2023 52 Card Project: Week 41: Ebb

[pegkerr]

How to put this delicately...

I've felt like absolute crap pretty awful this week.

I've already talked about some of it: I'm wearing a surgical boot, and that has thrown off my usual routine to keep myself healthy. With the boot and foot problems, I've been using a cane on the stairs. I'm not able to do my usual walks. I am having a problem with my wrist which precludes doing yoga (can't do downward dog). So I've done very little exercise at all. Okay, none.

I've had some other medical tests in the last month with results that I didn't like to hear. My cholesterol is edging higher. I've now been diagnosed as having osteopenia--thinning bones.

It's getting colder and darker. I'm starting to feel the effects of seasonal affective disorder, and I discovered this week when I pulled it out that my SAD light is broken. I have to buy another. And those suckers are expensive.

Sleep disorder continues--I had one night this week when I managed only a half and an hour of sleep. The next night's sleep was disrupted by a trip to the emergency room in the middle of the night (don't panic--I was having symptoms which might have been indications that I could be having heart problems, but turned out to be a false alarm. Muscle spasm, possibly, the ER doctor thought.). So that was another night of very short sleep, and I can expect a very big bill in the mail.

It just so happens that the same day I went to the ER, I got three vaccines in one day: Covid, flu, and RSV. I mean, yay for modern medicine, but I was just FLATTENED for the next 36 hours.

So I've been thinking about getting older and about how the body starts to not be able to do everything you want it to do. This week, I've felt sluggish and dull even on my good days. Especially on the day I was so short on sleep and dealing with post-vaccine symptoms, I felt about twenty years older than my actual age. I couldn't even read because of the headache.

This was all very unpleasant and daunting. There was the added issue that I live alone, which just made everything more difficult. When I called about my symptoms, the clinic told me (at 11 p.m.) that I really should go immediately to the ER, and I shouldn't drive myself.

Well, that wasn't going to happen: Fiona and Eric each live about twenty minutes away, my next-door neighbor I might have asked had Covid, and I just felt I couldn't call any of them at 11:00 at night and ask them to pick me up, take me to the ER, and sit around for four hours. And I couldn't afford the ambulance ride.

So that meant I drove myself, in a fog of self-pity.

The next day, as I lay in bed so miserably ill from the vaccines, oh, how I wanted someone there to do the dishes, to fetch me some tea, to run out and get some pho (the ultimate I'm-feeling-sick comfort food) and bring it back to me.

But Rob is gone.

The whole week felt like a fast-forward VCR tape of the process of decline. (I had originally thought to call this card 'Nadir,' but then reasoned, 'No. This isn't the bottom yet." So I hit upon the word 'Ebb.')

I ran across a post on Facebook this week that I've been thinking about, in connection with all this:

The problem in middle life, when the body has reached its climax of power and begins to decline, is to identify yourself not with the body, which is falling away, but with the consciousness of which it is a vehicle. This is something I learned from myths. What am I? Am I the bulb that carries the light? Or am the light of which the bulb is a vehicle?

One of the psychological problems in growing old is the fear of death. People resist the door of death. But the body is a vehicle of consciousness, and if you can identify with the consciousness, you can watch the body go like an old car. There goes the fender, there goes the tire, one thing after another--but it's predictable. And then, gradually, the whole thing drops off, and consciousness, rejoins consciousness. It is no longer in this particular environment."

Image description: Background: a star-filled night sky. Right lower corner: a framed sign reading "nope. NOT ADULTING TODAY." Above it sits a lit kerosene lantern, sitting on the pillow on which a haggard-looking woman (Peg) rests in bed with her eyes closed. Above her (center left of the collage): a rusted-out old truck.

Ebb



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Comments

[ndrosen]

I hope you’re feeling better soon.

[malinaldarose]

I hope things turn around and you feel better soon.

[pameladean]

Ebb is a good term. Any ebb tide is followed by a flood tide. In the meantime, what an awful day you had with the E.R. and the vaccine side effects and the inevitable but unpredictable return of grief. I'm not sure this addresses your basic reluctance to ask people to drive you to the E.R., but when I was having to go there regularly, I'd try to get people to just go home for the waiting time. But with luck, you won't have to worry about it again for a long time.

P.

[aome]

I don't have any words of wisdom or comfort, but I just want you to know I'm listening and thinking of you. Being alone when you don't feel well SUCKS. *hugs*

[minnehaha]

You can always call me. I am usually up until midnight and I get it.

K. [also knows where the pho comes from]

[kiwiria]

I hope things improve for you soon :-(

I hope it's not too inappropriate to say, but I like the card. It's very poignant.