Three needles in my left arm deliver the immunoglobulins that I don’t make on my own. They used to come in little glass vials, which I loved because they were old-timey. Now, they come in big plastic syringes packed in more plastic with stoppers and plungers that are all plastic. Plastic is too much with us, and we’re moving toward it rather than away from it. Ah! But fungi can eat ocean plastic! Problem solved. Make more plastic. Empty barges full of it right into the water. Set off in your boat full of sachet packaging and throw it all overboard. No worries. The fungi got you. They got you.
It’s overcast today, windy. My neighbor’s roof vent is clanking every few seconds, its head spinning indecorously. Someone is backing up as evidenced by their truck making two discordant beeping sounds in the round. mleh MLEH mleh MLEH mleh MLEH. I want to walk through the world sounding like that, letting people know how I really feel. MLEH fucking MLEH MLEH mleh MLEH. I think I might already be doing that. I wonder what wild animals think of those sounds and if they’re as irritated by them as humans are or at least as this human is.
I’m looking at something round on my desk, now something octagonal, now something rectangular. I like the shapes of things and how they morph into shapes that aren’t tidy and that don’t have a name and that require calculus for analysis. I used to be able to do that. I could find the area of an irregular shape. I could rotate and translate shapes. I loved it because I loved my calculus teacher, who’s dead now: Lenny Gibson. He invented the abbreviation HK for who cares. I say that to this day. I give no shits about people understanding the reference. Mr. Gibson was a lot like the comedian Steven Wright. Who’s Steven Wright, you ask? HK, you’re probably thinking.
What’s the equation for loss, for memory, for a circle turned into a gaping mouth turned into a nightmare or a crime scene or a missing person report or an AWOL marriage? What’s the equation for who gets an immune system and who doesn’t? For who receives whatever’s being backed into their driveway? For who has a driveway? For who gets to keep existing.
Where’s the equation for dead water and dead forests and dead humans. I mean living humans who are effectively dead, who want death, who would come up with an abbreviation for killing everything in sight and say it proudly. Something that goes beyond WWG1WGA or 14 Words. Something unthinkable, unimaginable, until it’s seen and heard and cannot thereafter be unthought or unimagined.
Several alarming news stories have run in The Salt Lake Tribune over the past several days. They all have ties to Utah and involve children. Each story is horrific on its own, but together, they’re overwhelming. I cried most of yesterday morning. It was too difficult to process this news, especially given what’s happened and appears to still be happening in [REDACTED], so I engaged in several forms of avoidance, including employing maladaptive coping skills that threw my metabolism off and undercut the work I’ve done following a ketogenic diet for mental health, doing intermittent fasting, exercising, getting the right nutrients, and maintaining healthy biomarkers.
I’m writing about this because I can see how something that’s upsetting can cause someone (in this case me) to do one thing that throws something off, which in turn throws something else off, which in turn throws something else off. Then maybe more bad decision-making gets thrown into the mix as things start to slip, and pretty soon a little movement in the ground turns into a mudslide that swallows an entire house, trees, retaining walls, and more.
Yes, the upsetting thing is upsetting, but the behaviors that follow and aggregate are what drive the mind and body into a state of disequilibrium that prevents a person (still me) from finding ways to sit with and work through what’s upsetting to whatever extend they (again, me) are able to.
Here’s what went down yesterday. Upset about the news stories, I developed a sudden craving for brownies. It was an all-encompassing desire. I went to Lin’s, where they sell Num Bars, which are ketogenic. They didn’t have them. (Turns out, the Utah-based company went out of business.) In my desperation, I got no-bake chocolate cookies instead. (This is when the whole ageism incident happened with the cashier, which added to my distress.)
I came home and ate the whole container of cookies, thereby consuming four times my typical amount of carbs, and none of those carbs were good ones. My body can’t tolerate carbs anywhere north of 50 net grams per day. (I have data from my cardiologist and endocrinologist that supports this assertion. It’s not just a thing I’m saying to be dramatic.)
The rest of the day, I made terrible choices or simply didn’t do what I should have done for my health. I failed to take my supplements. I didn’t drink water. I didn’t do my intermittent fast. I didn’t eat enough protein or, really, anything healthy for the rest of the day. I didn’t lift weights, something I do regularly for my metabolic health. I didn’t exercise. I didn’t meditate. I wasn’t mindful.
In short, one bad choice became more than one dozen bad choices.
Here’s the thing: I was terrified of having nightmares last night based on those news stories. I’ve already had several nightmares involving my family in the past couple of weeks, one of which was incredibly difficult to process. So I sabotaged my sleep before I even went to bed. I’m not surprised that I woke up at 3:46 a.m. this morning and had trouble falling asleep again or that my sleep was especially restless according to my Fitbit or that my sleep score was ten points lower than usual.
