This blog is coming out late today, as you can see. I wanted to spend some time on Saturday writing it; instead, I had an extra day of writing. With my Saturday session, I wrote 48 pages, 2 under my writing goal.
Now, I'm not beating myself up over 2 pages, but neither am I letting it slide. I know myself, shortcuts and slides will be my downfall. Let this blog and all those (2) of you who read it be my accountability.
The reason I fell short and needed an extra day of writing this week was that I took Thursday as a sick day. I slept off a migraine in the morning and went to the doctor in the afternoon. I wrote about two pages that day. I've been feeling sick the past couple weeks, and this is something that's happened to me a couple times before. It's like I'm in a car getting motion sick while sitting in my desk chair. Obviously, while writing, I do a lot of sitting in my desk chair and therefore a lot of getting sick. The doctor seems to have found the issue and I'm on yet more medication (I already have plenty for chronic migraines), and the meds are so far working.
Incidentally, illness is what cemented this project in my mind as a requirement for the summer. I'm not the healthiest person in the world. I have chronic migraines, get a cold at the slightest pressure or temperature change, and can injure myself in mind-blowingly astounding ways. But hospitals were never my thing. I had to go once for stitches when I was 8 and once for a panic attack and migraine when I was 19. In comparison to my brother who went to the hospital for a new injury sustained while doing something "daring" and stupid what seemed like every other week when we were kids, I was a pretty safe from hospital stays.
When I do get sick, I prefer not to go to see doctors. I know that a fever, nausea, and achiness are the flu and that I should take Tylenol, drink plenty of fluids, and sleep. I don't need to go to a doctor who will stick me with needles and tell me the exact same thing. Unless I need a note for missing classes. So, when I woke up one Tuesday morning in late April with the sudden urge to vomit up everything in my body, including my organs, and had a strangely high fever, I just assumed it was the flu - you know, one of those 24 hour stomach bugs that you used to feign having to get out of a test but still be able to go out on the weekend? I threw up and went back to bed, and my roommate went to classes, probably thinking my inferior gentile self couldn't handle the awesomeness that was our Seder food and especially wine from the night before.
But that night when she got home, she was a dutiful roommate and checked my temperature, it was 102.5. We went to the hospital. After a couple hours of waiting, some IV fluid, and a test or two, Rachel and I returned home with a diagnosed of flu and minor infection. Take Tylenol and a prescribed antibiotic. I spent the next day in bed, with my roommate and another friend dutifully watching over me, making sure I was taking the Tylenol that wasn't lowering my fever and drinking fluids that I was barely keeping down. I'd filled my hospital quota for the next decade; Rachel hadn't. After taking my temperature again that night (103.3), she dragged me out of bed - I could barely move my muscles were so sore - and got me back to the hospital. With explicit instructions from my mother for Rachel to glower at the hospital staff until I was given everything I could possibly need, I was treated like I was dying. As it turns out, I was. I spent the next few of days in the PCU and another couple in general care. At first I was too sick to really understand exactly how serious it all was. Then I was too doped.
I guess one of the morals of this story is to see a frikkin' doctor when you get sick, which I have taken to heart, as evidenced by my doctor's appointment on Thursday. But in terms of this project, I also learned another lesson from the experience:
On an intellectual level, at some point, I realized that this could have been it for me. It took a while for it to fully sink in. You know how people say that you should live life to its fullest because tomorrow you could get hit by a bus or something? When you actually get hit by that bus and survive, things come into a different perspective. I have 21 years of really fabulous test scores and GPAs. I wanted more. I get to live the rest of my life with the threat of a recurrence, but far more importantly, I get to live, and I am going to make my life worth that. Which means it's time to get serious about what actually matters to me.
That's what this summer, this project, is about.
Quote of the Week: Memory (Reminder: These are very rough drafts. Apologies.)
In this quote, the healer Contierra from last week's quote is reflecting on the fulfilling 500 year life of an important man she's treating and her own memory of him. This was written on May 27th:
"Contierra tried to imagine him as young Cazchdani man named Abner at about her age, but she couldn’t. She could, however, picture him quite clearly as a bumbling sideshow magician at her hometown’s annual Summer Festival, as he had once posed for some reason she had never learned. She wondered if anyone else could – it was doubtful. She knew that in his lifetime, he had forged many important relationships, but having known him in that way made her feel special. That was how she met him."
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