The Other Sick
[Michael Ancher, “The Sick Girl”]
I skipped a day here because I was too sick which is funny to me given the name I’ve given the Substack and given the fact that I am chronically ill and by definition then constantly sick. But this was different; I was what some call “normal-people-sick.” I had a true fever for the first time in years and a cough and sore throat and chills. I had a regular check-up appointment with my Lyme doctor on the first day of this and he was overjoyed to see me in this condition. “Congratulations! Your immune system works!” And I realized it had really been five years or so since I had such a sickness. My doctor proceeded to show me my bloodwork which was all good news: my white blood cell count was finally within normal range, something that had not happened in years.
So here I was: normal. And it felt awful. I spent much of Christmas Eve & Christmas in bed feeling miserable. But also feeling so grateful that it was the kind of miserable I knew all my life, the kind everyone knew. It was not the surreal, always unfamiliar, ever unpredictable miserable of my chronic illnesses.
I found an old Facebook entry looking back a year into the last time I was sick, and then beyond. I was in London, with another book coming out, with another boy I was sure I loved. And the entire time I was there I was drowning myself in hot toddies, which helped me survive that freezing Primrose Hill flat and whatever that virus was. (This week I have been back to hot toddies, as if picking up right where I left on with normal sickness.) The whole time I was there I never once thought about Lyme or any chronic conditions. I felt sick and also so alive:
Last year on this day I was in London walking around Primrose Hill, while a man I was dating was working inside his apartment. We were supposed to go to Paris but both of us had too much work and plus train tickets were so pricy last minute. I was doing peer reviews for a lit prize, and managed to escape to see old friends from my Oxford junior-yr-abroad days and we laughed and laughed and ate a lot of cake and drank wine and smoked cigarrettes--all things I was not supposed to do anymore (that now I will not be doing anymore, thank you universe, I got the message). A few days before my second novel had come out in the UK and I was doing big interviews and hanging out at illustrious Bloomsbury UK. I felt alone in loving big grey bustling cranky London, the way I always do. In a few days we'd be going to the country to visit another old Oxford friend, a retreat full of great journalists in the countryside, and it would be days of great food and decadence and joy and also hard intense discussions and so much love. A few days before this trip a man I had been in a relationship sent me a suicide note--he did not kill himself in the end--and somehow it never left my mind for a second and yet I was able to function. At the end of this trip, I flew to Stockholm and saw my 90 year old grandmother who had Alzheimer's, my favorite person in the world--she would be dead in 6 months; I slept on a bed next to hers for several days, knowing this would be the last time I'd see her. More things would happen in this year than any in my life (will do that post too), but today Cosmo the poodle and I sat alone, and I talked to some friends on the phone (and a few people I've never spoken to before), and tried to do some work, and tried to shake off some wild pain, and I broke a couple plates, and I actually laughed out loud at the sort of pathetic-ness of this holiday for me this year! But then I remembered so many childhood Christmas days filled with so many of my favorite things (especially TV Christmas specials, but also my parents got this wonky plastic tree just to appease us and I adored it like a pet) and the one where I felt so fancy with fiancé and my big Santa Fe home and its famous-people visitors, and those other ones with the East Village cool kids, and then the one with the Brooklyn cool kids, and all the other ones alone. And I couldn't even register their good or bad. Joy doesn't come on the days one designates. It is an unpredictable force on its own schedule, thank goodness. That brain of mine that competes with myself and measures and quantifies and analyzes is a bit disabled right now and I am so grateful for that. It's possible even that today was a good day--which autcorrected as "god" which, well, like it or not, I'll take.
[Shannon Cartier Lucy, Naptime]