22 March 2018

To insist on life's being life and recognising that it could easily be less but shouldn't be.

Richard Ford 



Rain and sleet, cold north wind. I get up and make tea. I go through the motions of a normal morning but something isn't quite right. My muscles ache, my hands will not hold this mug firmly, my taste buds are numb, I feel ravenously hungry and yet, the food on the breakfast table makes me gag. The voices on the radio are too loud and my eyes, my eyes, my eyes just don't want to take anything in.
My head, however, is full of thoughts and plans, swirling with distant images and ideas, potential. 
Alas, the effort.
Day one after the seventh monoclonal antibody therapy. This is what it's like when approx. 90% of my overactive B-cells have been told to disintegrate for a while so that whatever ongoing inflammation they have been involved in is shut down.



11 comments:

Colette said...

I can't imagine the effort your body is going through right now, but she is fighting the good fight. As you are. Assuming, of course, that the mind and body are two separate things. Lock on to those swirling ideas and potentials and write, write, write.

I love me some Ry Cooder and his twangy old guitar sound.

am said...

Sending love to you, Sabine. Winter still has its hold here, too. Music, especially Ry Cooder's, can keep all of us grounded in what it feels like to be fully alive. Thank you for your recent comment at my blog. Whatever it is that is beyond our comprehension, we certainly don't know its name. That's for sure. I like what the Tao Te Ching says:

"The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth."

Is that quote from the Richard Ford who is a novelist? If so, he was in the Creative Writing program at University of California at Irvine at the same time that I was taking classes in the English Department from 1967-1969. I might have seen him around the English Department. Who knows?

JO said...

Am so glad you have Ry Cooder for company, in the absence of sunshine!

liv said...

Holy mother of god! I wish I could take some of this shit away for you. Food is so important and I really hope that this gets calmed down so that you can enjoy it again.
But oh how wonderful it is that the music is there, that it gives you solace. Love to you.

Ms. Moon said...

I cannot imagine. I cannot. Please take comfort and ease in whatever you can. You are loved.

ellen abbott said...

I can't even imagine. I see Ms Moon has already expressed my inability to comprehend. strength to you.

Anonymous said...

Add my wishes to all the good wishes and healing thoughts and compassion heading to you with love. Take care, Sabine.

Roderick Robinson said...

Ah, the intellectual conflict of illness. And especially those periods of excessive sensitivity. To be revolted by corn-flakes seems like farce; one cries out: let the disgust be truly disgusting - the threat of nuclear war or the collapse of the euro. Not that innocent and neutral pap.

To the sciatica I have added a profoundly infected cough. This I am familiar with and can bear. But for the first time I have passed it on to VR where it has become far more severe. So I am now guilty of violating my wife. Illness brings with it a hermeticism and we face a desert of futilely charged speculation. We long for the Richard III moment "Shadows begone! Richard's himself again!", putting to one side what happened next in the play and in real life. And I am desolated to discover these words are Cibber's not WS's. Healthy and out of the hermetic bubble, I would have laughed. Now I am cast down, if only slightly.

But you know all this, I suppose.

Steve Reed said...

I'm glad that your head is swirling with ideas. I'm sorry you're wrestling with such physical hardships but to have a head swirling with ideas and plans can only be a good thing, it seems to me.

A Cuban In London said...

I am ever so sorry that you're going through this. The fact that you can articulate your illness so brilliant is testament to your resilience.

Greetings from London.

37paddington said...

You write it so powerfully, the feelings, the sights, the sounds, the floating off into air. I hope today is better my friend. Sending love.