Good Days : Bad Days
It’s weird — some days I’m completely fine, nearly normal. Other days are awful — and often with no discernible explanation. Yesterday was one of those days. It was one of those nights where I did not want to go to sleep for fear that I would not wake up. It’s an odd feeling, that lack of confidence in your body to carry you through the night. But here I am.
On those days, I’m in my sick guy persona — or worse, dead man persona. Jeff the Zombie. The walking dead — it’s hard to get out of that depression, but it happens. Yesterday was also one of those days where acquaintances want to talk to you about how you’re doing, but when you tell them — honestly tell them — they recoil, as if you really are a brain-eating monster. Some people just want to hear good news –I’m just fine! Hoo-haa! — but is that really the right thing to do? To lie?
When you tell them the truth, they want to get the fuck out of the room. Jesus Christ, there’s a brain-eating meat bag in here! Run for the hills!
Some days I do lie. “I’m just feeling tired,” I say, when I’m not tired at all, but experiencing the weird feeling I get when I’m aware that my heart isn’t beating right. Lying makes people happy, though. Good for you! Keep up the good work. You’ll be fine in no time.
But will I be “fine” in no time? Really? Will my heart, which was born broken, suddenly fix itself? Not a chance.
I recently told an old friend of mine what was going on — the email I got back was about as impersonal as anything a complete stranger has said to me since finding out about my cardiomyopathy. Seriously, it could have come from American Greetings, it was so canned. I suspect he may have pulled it off of a “Miss Manners”-style article: “How to respond when an old friend tells you that they’re going to die.” The tone basically turns you into an object — written off, undead, not at all normal or human. It’s like you’re already dead and this person — this former best friend — is talking to your animated corpse, and not a living breathing human being who just happens to be sick. Sorry if you don’t like the smell of leaking guts, man.
The thing that I’m learning is that sick people, dying people, are human beings. There’s more to their lives than just their disease, but so many people around them want to put them in that box. We struggle for it not to be that way — we try as hard as we can to live as normally as we can. I treat my disease as an inconvenience, not a defining personal characteristic. Even less so now, after it because clear to me what was wrong and what the ultimate prognosis was.
Ask them about their families, the weather, the economy. Dying really is a very mundane way of life, especially the slow-motion death march of cardiomyopathy. Someone pointed a gun at me and pulled the trigger — there’s a bullet creeping through time and space and headed straight for my heart. This bullet was probably launched the day sperm met egg and mitosis began. But there’s no way for me to dodge it or take cover — it’s going to hit me some day, but I just don’t know when that day is. And if I end up by some miracle getting a heart transplant, then another slow motion bullet will be launched, this time from within my own body — a bullet called rejection.
And as much as it seems like I care about the bullet, I really don’t. Do you worry about the external forces that can take you down? The possibility of cancer, or heart attack, asbestos poisoning, the impending doom of old age, a car wreck? I’m tired of being defined by the bullet. I’d rather talk about what happened on Lost last week or Battlestar Galactica’s finale.
Uncategorized | jeff | 06 March 2009 |
