the ups and downs of just kind of living

I think the thing to do is look at the scale as a novelty item-- a kind of "Magic 8-ball," if you will. Before I even stepped on it this week, I knew it would be up. I just felt like that. The challenge is not making a big deal out of it, not letting it devastate you. That's where the 8-ball comes in. Just react to the scale as you would that age old advisory object. Nod in agreement, or shake your head in disbelief, then reflect. Was I a good witch or a bad witch? And what's the use of Good and Evil, anyway? Little use to me. I'm still Livin' La Vida Stina. I'm still doing the things I need to do. I haven't been an out of control freak, but I must admit that some peanut butter came into the house, and therein may lie the rub. Also, I have this giant pimple near my right eye (a very John Merrick number) and I'm thinking that thing has to account for a few ounces all on its own. No, really.

So here I am. It's no longer about the numbers getting smaller. It's more about keeping this rotation of numbers in the same basic range. Kind of like a very limited slot machine. I can't wait until cherries comes up...

catching up

Yeah, I know. She disappears for weeks and gets some fucked up infection and is out of work and huffing too much on the green and cigs and then she comes back and posts all these crazy ass emails on the blog.

She being me, and me being someone for whom sickness is like a stew I can't avoid eating, no matter what-- take a draining, puss-laden ear and add childhood neuroses, a smattering of really bad experiences with incompetent medical professionals and a heaping teaspoon of no one-ever-believed-that-I-was-sick-until-I-couldn't-stand-up any more...and you've got my life. Sorta.

I couldn't write for a whole week. I sat in my garden and watched ants crawl up a leaf and back down again. I took pictures of my hands, obsessively picked my fingernails, watched gay-friendly LOGO channel programming that I'd downloaded onto my computer. Once I could actually read for an hour or so at a time, I devoured Annick Smith's In This We are Native, read the whole of Best American Poetry 2006 (again) in one sitting, reworked some of my own poems. I was in another dimension entirely for long stretches at a time. I only cried once, when I really really wanted to keep working on revising a piece called "New Kitchen" (I hate the title; it's a working title and nothing else has availed itself to me yet) because it was starting to move in the right way but I had to stop. I was getting a migraine from the slight, barely imperceptible moves of my head (that usually I don't even notice) and I needed to lie down.

So you see, now that I can actually sit down and compose without blowing chunks I am making up for lost time. I am thankful to be feeling better. No, I am amazed and humbled and curious as to why I was spared.

You ask
what is my bonus gift
and I say

being able to reach
for the olive oil

feeding the dog

the thought of getting back on a bike
maybe soon

too many acts of possibility to list.

I ask
what does
this hell of dizzy
have to do with desire?

No amount of wishing could make it so.
I pushed through in the beginning
and ended up spinning like a top for days.

Never received an answer.
Then you called.

In recent pictures I am always
wearing the pants you sent me
the blue linen ones. If I was out

of bed I was wearing those pants.
I was stuffing the pockets with tissue
and cough drops and stems.

Your sample outgoing message?
Your title?

Perfect. Fuck all y'all.

the poem that won't leave my head

Work

You were hired by the tools in the box and set to work.
How to hold a stone. How to throw it.

The project took a long time, you had to
learn to take care.

You were digging underground
and you didn't know where.

Sometimes it was a tunnel
and sometimes it was a stone.

*
The first sign that summer was over was in the fields.

Barley stalks stood up from the earth, which was painted
in a black so thick you would choke if you ate it.

The wind pulled the rose branches and tore them from the wall.

It is time to pack up the house and carry yourself away.
The fields are filling with water.

*
How will you render it, how will you hold it,
how will you bury it and carry on?

There is everything in the world still to do.

You spent so many years trying to find
the end of the day, the close of the shop,
when the work goes back in the box.

He calls work the throat. I call work the chest.

But it is lower than that,
the drawer in the belly,
where the remnants are.

And when you open it, what will you find?
That it was neither the throat nor the chest.

It was the ear that led you this far.

Saskia Hamilton

not dead yet

the tilt by which i live

Below is an excerpt from something I sent to the ROARS women...it's the best I can do to describe what I feel right now and what I've been through these past few weeks. I am happy to report that I feel better today than I have in awhile, but I can't get cocky. One wrong too-fast turn of the head and I'm back on the neverending tilt-a-whirl.

