Nine Days

IX

'Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.
It is the bitter potion by which the physician within you heals your sick self.
Therefore, trust the physician and drink his remedy in silence and tranquility.'

— Khahlil Gibran

Nine days. After the Untethering I will wake up Dawn again. Oh yes, there will be a new dawn…but as I think about it I realize that I don’t want to be a new Dawn. Or even the old Dawn. These long months of hell have changed me it is true, but I am the ultimate editor of these changes. By which I mean that it is not what happens to me, but how I interpret it, how I integrate these changes into that both ubiquitous and ephemeral reality of Self.
It is as if I have been hammered on a forge, burned and quenched; but, rather than becoming brittle, I make the choice to be tempered by it.


Yet another appointment with the Doctor today, this one was to have the stitches removed from my neck. [See Whining Allotment, in the post Eleven days] As I was wrangling the wheelchair out of Mom’s trunk I made the mistake of not anchoring myself against the car. Stupid.
It happened so fast that I felt like the ground hit me.
Drop Attack is such an innocuous phrase, even with the word attack in it; but essentially what happens is that, like a mannequin, the strings holding you up are abruptly cut and down you go. Unlike falling down from dizziness, which happens too, this is more like a conspiracy of Chiari and gravity to stomp my ass. And along with being painful it is wholly unnerving.

This was a bad one. I landed on my tail bone, poor stumpy thing, twice fractured already, then my head bounced on the pavement. Agony.
With the help of my Mom and two compassionate people who ran to my aid, I got onto my wheels and we made it into the lobby. By then word had reached the staff of the Anchorage Neighborhood Health Clinic [I spell it out fully because I have great respect for the entire staff.] and two nurses met us at the door. I was a shaking mess of tears and snot. Through the pain, all I could think was that I had just seriously fucked up, having hit the back of my head, right where my brain is malformed…
Sensing an impending emotional collapse a nurse took charge and wheeled me back to an exam room. But not before I summoned enough presence of mind to let my Mom know that it was just pain from neuralgia, not some new horror.
Seeing the pain of empathy in her eyes hurt my heart. [Though foremost I do it to regain my life, there is also a great desire to end what this is doing to those who love me that motivates me to risk the surgery.]
Following a flurry of taking vitals and finding something for me to puke in, I found myself alone for a few minutes.
And that’s when I lost my grip.
I don’t pretend to any macho stoniness, a life without tears is as empty as a life without laughter. And believe me, I have cried over the Chiari now and again, but never with such abandon.
I just sat there in the exam room and wept. I gave my self over to the endless stress of pain, the nausea clinging to my back like a leprous monkey, the fear and bottled-up rage.

And while it hurt, the release felt good. It was an eye in this storm of relentless illness.

Clichés are habitually ridiculed, often deservedly, but there is a reason they persist. Sometimes they are truth that has become tarnished by misuse. Tonight I am cherishing just such a truth: Thanks to the wonders of sativa, I am eating a hot bowl of savory vegetable soup, made with love by my Mom. You can suspect bias, but it is the best damn veggie soup on the planet. I can feel it binding with the percocet to untangle the damage of the day.

Nine days...but right now I have soup.

—End Transmission—
Dawn McKenzie