatedly slammed my shirt against the inside of the bedroom window covered with the blinds.
I ended up lying in the back yard that night...
...in the dark
....on the grass
.....crying.
Sobbing, I rolled on my side and looked at the treetop shapes in the distant darkness. The animal tree-shadows brought to mind when I was young girl and would camp in the yard so I could stargaze and look for animal shadows and listen to night sounds and wonder at the vastness of the universe and think that surely extra-terrestrials would come visit me someday and that there had to be more to life than my time on earth.
Yesterday and this morning...
...with the incredible heaviness in my limbs
....with the feeling that I'm dragging around a dead body
.....as I made the effort to defy gravity and pull my body to an upright position
......and then consciously thought to myself, "Move Carol. At least you can still propel your body forward,"
.......the earth felt like a giant magnet (which it is) and my body was filled with slivers of iron and the earth was pulling the iron with all the earth's might. I was going to be sucked right into the center of the earth.
The heaviness gets incredibly unbearable...almost. I do bear it, because I'm still here.
I thought, what can I do? what mental image might help me?
I know.
I'll picture a rubber covering under my feet that will buffer and interrupt the pull of the magnet.
But I love the earth.
I want to feel the earth.
I don't want another separation between me and the earth.
I don't want to think of the earth as my enemy, as something I need to shield myself from.
The earth is not my enemy.
My body is not my enemy.
I don't want to even think of terbinafine (the drug that precipitated this unkindness) as an enemy.
I don't want any enemies.
E-n-e-m-y .
Innie me.
That's when I was my own worst enemy...when I as an "innie me."
I took terbinafine for about six weeks in Spring, 2011, that caused, or at least was the catalyst, for this dis-ease of polyradiculitis that robs my limbs of functions, that has stolen my dreams.
(As I type this now, I feel hatred toward that medication.
But I don't want to feel hatred.)
Anyway, I wrote down the word terbinafine.
I asked myself, If I scramble the letters, can I come up with something I can embrace ... instead of hating the culprit, instead of viewing terbinafine as my enemy?
terbinafine
or
train be fine
or
benefit rain
Benefit rain...
Shower me with benefits...let me once again dance, light-footed, arms outstretched, open face toward the heavens as the rain freely falls, life-giving, nourishing, replenishing...
I prefer a benefit rain to terbinafine.
Dancing in the Rain
by Hillary Weeks
"...And I danced in the rain
I let my dreams know I hadn't forgotten them
I let my heart take the lead and
I told my hopes to get themselves up again
And I danced, I looked, yes I danced..."
