Month: June 2022

Snail-Mode

My Trusty Pack-horse by Rita de Heer (Day 12 of #Inktober 2021)

Yesterday, in snail-mode, I struggled to get out of the house, onto some transport — bus, train, cab, car-share. All coming with timetables, places to catch, and the last one impenetrably with a forgettable password and a pin. No-one else I know has trouble signing up to Uber!

When my eyes and mind are greedy, I start making promises to come here and there, this event that meet-up. I have great intentions. But, physically — 15 months post-chemo — I’m capable of about half of what I sign up for.

So, yesterday. Snail-mode is when I’m slow. Though it was a lovely day outside, sun shining with a nippy little breeze in the shade, I signed off on the event. Did not catch any of the above transport. Did not visit, nor explore further, my favorite building in Brisbane. Emailed the organizer my abject apologies.

And so, since the sun still beckoned me outside, and I didn’t want to dwell on the cop-out — what it felt like — I loaded my trusty pack-horse with my three-week-overdue books, pushed it to the Stones Corner Public Library. A good walk of four kilometres. The sun a benison.

No Cure for Being Human, by Kate Bowler, 2021, Penguin Random House, one of my new borrows, is the most amazingly appropriate book for how I was feeling.

In Health and in Sickness

These almost-gone tulips startled me with their sere beauty. A good metaphor for how I feel sometimes … almost-gone; learning to love myself in better times and worse.

The previous couple of weeks or three I sat around with a cold, fatigue, a heart scare, more fatigue. Knitting was it while I was forced to sit around. Fatigue is a thing to be borne. There’s no hurrying it. It can be calculated. Six days of sickness, 12 days of fatigue.

In between all that, I spent the day in an Emergency Department to have my heart checked. Which meant blood tests and an ultrasound on my legs to check for blood clots. Nothing eventuated. It was just a scare, that’s all, I was told. These are the kind of diagnoses meant to comfort a patient.

This patient went home, not forgetting to ask for a copy of the the blood tests. Getting that was the best part of the day. The blood results confirmed to me that my continuing semi-isolation is in a good cause. My white blood cells are still well below what’s needed to fight off disease, platelets also very low, and red blood cells only just dragging themselves into the average range.