First of all, muchas gracias a daisybones for linking to me from her blog! (Even if it was "just" a credit link) Much classier and wittily written I assure you... go check it out! I'm tickled that such a beautiful artist woman linked to moi, heee hee ^_^
Okay, so here's what I would like to put under my "..." of the description on the sidebar, but I can't because blogger is hard to navigate/edit. So:
Steps of Grieving
“Ten years ago we would have given you painkillers and hoped for the best, but now we prefer more aggressive therapies—before the body has a chance to deform or deteriorate.”
Aggressive is codeword for terrifying; though in the grand scheme of things I should be thankful. These nuclear-toxic pills he’s telling me about—“disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs”; they weren’t meant to shut down my self-destruction. They’re made for malaria, cancer, the kind of illness you think of when you hear disease; my lifespan is jeopardized but no more noticeably than a heart murmur or chronic sadness. Five to ten years reduction, on average. I’m almost twenty and I’m faced with mortality and another affected woman’s motto—I’m living a good life, not a long one. A life sentence and how much I don’t want to believe it, to believe anything. I’m angry, almost—with quality and quantity in the balances, God must owe me something.
But it’s killing me, that thought, the loneliness, like an alcoholic I’m self-destructing, my own immune system chipping away at what allows the fluidity of movement, lets one bend easy as waterfalls. If we knew why we wouldn’t say incurable. I could twist the staircase of my genes enough for the information to walk upright; I could turn off the switch into a low power state and finally sleep without the knowledge that my own flesh is silently scraping away at itself, misdirected, a tide pulled to loss by an ill-intentioned moon. Autoimmunity, I’m thinking; the doctor’s steady voice reeling me back to now from a dream of subconscious suicide, a dream I can’t wake up no from matter how many times I rub my eyes each morning.
“At your age the kidneys and liver should bounce back rather well. Side-effects are rare and usually mild—though usually the only reason a patient will stop taking a drug.”
Hair-loss, vomiting, vivid dreams; later, mood swings, water-retention, anxiety, insomnia. My mother jokes that cortisone is the equivalent of PMS and speed, but otherwise only nods at our earnest dialogue. I speak up, my voice, shaking, asking everything I can—how does it work, what are the options, no really please how does it work? It takes me a half hour to get the man to say “The drug interferes with antibodies’ communications with each other.” He wryly asks if I am a biology major. I shake my head no. Words are the only thing I love enough to keep living most days. Poetry as condensed emotion, all feelings held in this petite jar of false fragility, three stanzas. I can’t give you morning stiffness or blows to the knees, disabling fear or creaky heartache, but words—these are the only things I can shape without tiring or shaking myself to terror. It’s a tragedy, drama, monologue and dialogue—but mostly dark comedy, plot twists so common that corners no longer leave me surprised.
Irony makes me sicker than the drugs themselves. The doctor and my physical therapist with their voices turning somber when we talk about “the rheumatoid” it feels more like a death-sentence than the thing that gets me out of bed every morning. Always, your age, your tenacity, your youth—after the first college semester of cheap wine I have to swear off alcohol, the doctor encourages “smoking the good stuff”, chemo has given me a life-time prescription to the morning after pill. These bones are mine but my age is an idea, a date on a card, a day of the year, a constant reminder; a year into college and I have spent two paychecks on necessary drugs that can kill faster than cocaine. The sterile paper warnings tell me to not brush up against pregnant women—and to not become so myself— because, combined, the medications have a ninety-nine-percent rate of birth defects and miscarriages. I cry sorry to my body for this poison, this toxicity, I wonder what else I’m killing as the white blood cells dip dangerously low and chemical waste seeps from my fingers—six months out of high school and I consider getting my eggs frozen. I’d have to go off treatment for a year before conceiving and to breastfeed, and I hate to say it but I am just as afraid for my own pain as the well-being of my babies. I know the standards women are held to as creators, and even more terrifying is being unable to find a man who could see this decomposing girl bright enough to care that much—one who’d care enough to wait for me, for our children. Romantic overtures turn into cold stutters and some nights I hope these beautiful woman parts will become barren as tundra. I’d still be lonely, but at least I’d have an excuse.
all work writing and bitchin' metaphors (c) treesa dee, in all psuedonyms and actual names, in all times hencetoforth, past, and present, etc, ad et al. if it isn't awesome you can have it. but well, it totally is.
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