What I am surprised about is how difficult recovering is for me. I have a seven-day intervention I do when I need to really focus on my metabolic health. I told myself I’d start that intervention today. I didn’t. Instead, I stayed in bed most of the day. I just now made my way to my computer. My food choices today aren’t great but they aren’t stellar, either. My digestion is hosed, again, just after I got it back on track. I haven’t exercised. It was a struggle just to get dressed, to make the bed, and to make my way to the living room, where I stopped for a long while and watched reruns of “The Conners” as I mustered the strength to get to my computer. I haven’t bathed. My hair is weird. I didn’t even have it in me to put on lotion.
And it’s cold and the days are short, which makes getting on track that much harder.
This all illustrates how a single genuinely upsetting thing can lead to a systemic issue and why it’s so important that we recognize these kinds of patterns. I know I’ve been talking about me, but I’m not the only one who experiences this kind of domino effect under stress. Many of us do, perhaps most of us.
Right now, I’m trying to do things that will help my body recover. I’m starting with water. That seems doable. Then I have to process these stories about children without doing more harm to myself. I don’t know how to do that. Process the stories, I mean. How does one come to terms with the kinds of things discussed in this type of reporting, things happening here in Utah, across the country, and around the world? I want all living beings to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, but we’re often the cause, and children should never suffer the way too many of us make them suffer.
Several alarming news stories have run in The Salt Lake Tribune over the past several days. They all have ties to Utah and involve children. I can’t be more specific without being censored by Facebook. Two of the stories are linked in my feed if people want to read them. There’s a paywall, but you can get an idea of the subject matter by reading the parts of the stories that are visible.
Each story is horrific on its own, but together, they’re overwhelming. I cried most of yesterday morning. It was too difficult to process this news, especially given what’s happened and appears to still be happening in my own family, so I engaged in several forms of avoidance, including employing maladaptive coping skills that threw my metabolism off and undercut the work I’ve done following a ketogenic diet for mental health, doing intermittent fasting, exercising, getting the right nutrients, and maintaining healthy biomarkers.
I’m writing about this because I can see how something that’s upsetting can cause someone (in this case me) to do one thing that throws something off, which in turn throws something else off, which in turn throws something else off. Then maybe more bad decision-making gets thrown into the mix as things start to slip, and pretty soon a little movement in the ground turns into a mudslide that swallows an entire house, trees, retaining walls, and more.
Yes, the upsetting thing is upsetting, but the behaviors that follow and aggregate are what drive the mind and body into a state of disequilibrium that prevents a person (still me) from finding ways to sit with and work through what’s upsetting to whatever extend they (again, me) are able to.
Here’s what went down yesterday. Upset about the news stories, I developed a sudden craving for brownies. It was an all-encompassing desire. I went to Lin’s, where they sell Num Bars, which are ketogenic. They didn’t have them. (Turns out, the Utah-based company went out of business.) In my desperation, I got no-bake chocolate cookies instead. (This is when the whole ageism incident happened with the cashier, which added to my distress.)
I came home and ate the whole container of cookies, thereby consuming four times my typical amount of carbs, and none of those carbs were good ones. My body can’t tolerate carbs anywhere north of 50 net grams per day. (I have data from my cardiologist and endocrinologist that supports this assertion. It’s not just a thing I’m saying to be dramatic.)
The rest of the day, I made terrible choices or simply didn’t do what I should have done for my health. I failed to take my supplements. I didn’t drink water. I didn’t do my intermittent fast. I didn’t eat enough protein or, really, anything healthy for the rest of the day. I didn’t lift weights, something I do regularly for my metabolic health. I didn’t exercise. I didn’t meditate. I wasn’t mindful.
In short, one bad choice became more than one dozen bad choices.
Here’s the thing: I was terrified of having nightmares last night based on those news stories. I’ve already had several nightmares involving my family in the past couple of weeks, one of which was incredibly difficult to process. So I sabotaged my sleep before I even went to bed. I’m not surprised that I woke up at 3:46 a.m. this morning and had trouble falling asleep again or that my sleep was especially restless according to my Fitbit or that my sleep score was ten points lower than usual.
What I am surprised about is how difficult recovering is for me. I have a seven-day intervention I do when I need to really focus on my metabolic health. I told myself I’d start that intervention today. I didn’t. Instead, I stayed in bed most of the day. I just now made my way to my computer. My food choices today aren’t great but they aren’t stellar, either. My digestion is hosed, again, just after I got it back on track. I haven’t exercised. It was a struggle just to get dressed, to make the bed, and to make my way to the living room, where I stopped for a long while and watched reruns of “The Conners” as I mustered the strength to get to my computer. I haven’t bathed. My hair is weird. I didn’t even have it in me to put on lotion.
And it’s cold and the days are short, which makes getting on track that much harder.
This all illustrates how a single genuinely upsetting thing can lead to a systemic issue and why it’s so important that we recognize these kinds of patterns. I know I’ve been talking about me, but I’m not the only one who experiences this kind of domino effect under stress. Many of us do, perhaps most of us.
