You can suggest a better title for this post if you choose to. However, for now it is a temporary tag. Only in the past two weeks have I “returned” to my normal self, whatever that really is. I can walk bi-pedally now, most if not all the pain is gone, I’m off a muscle relaxant and an opiod, Ativan as well, and an anxiety attack has not returned but like distant thunder the thought of it rattles me at moments. As Chesterton so incisively and wittily said, “I am cultivating the faculty of patient expectancy.”
Quite frankly I have been humbled, hopefully have become more sensitive to the varieties of human pain we all can experience. If I had to choose between the excruciating and riveting pain I have had and the discombulating and estrangement one experiences with a panic attack, which I experienced of late, I would choose physical pain. I knew this as a therapist so many years ago, it now seems. However, to feel unreal to yourself, to feel you have surrendered self to anomie, to feel claustrophic within your own body, to feel incorrigibly restless and sleepless, alien to reason and rational courses, to feel a lack of remedies available, to sense that there is no where to flee to because you will only bring your self with it, is to feel enormous anxiety, dread, angst and existential despair.
I can only imagine how out of hand I will be when I come to die and those unfortunate dear ones trying to allay my fears, insurmountable for me, insurmountable for them. To cede control, in my life, is to lose who I am, although I am a defended personality but I would not say one who is poured in concrete. As I think and associate to all this I feel, in a way, I have had a near death experience, not the one we read about with shining lights and Jesus figures. I think I have tasted in a very secular way the shape of things to come — for me, that is; you are another matter. I have been humbled these past weeks. I think of the old mortar and pestle in drugstores of old in which compounds were made by the energetic arm of the pharmacist. I have been crushed and compounded and I didn’t like it one bit. I had no skills to resist, except for one night I tried to incoherently write coherently of the demons assaulting my mind and self, much the same ball of wax.
In short, dear reader, an anouncement was made: Mortal man prepare for mortal death and dying.
I broke off writing this blog about two or three days ago. Today, on the 18th of September, Tuesday, Jane away to see her sons, I have had intimations of an anxiety attack, an unsettling feeling which moves me to prowl about the house, try to nap, eat a bit, read a little, all in that annoying and aggravating brilliant sun of the Nevada sky, a relentless optic above. Nevada suffers from a lack of diversity — in everything. As I am alone for about 12 days and missing my bride, I discovered a Carvel custard store within an Italian restaurant which serves thin New York slices. I said slices. Out here, in the boonies, one of the first mild culture shocks was that you had to buy a full pie, for slices were not sold individually. Try that in the Big Apple and the toppings for your pie will be your own gonads.
I am in a mental rehab frame of mind — I feel shaky! trying to design my day in this relentlessly boring town to find things to do and it is something of a hardship. I cannot write except for this blog as the faucet has been turned off. I am still trying to metabolize what has happened to me this cruel summer. Again I have to have blood taken by my insistent internist, but the cardiologist said he’ll see me in six months time which is a probation of a kind. A few days back I had root canal work which is nothing compared to what I have experienced physically. From here on, dentisty is easy, he says boldly.
Clearly the blog serves a purpose, to ease some of my anxieties, to spill the beans about my present situation, to satisfy my needs and not that of the reader. It is my diary, how I have handled an onslaught, if that is the right word, of medical issues, their consequences, the emotional and psychological long range anguish they hold for me.
I will end here with an anecdote that has more meaning for me now. Going to a restaurant with Jane, I saw a couple, she in a wheel chair and looking very frail, and he suspended on aluminum crutches, wearing a cap that said Marines on it. He had a van and a door was dropped so his wife could wheel herself in. Given what my own ordeal had been, I asked what I would not have done before. I asked out of a humbled self if they needed some assistance. In the chit chat he revealed he had back problems that made mine pale. The other old man said thanks but all was fine and what I sensed was a sense of independence and that he would take care of his bride and that he appreciated the offer as well. I was moved by the soft fire in his eyes and what cards had been dealt to both of them. We almost always forget how fragile we are as creatures.
And damn you Romney, for here was the 47 percent, not asking for a dime, and kindly refusing help.
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