I've been very isolated and it's not a good thing and so I'm reaching out, sending up a flare.I had no idea that, when I came home from my trip to Ohio and was sick with a sinus/bronchial infection, I would still be recuperating three weeks later. The chain of events that have unraveled since then have turned into one of the hardest things I've ever dealt with in my life. And health issues and I go way way back.The doctor put me on hardcore antibiotics for the infection (ah quniolones, just what I needed to toxify my body even more), and when I started feeling off balance and woozy a few days later, I attributed it to the meds and/or the sinus infection. By Wednesday the 6th I was so dizzy that S. had to come get me from work. Thursday I felt okay, even managed to take a bike ride (with a little voice in my head saying "should you really be doing this?" and another little voice saying "yes yes yes you don't exercise and you're going to go crazy") but Friday morning, when I raised my head from the pillow, the entire room started spinning. I grabbed S.'s arm, let out a WHOA and just held on. Soon we were in the doctor's office and I was given a test for BPPV (benign paroxymal positional vertigo), which I passed with flying colors--they would tip me back and my eyes would go into spasms, jumping in their sockets (nystagmus) to try and keep up with the room that was spinning around me...the doc said to S. "come here, look at this," and she did, told me later that it was really cool to see but it wasn't cool for me...I just sat up and vomited. They sent me home with anti-nausea meds and a prognosis of four to six weeks. No way, I thought. No way in hell I can take this for that long. It HAS to get better soon.BPPV happens, they think, when calcium "crystals" (otoconia), which live in the ear's utricle, get loose within the vestibular labyrinth (the body's organ of balance, located in your inner ear). The labryrinth includes loop-shaped structures (semicircular canals) that contain fluid and fine, hair-like sensors that monitor the rotation of your head. The otoconia are attached to sensors that help detect gravity and back-and-forth motion. When they get "stuck" and start going whither they should not go, they can irritate the nerve endings associated with balance, giving a false signal of movement and causing a brief sensation of spinning. Brief my ass.They gave me exercises to do to help the otoconia get back to where they are supposed to be. S. and I did them religiously, three times a day. S. would time me as sat on the bed, moving from one side to the other, 30 seconds of dizzy, sit up, nausea, back down for thirty seconds, five sets three times a day that left me exhausted. S. had booked a trip back east to deal with some family issues, and though she was completely wracked with guilt over leaving (and attempted to change her ticket but it would have cost $500), she flew out last Tuesday. Intuition and my own knowledge about my complicated history with my ears led me to make an appt. with my ENT that same morning. My neighbor, bless her, took me to the appt. I saw a nurse practitioner with an odd bedside manner who looked in my right ear and didn't like what she saw. "Fungus," she said. "Your ear is infected." Oh joy. She also performed the Epley manuever on me, which was designed to rattle those otoconia back to their homes. This time, when I was placed in a lying position with my head lower than my feet, I did not experience such extreme spinning. I was dizzy but much less so. The NP prescribed yet another round of antibiotics (1000 mg augmentin 2 x a day, sheesh!) and some powdered antibiotic to put in my ear with a bulb syringe twice a day. I cried when she vacuumed out my ear. It hurt like hell. I felt small and cold in that exam room. At one point she put drops in my ear to loosen dried debris in the canal. I was spinning again. I was Meghan as a 10 year old, ear aching, waiting waiting for the doctor to come back and finish the job. As I sat there, I imagined S. taking off and heading for Ohio. My ear ached and I ached for her. I thought of her hand caressing my back as we did those exercises. She takes such good care of me, and never complains. All these years, all my health problems and still she loves me.It's one week later. I can type and write (obviously) but I pay a price. When I look up from this screen, I have to blink two, three times before the room comes into focus. When I get up to get some water, it feels like I am on a dock and a boat has just passed by...the waves from its wake make the dock move and sway, and I can't get off the dock, can't move to more stable ground. I still cannot drive a car. I can't walk my dog, can't (shouldn't) bend at the waist, tie my shoes, do laundry.I tire easily, moreso than I'd ever imagined. And I eat. Oh do I eat.During the day I'm okay, but at night I become a monster. I'll eat little during the day and then my body gets pissy...I'm barely hungry most of the time, and the motion sickness makes nothing sound good and it's been so hot here; on Sunday my neighbor took me to the grocery and on the way home, as I was eating through a whole pint of raspberries, I realized that all I'd had to eat that day was an english muffin. It was almost 7 pm. I'd bought mostly perishables at the grocery but I'd also bought ice cream and sorbet. Dove Mint Chip, Ben & Jerry's Strawberry Cheesecake, lemon sorbet. I didn't care anymore. I just wanted something sweet and cool and though I knew that eating all that fat would make my subconscious get out the whip and start in on the self-flagellation, I didn't possess the strength or will power to stop it. All I wanted was to feel steady on my feet again. All I wanted was to be able to work out again, pick up my house, get out of bed without falling right back into it. Literally.Nevermind work. I am trying to keep up but it's hard. By the time I push through writing this email, I will have blown my wad and will have to go lie down for a spell. I'm still not driving. It scares the shit out of me to imagine myself having to react quickly to some stupid ass driver doing some stupid ass thing like cutting me off and in turning my head quickly I find myself unable to focus on the steering wheel because it's now three, four steering wheels. I can't take the risk.S. returns tomorrow. I am so very thankful. Having fallen into quite a depression these past few days, I need some love, some hope. Because I walk slowly, gingerly, and my vision often splits, every time I'm up I feel like a gargantuan fat blob lumbering along. I actually tried to take a walk yesterday and it was comical. But not. It wore me out. My brain is working overtime, trying in vain to convince my body that it's really rightside up, that I'm not supposed to see the curtains at an angle. I am nauseated as I write this but I don't care. I want my balance back. I'm afraid of losing my job. The doctor's prognosis might have been right: I'm only 12 days into this, 12 days since I woke that morning and the world was vibrating, moving in ways it should not. I've learned the BPPV isn't that uncommon, and I've taken comfort in talking with a couple of people who've had it and who say "people don't understand...unless it's happened to them, they just don't get it." It's true. It's hard to comprehend what it's like to be so immobile, so dependent on others, such a prisoner in your home. I tried to go back to work yesterday and lasted only two and 1/2 hours. There are words that describe what I feel, but they are only words: useless, angry, frustrated, grossly obese, scared, totally and completely freaked out.I know I can't see anything clearly through this dizzy lens. I can only pray that my body has enough strength to heal itself. I see the ENT again this Friday morning. Please let the fungal infection be gone. Please let her be kind and compassionate and let her tell me that I am, indeed, getting better, even if I feel like every day I wake up to dizziness is another chapter in a very long and awful book that has somehow become my life. Let me be able to exercise again before I gain back all the weight I just lost and then some. Please please please.

