this won’t be a happy post. there’s your fair warning.
so i lost my weekend courtesy of the worst bout of cyclic vomiting syndrome/abdominal migraines that i’ve had in a long time. it’s a real disease, look it up. at last count i’ve been in the hospital for this eight times in the last two months, but friday’s emergency-room episode (which comes on the heels of monday’s er stay) blew everything else out of the water and brought some really, really unwelcome college memories back to the forefront.
it’s hard to pinpoint the lowest moment. is it stumbling around a newark er waiting room alone for four hours while all the other incoming patients stare at you while you’re retching nonstop? having someone who loves you tell you “you need to get over this” as you’re writhing in pain in a filthy hospital room and mentally telling god that you’ll give up every vice you have if he’ll only send help? losing all sense of time while laying in a ball at the bottom of a shower for hours, praying you’ll become just dizzy enough to fall asleep if you can inch back into your bed? knowing that while you’re trying desperately to keep your insides from betraying you, you’re missing a kickass sugarland concert and later finding out that jennifer nettles transitioned from a classic sugarland tune into a mashup of beyonce, the jackson five *and* miley cyrus? and forget taking solace in baseball – the mets are walking batters like that’s the point of the game and losing games and pitchers like it’s 2009.
screw the honor that comes with the distinction of having one of the 45 worst diseases in the world, according to the hypochondriac’s guide to the 45 worst diseases known to man (it’s ranked somewhere around the plague, if memory serves). i’m sick of this sickness.
i’m sick of the insinuations from one or two people that maybe i could just will my brain to stop sending pain signals to the pain receptors in my stomach. you can only hear so much of that before a nagging voice starts to question – against your own experience, against medical research, against your doctors – that that may be true. you’ve already skipped concerts, passed on ballgames, stopped your social drinking, missed more dinners than you can count, completely forgotten that you used to go out. you’ve lost the energy to return your friends’ phone calls, to even answer your emails. you haven’t had a dr pepper in two months. what else do you have to give?
you wouldn’t wish this on your worst enemy, but you can’t help but wish that you knew one other person who was suffering through the same thing – so you could hear for yourself that you’re not crazy. so you could know that you’re not suffering alone. even though cvs doesn’t give you visible scars or bruises to walk around with doesn’t mean they aren’t there, twisting your stomach into knots, irritating your insides with any small amount of food. just because you look okay doesn’t mean you are.
this post was actually supposed to be about lindsay lohan. i spent two of my 48 hours in bed watching her version of “the parent trap” – both the original and the remake are among my favorite movies ever. as lindsay has self-destructed in front of the whole world, i’ve mourned for 1. her awesome red hair (who dyes a gift like that??) and 2. the bubbly kid who could count “the parent trap” and the epic “mean girls” among her life’s highs but who now looks like she’s just going to be another cautionary tale. such are the perils of celebrity, i suppose …
but when your life feels like it’s been reduced to one hospital visit after another, one jolt out of normalcy and into hellish pain after another, i guess sometimes it’s hard to keep the upbeat thing going. even though diving into quirkiness and humor are the ways i keep my sanity, the things that keep me feeling more like a person and less like a patient. i haven’t posted anything here in a while because it’s been difficult to write about anything fun. i won’t let myself be defined by cvs, but sometimes it’s exhausting trying to pretend that you’re fine.
