Back to Bed

Infection Number 3 (or 4) begins, this time upper respiratory,  Not surprising, given that Imuran takes about six months to really kick in, and it has been 4 months since I began to take it.  It seems like I get an infection now every week.  I'm living with a 4 year old and a mighty Norwegian who powers through his illnesses, but still.  I don't really care anymore--I just go to bed and drink hot tea.  Incredibly, the infections are often gone in the course of a day or two, instead of dragging out endlessly as they did when I was so critically ill with lupus.  I find Imuran to be a much more healing medicine than I first thought. 

I did get my hair cut, and asked her to take off several inches to get the old dyed part off and to get it to look fuller.  It did--it's starting to curl again, and the baldie spots have bits of fuzzy hair on them.  I go back and forth on covering the baldness at this point.  I was really ashamed of it at first, and the hair loss...it is an obvious sign of chemotherapy.

I've lived for more than 20 years now standing in the balance between wellness and non wellness.  I know this landscape now.  I was afraid, so f-ing afraid when I started Imuran...as I've said before, it was a parachute jump into the darkness, and I had only a tiny speck of  faith in the process.  It literally was chemotherapy or die.  I'm afraid of death...not because of whatever is or is not on the other side, but because I don't want to make people sad when I go.  When people die, a world ends, and I don't want the world of my life to end just yet.  There are still many adventures to be had.

Speaking of adventure, there were cougar tracks again in the "pocket park" up the street from my house again, with drag marks from a caught deer.  I thought I heard the cougar whistling and making weird cougar noises again in the deep woods where the creek is, and there are at least two bobcats around also--I heard one of them make a kill the other day.  It's wildcats all around here.  Wonder why they have come to this neck of the woods. I hope with equal measure that I don't come across one in my trampings through the woods, and that nobody hurts them.  They are very shy and won't harm unless threatened.  I feel a kinship with them, and with the bobcats, somehow.  They remind me that it's okay to be untamed, that it's okay to watch and wait in silence, and to be strong in spirit and body. Of course, the only time I spotted a cougar, its yellowish eyes had literally the light of madness in them--I suppose it was scared of my car and probably of me taking away its prey (a rabbit was clenched in its jaws).  It was creeping across the highway and its muscles were incredible--the whole animal was one sleek, golden being of pure strength.  Can I face my illness with that sort of fierceness, that strength?  A hundred years from now, no one will know how hard I battled to stay on this earth one more day, one more week, one more year.

But from some place, perhaps from my little heaven by the waterfall in Big Sur, I will know.