Slow

 My recovery from sepsis (and the influenza which caused it) is gradual. If I go through my days slowly and with patience, I will likely get back to the realm of normal. "Normal" for me is keeping my body strong through exercise (particularly dance). I have, in less than four weeks, progressed quite well from being too debilitated to put on my socks. Still, there is still a long road back. I'm going for two-minute walks every day, adding thirty more seconds every week until I feel stronger. These are the steps on the long road back. Disconcertingly, my presbyopia (elder's eyesight!) has gotten worse after this incident. Sepsis can affect even that. 

I wanted to amend something I wrote recently here: I'm not going back to volunteering in the school garden to the extent that I did. I am visiting the kids and handing out little packets of seeds as a gift for summer break. I'll be in the garden for about ten minutes, max. 

Sometimes I still miss the sense of my "transitioning" self, the strange, small visions I had when I returned from the hospital. My body felt light, like a shell. If I looked at my hand in a dark room, there was a thin border of silver-blue light around it. I saw ribbons of silver-blue light on my bedroom wall, and a skylight opening up above my bedroom window. I saw myself go through it. I had closed-eye visuals of people walking down a silver-blue corridor; I knew them somehow. I miss that sense of being a body in transition. I suppose one day I'll get back to it.

One night, about a week after I came home (and still catching up on sleep), I woke in the early morning and sensed a malignant presence near my bed. I'm annoyed by such things--they've happened once in a while. I did what I always do, just told it to go away, and went back to sleep. There are a lot more evils in the world than just a dream-phantasm.

Well, off to finish up planting pumpkin seeds...still so amazing to me that seeds contain a whole world in themselves. 

I'm glad to still be here.