Confinment

Not much blogging, but tending to illness, has taken up these recent days. After thinking I escaped the virus that got John for a month, I began to feel incredibly achy and within a couple of days was coughing and had the roster of symptoms.

However then I began to labor with breathing at night which provoked John to get me to a doctor and that led to the realization that I had a low oxygen level and warnings from the doctor about how serious this is. Now I have a machine, a nebulizer, which makes steam and disperses a drug called albuterol into my lungs when I breath. I get to do this every 4 hours. It is called a bronchial dilator. And some prednisone for reducing lung inflamation. And a little gadget that measures my oxygen blood level overnight. And instructions to take my blood pressure every day.

It is a fairly traumatic transition from feeling that I am a very healthy strong woman to a sickly one who is dependent on a whole bunch of meds and equipment to stay safe.

It is also embarassing. I am ashamed of being sick. I am ashamed of being seen as a sick old woman. Just being an old woman is shameful enough.

Why is that? Age, as we know, is what you get when you don't die. So it seems it would be a positive thing.

And the words that come to my mind in association with illness are: dependent, boring, needy, no longer relevant, and so on.

Wow. This is severe.

And yet when I think of Flannery O'Connor, I think of a brilliant, relevant, interesting, strong and relatively independent woman. And she was very ill most all of her brief 11 years of adult life.
As I continue to work on my book, I think of her often and say to myself that this is how she felt in her best days and yet every day she kept writing and she has a whole catalogue of work to show for it.

So my task for today is to forgive myself for being ill and accept its limitations without making critical judgements. That sounds right to me. And write what I can.