A Day of Dim Views

There are three hours of my life today that I can't remember. Not because I was asleep, or drunk, or stoned, but because I was knocked unconscious. My blood vessels contracted and cut off blood flow to the left side of my brain and that caused me to fall and hit my face on my coffee table. I don't know exactly what happened or I would tell you, but the smack to the face erased it from my mind.

Sure, I have a chronic illness, but I don't want your sympathy for it. I'm just frustrated, and I need to put it in writing. My brain loses blood, I lose the ability to speak and move the right side of my body, and I get helpless. Obviously, no one wants to feel that way. When it happens (and I'm awake for it) I get to lie on the floor and try to find a way to get to my phone with my good arm and call for help. Most people jokingly say that they can't live without their cell phones, but in my case it's a harsh reality. I used to have one of those medic alert buttons. You remember the commercials with the little old lady saying, "I've fallen and I can't get up." That was me, only I'm in my twenties and I felt like a fool having to wear a call button around my neck twenty-four hours a day.

At my age, dependency on anyone but myself is painful. Having to sit on the couch and watch my mother clean my house because I can't hurts me. Most people think something like that would be awesome, but when you have no other choice, when you have to be a burden on your family, it gets to be really hard. I can't really trust my body to do what it's supposed to. I don't think that I'll ever be able to live without prescription medications, and the thing that really gets me about the pills is that even though I swallow a handful of them twice a day it only makes things manageable, not better.

I know I'm not the only one living through something like this. I wish that I was, because it sucks. On the other hand, I wish I had someone who knew exactly what it was like that I could talk to. It feels like those are the two halves of me, left and right, always in opposition. The half that works and the half that doesn't. And, in spite of all my deep wells of frustration and flashes of hopelessness, I remain an optimist. This is the worst thing that's happened to me so far. Three hours of unintentional napping. I have survived falling down numerous flights of stairs, in the shower and bath tub, outside, in narrow hallways and holding boiling pots of liquid, and I've come through it all unscathed. There must be something that I'm doing right if this is the first major injury in all these years.

I will be here, attempting to write each day, sick or not, and I promise: I will try to keep it more sunshine than rain.