I've felt awful for suddenly diasppearing from the ROARS thread but I've had little to say and little energy and who wants to log on to WW and talk about the pints of ice cream in her freezer? About her long hours of nothingness? Not I. Bad karma, that.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I don't think I'm using the word karma properly, but ah well. I will take liberties where I can, since I'm not exactly running on all cylinders and I've reached such a point of heavy sign resignation that exactitude is not a concern. Just let me get through this day without falling against something, or feeling like I'm about to upchuck at any moment.

And that, as Paul Harvey would say, is the rest of the
story.

some other moves - far more fun than it looks

I had another run-in with a the hula-hoop. This one went longer. Not the best thing (and yet, the best thing) for a slight hangover.

getting my moves on

It starts getting light out a little before 5am now. I find this wondrous. I also find it inspiring, like I can't wait to get out and ride to work. Lately, I've divided my riding thusly: ride in resembles work-out-- I push myself and try to feel the burn. Ride home resembles good old-fashioned transportation-- I keep my wits about me and use what energy I have left to keep up a steady pace and get to mi casita. I know that over the past few months of riding, my speed has picked up and my sense of exertion has changed. It's really kind of miraculous what repeated exercise can do for the body.

A couple days ago a friend came over. She hadn't seen me in a few months. She was blown away at how I looked and she said "From Cycling?" and I just nodded and added "and cooking for a living." And then I had to add that I really haven't lost any (other than a pound or something) weight since we last met. I did this for myself, to reinforce that the numbers are not the only reality. And they're not.

Ideally, I'd feel better than I do right now. I'm a bit tired and run-down from working so hard. I'm trying to focus on better nutrition, on more rest, on taking a moment in the sun to recharge the solar aspect of my battery. I know I can do that.

The exercise, it's a constant. It has to be. I've been lucky enough to be able to maintain it, and it's become routine. And wondrous. I know I have a tendency to forget, to let it go, to let it slide. So I'm tying and imaginary knot around my pinky so I'll remember.

it's gagalicious

If you ever want to get over your undying and potentially (for me at least) dangerous love of Tortilla Chips, just wrap your mouth around a few of these seachips.
I won't describe them, other than to say, uh, well, not flavorless-- more like, flavorgag, or ever wonder what the ocean floor might taste like? try one of these!

They proudly boast no salt. They need salt. In fact, I could see the whole sea vegetable with tortilla chip thing working a whole lot better with the addition of sea salt.

I'm serious. I've given these a few tries, and each time I feel myself moving further and further away from my love of corn chips. I know that might be a good thing, but I feel resistance. Anger, even. And yet, if you really wanted a kind of corn chip aversion therapy, this might be just the product.