Lucky Me.

I sat on the beach today.  Lucky me. The sun, the sand, the waves.  Just as I visualized it when I would lay in my hospital bed the past few months.....so grateful.

Gratitude

As I sit in my living room I am overcome with gratitude,  I am so grateful for my body responding to weeks of antibiotics, the wonderful staff at UT medical center for kindly facilitating all they do to get me on my feet again.  I owe my life to the dedication of my doctors, nurses, cna's and respiratory therapists;  it takes a big team and I am blessed to have access to modern medical care.

Tonight my breathing is labored and I am tethered to an O2 tank.  I feel this disease taking more then I want to give but tonight I will live out of gratitude that I am in my home; it's warm and dry as the cold rain falls outside.  I am fortunate.  I am blessed.  I am loved.

Merry Christmas!

Tomorrow I get to leave the hospital.  I have spent 28 days on the 9th floor of UT hospital.  My body has been pumped full of antibiotics.  Vancomycin, cipro, zosyn, zyvox and colistin  have been delivered through the line in my groin then moved to  the the line in my chest. I am thankful to be going home for Christmas.

Darkness

I am tired.  Tonight is the end of a long week.  Last Saturday evening I started with a low grade fever.  Like kudzu attaching on and lurking up a tree it started slowly, once it starts there is no stopping it,the plague of the South clamps onto the innocent sampling creating a topiary that transforms;  The morphed image is a giant statue of kudzu,a tribute to it's need to consume. And so it went with my temperature, enough to notice on Sunday at 99.9, enough to get my attention but allow me to continue, wondering how high it will climb.  By Monday I am feeling the tentacles of sickness wrap around me, again.  I am familiar with the clamp on my chest that starts tightening as the vice grip of fever climbs.  I start giving up all intention of accomplishing tasks, there will be no unpacking, no tending to the details of settling back in. Life is reduced to breathing and toileting, zombied out in the blur of illness.  By Tuesday the reduced life is taxing, with temps near 103 and fluid quickly filling my chest the choice is breathe or walk, both can not compete with the effort of the other.  Two steps, stop, gasp, pull the oxygen line along.  Low level anxiety buzzes through me.

I have to see the Doctor or go to the ER.  The ominous mantra plays over in my head, "avoid the ER at all cost.  You don't want to get exposed."  One encounter with the wrong bug ruins my chances for a future lung transplant.  I can't risk getting better today and forfeit my hope for tomorrow.   I have to maintain vigilance at all time in all situations.  I can't get exposed to Hepatitis or Cepacia or a hand full of other rare and common bugs.

My doctor sees me, by now I'm using the wheelchair.  My heart is racing trying to compensate for drowning lungs, my 102.9 fever pounds my head.  The x-ray version of my lungs look mike marbled Swiss cheese.  The swab from my nose points to influenza type A.  Miracle medicine, tamaflu is given to me with the assurance that I will feel better, but not today, not tomorrow either.  These things take time.  Follow up with my pulmonologist and go to the ER if I get worse but I just want to go home.  I call my two kindred Spirits and ask them to pray for me.  They go to battle as I am defeated.

I want to go home, to the place where I will not have to be sick anymore; to the place of sunshine and warmth and all manner of perfection.  I want to go home where kudzu does not grow and peace reigns.  I want to flee the present with all the trials and pain this world offers.  I am exhausted from pulling myself up, trying to stay triumphant in the weeks and months that had recently passed.  In the past 6 weeks I had been at various hospitals for 35 days, never home long enough to settle or recharge. The looming thought of transplant lies ahead like a deadly obstacle course.  I will have to be sicker, much sicker, to get the chance of breathing easy.  It will get worse before it gets better. I cannot stand for it to get worse.  I am at my limit.  I continue to pray for the fever to break.

But the fever, like the kudzu triumphs, I am transformed from an adult of dignity to a blubbering dependent child of pain.  The next few days are a blur of fever bursting through walls of sweat, moments hugging the garbage bin emptying my stomach of what is not there yet my body continues to puke and purge itself clean.  I keep asking the all knowing One why?  Silence rings as deafness; my question mocked as the fever morphs my reality to the present.  In the moment only pain exist, another hurl, another wave of nausea continue.  I beg for relief from the maker of all good things.  I am lost in darkness.  I have asked what I vowed I would no longer ask. WHY?  Knowledge is futile in the face of pain.  My body will recover, I hope the same for my faith.