Act Naturally

I finally feel like now is the time for me to take hold of my health.  After being just ridiculously ill for two weeks, I find that it is quite depressing to not even have your health.  You know what they say: “You ain’t got nothin’ if you ain’t got your health.”  I began to slip into the depressed mindset while cooped up in my hospital room that it really felt like I had very little at that point.  This resulted in an emotional breakdown on the day I returned home to Los Alamos.  Now, I have a wonderful, adoring husband, one all-too-cute cat, a job (which is more than I can say for a lot of Americans right now), and an a-okay apartment.  However, upon returning home from the hospital, I felt my health had gone to the dogs and I wasn’t happy in my home.  Nothing about my life was beautiful to me that day.

Now I can reflect and say that I had every right to be fully emotional, as I had been through quite an ordeal.  At one point, my mom told me she really felt like she was watching me die.  I am sure she was overexaggerating, but it astonished me to imagine my own mother thought I could be dying in that hospital.  I have ruminated over my mother’s concern, and cannot make much sense of it, except that she is a world-class worrier.  I mentioned this to my husband a few days later, and he begrudgingly admitted that he had worried along the same lines.  Indeed, I had lost the ability to eat or drink within the first days of illness, and had to be connected to a saline intravenous solution for many days in order to introduce basic sustainance to my body.  There were some really bad days.  The worst were the nights when the nurse took over an hour to bring me pain medications, and the day I had to be saved by a very strong nurse’s assistant from falling in the bathroom after a drug-induced near-pass-out in the shower.  The whole thing scared me sometimes, too, but I never felt as though I was dying.

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