Getting sick really feels less like an experience than it feels like I am becoming, less a person than a force of nature. I can feel the changes in my body in visceral ways, an invasion that I can feel growing, pressing in, grasping onto my throat from the inside. I feel less like a person right now than an event, an event that is happening to me but also to other people. I am a reminder that people get sick and die, a reminder of our mortality. But absent from those moments of reminder, I see and hear life moving on for others while the nature of my situation continues to press on inexorably, growing into even the very mechanism of my breath. I hear people talking through the walls and remember that this is event is mainly happening to me.
Yet, it’s surreal and dislocating to experience the reactions to my illness, trying not to take it as a reaction to me but rather the thing growing inside of me. It’s uncomfortable, people are sorry, it makes them sad. The best reactions are those who have taken it in stride and just seem concerned enough to listen to the probably repetitive daily concerns that I get to think about all the time now. Did I manage to sleep last night, or was I choking again? Can I get enough to eat, can I get out of bed?
I don’t really want to be something traumatic that is happening to other people, that they need to reach out for support to deal with. It’s strange wanting to tell people how it feels but also not wanting to feel that strange sense of pity that also feels like a bit of panic, not knowing what to say. What do you say?
It’s been interesting to be getting food dropped off from both friends and strangers and sampling all of the interesting things that I imagine people find comforting but can’t help but feel a little alienating as well. This is not my food, but I eat it imagining the person who brought it and the comfort it gives them and I think of that being passed on to me in these loving gestures of nourishment and I think that this feeling goes beyond what anyone could ever say to me. That jar of chicken soup communicates something deeper than words could have.
I generally don’t like to ask for help but feel so helpless right now, that I reach out so that I can feel a little bit less numb because that’s still my prevailing feeling, numbness. It’s as though it’s happening to someone else because being choked in the middle of the night is not something that I can claim right now. It’s a reality beyond the grasp of anything that I can possibly do and I am left to wait in this unknowing, feeling and knowing that there is something growing inside of me that would shut off every mechanism of my life. It’s there all day and there’s nothing I can do but wait, and eat soup loving made for me by people I love, hoping, and praying that everything will turn out okay.
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