I have a lot of flaws, but one thing I am is fair. I have always seen the world the same way: balanced in all things, if you wait long enough. It seems to me that life is just a series of interconnected decisions, a closed system; that if you had a lot of bad, you would have a lot of good to balance it out, to zero the sum. Part of the difficulty of being sick is that, in the back of my mind, I am waiting for it to balance and it never seems to. In the quiet moments, it leaves me disappointed and confused.
Life gets a lot less confusing when you realize that even if it balances, it is not fair, and that sometimes things happen without a reason. It is much less confusing when you accept that sometimes, no matter how hard you fight, life breaks you in a way that can’t be fixed.
I have been trying for a while to remember a particular day: the last day when I was healthy. It’s hard because every time I think I have identified the window in which it would have taken place, I am reminded of some previous strange illness or reaction that looks decidedly like masto. I remember my back injury when I was 13 and the bizarre subsequent neuro issues. I remember breaking out in hives from eating salsa and thinking for years that I was allergic to tabasco, chili and cayenne. I remember sudden, severe abdominal pain as a child and burning lungs. The truth is that I lived my last day as a healthy person so many years ago that the memory is lost, and I never even knew it.
My disease has changed this past year. It used to be that I would have sick days and then they would pass and I would feel better, normal. Now I have bad days and normal days, except now on my normal days I am nauseous and flushed and in pain. Like so many things about my life, it is hard to isolate exactly when it became this way, constant and more pervasive.
I cherish these normal days, so wonderful compared to the bad ones. In the dark of night, I fear they will end forever someday. What will I do, when they are all gone?
I worry that maybe this feeling of transience I experience now is a sign of this happening. I am afraid that maybe I’m living the last days of this stage of my life, and when it is gone, I will miss it.