The face of mental/physical/emotional exhaustion.
As is no doubt wholly apparent from my regularly posting about the situation, I hate my life.
Since around 2010, my life has been an endless odyssey of one form of medical misery or another and I have weathered all of it, with the unexpected benefit of it allowing me a lot of time for introspection and deep examination of my life and the elements of it that made me who I am, both for better and for worse at different points in my development. We're talking a couple of stent surgeries, followed by years of suffering through the torment that is chronic atopic dermatitis of a severity that shocked even international dermatological specialists, becoming a guinea pig for the miracle drug Dupixent (which cleared up my atopic dermatitis and saw me becoming the poster boy for its initial success). Then came finding out that my kidney function was almost nil, so I had to get a fistula surgically created in my left forearm so I could begin ongoing dialysis treatments, and that first year of adjusting to the rigors of dialysis being a study in learning to handle excruciating pain and the process's resulting near-complete lack of energy and occasional ancillary insomnia. Up next came the esophageal condition that caused my airway to sometimes close off so I would be unable to breathe for about one or two minutes at a time (which was terrifying until I remembered how to hold my breath from swimming), along with near-ceaseless hiccup-adjacent spasms that could be quelled by multiple rounds of my "water trick" every day. And don't get me started on last August's cardiac bypass surgery. Oh, and my recent viral infection that saw me hospitalized sick as a dog, with my system in toxic shock that resulted in all of the skin on my body shedding like a snake and subsequently regenerating, albeit a tad more leathery.
All of that galloping horse shit was a lot to deal with on its own, but then my mother ended up in a near-fatal car accident that put her into a coma for a while — I hope to someday be able to erase from my memory the sight of her laying there, un-moving and silent, intubated, and looking utterly helpless — followed by her pulling through that only to be diagnosed with cancer in both lungs at the age of 85. Over the next several years I watched helplessly as her advanced age and illness caused her once mighty force of nature to fizzle out like a damp squib, which was only worsened by her surviving a minor stroke that further robbed her of her sharp mental acuity. And while I did what I could to be of help and comfort to her, I was trapped in the prison sentence of my own medical nightmares, and I could only be in Westport when my medical schedule and diminished physical stamina would allow, which forced me to leave the lion's sharp of being my mother's helpmate to the stalwart soul that is Roger, without whom neither of us could have weathered things through to the end in anything resembling an organized manner. Then Mildred left us and the sale of the house and disposal of its contents came next, which I traveled to Westport to deal with on weekends as best I could, with the aid of Roger, Kathleen, Daisy, and a legion of caring souls whose presence and help saved my fracturing sanity.
It is now roughly four months since my mother's demise and my own medical miseries persist, coupled with the fact that my main hospital, Mount Sinai, no longer accepts my insurance due to contract negotiations with my insurance provider going sour. Truth be told, I've been breaking under all of this and have yet to get new insurance, but I am getting myself together enough to resume taking care of business and I aim to spend most of Thursday on the phone with Mount Sinai, looking into continuance of service, considering that I am a patient with chronic kidney disease and have been on the State's waiting list for a kidney transplant for going on six years.
None of this is in any way uplifting, and compounding all of it is the fact that many of my dear friends live elsewhere and/or they have schedules that do not allow for any or much interaction, which would be contingent upon how much energy I can muster to socialize after another week on dialysis.
In short, my life sucks. That's why I go to Tea and Sympathy as often as I do. Its cozy interior evokes a hominess that I have not felt since I was very young, and its roster of delicious food and tea serve as a great source of comfort when there is little of that elsewhere in my day-to-day existence. When I am there I am reminded of what it feels like to be a living, functioning human being, rather than the ambulatory husk that hauls itself to dialysis or any number of other medical or hospital-related can't-miss appointments. My times of seeing and being with my friends are tragically few, and when I do get time with them, it is invariably over far too soon.
And having said all of that, it's back to the center in but a few hours, and I. can tell you with full candor that I would rather be anywhere else instead. Someday all of this misery will blessedly be over and done with, but the ongoing nature of it that I experience daily is downright Sysyphian. In a past life I must have sinned like a motherfucker, because the ancient Greeks had it right. Tartarus is real. I know. I fucking live there.