Right now, I’m trying to do things that will help my body recover. I’m starting with water. That seems doable. Then I have to process these stories about children without doing more harm to myself. I don’t know how to do that. Process the stories, I mean. How does one come to terms with the kinds of things discussed in this type of reporting, things happening here in Utah, across the country, and around the world? I want all living beings to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering, but we’re often the cause, and children should never suffer the way too many of us make them suffer.
Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Our water purifier started making a high-pitched noise a few minutes ago, a steady ewwww like a piece of industrial equipment humming in the distance, at once piercingly but almost inaudibly. I unplugged it, but the sound made me hyperfocused on my tinnitus, so now I’m just a body that screeches and won’t stop.
I took some sleep medicine, something I rarely do. As I wait for it to kick in, night thoughts do their dark work. I don’t ruminate about minor issues like some folks. My waking nightmares are about my father, my family, Oklahoma, me, the ways in which I’ve been purged, and the things I feel like I need to purge that find me at night when I’m closer to my personal unconscious and the collective unconscious than I am during the day.
I had an unthinkable thought that was immediately ushered by my circuitry to every central and distal part of my body. My feet. My hands. My tongue. My scalp. My shoulders. My gut.
What if, I thought. What if it’s true?
This particular thought is a hard one to put on a shelf until I can process it in the light of day. The “what if” feels less like a possibility than a haunting, a visitation declaring what the world is and who I am in it. I don’t like either. I hope I’m seeing an old lady that’s really an owl, like in one of those optical illusions.
The unconscious realms are beautiful and terrifying. I’d prefer a different ratio of beauty to terror right now. I’d rather experience both while asleep, not while sitting in bed awake, my warm dog pressed up against my calf doing what I can’t do: slumber. I feel her breath on my foot. I feel her chest rise and fall. I feel how soft and small and fragile she is. I feel how much I love her and how much I don’t want to be a monster in a monstrous world.
Awake is my least favorite word when I don’t want to be. Terror is my second least favorite. Monster is my third least favorite. To be an awake, terrified monster inside of what is monstrous is nothing I’d wish on anyone.
The house has been doused with gasoline. (You’re welcome in it.) The floor of the house is littered with matches. (Take your shoes off.) The house has no fire alarms. (Have a seat.) The cops don’t respond to house fires in these parts. (Kick your feet up.) The house is on fire now. (Be a love and close the door to save the rest of us.) The house burned down. (We wrote you a loving obituary.)
The loving obituary: We adored them. For some reason, they always looked uncomfortable around us. We did everything we could to make them feel right at home. They died before their time. Sometimes, [insert adjective here] people aren’t meant for this world. We will always remember them fondly.
—
I wrote this July 12, 2023. It’s about how we treat people we want to exclude while they’re alive versus how we talk about them once they’ve died. I was thinking specifically about how queer folks and those living with trauma and/or mental health issues are treated—and the ways in which the very people who exclude those folks from their homes, lives, families, schools, workplaces, places of worship, communities, and societies take no responsibility for their eventual, often untimely, deaths. There wasn’t anything we could have done is a common refrain. Really? Nothing. Not one thing?
I was also thinking about how it felt for me to live as a queer non-Mormon person with trauma and mental health issues here in Southern Utah, where I was routinely excluded and reviled even in literary communities. The poets who run two separate chapters of the Utah State Poetry Society told me they’d close their chapters down if I ever attended them because my work was inappropriate. I was a member of the USPS at the time and had every right to attend any chapter meeting in the state. Their issue was with my gender and sexuality, not my writing, which they hadn’t read.
I’ve thought about this post a few times since the election, so I decided to share it again. We need to bring the way we talk about the dead and the way we treat the living into alignment.
Love yourself. Love your body. Trust yourself. Trust your body.
Put yourself in the world and know that you belong there. The world is bigger than people with power.
Find the exits. Know the exit routes. Plan your exit. Then enter.
See clearly, even what you don’t want to see. Bear witness. Take notes. Synthesize. Learn. Speak. Sing. Recite. Remember.
Write more poems. Stronger this time, more sure-handed, until metal strikes against metal.
Pay attention but do not seek attention. Turn your attention into a Mobuis strip that moves inward, then outward, then inward again with no beginning and no end.
Read people’s bodies more than their words, unless they’re poets, then read their bodies and words together.
Call bullshit bullshit unless it’s meant to be bullshit, then let it be what it is without calling it out. We need a little bullshit, now more than ever.
Read poems. Learn to move in and out of their white space. Listen and respond, listen and respond. Breathe through the lines. Inhale poems, exhale poems.
Believe in poems and their power. Don’t give up on poems.
Write more poems. Softer this time. Less heavy-handed, until the weft of each poem is as strong as churro wool.
Fawn if needed for survival but only for survival. Try not to freeze or flee. Remove the “r” from fright and fight if that’s the only available option.
Be ready to run. If needed, run. But circle back. Never leave. Draw an arc around the threat from a safe distance. Make that arc smaller every day. Remember: You belong.
Know when you’re with someone who’s hostile. Know that anyone can be hostile.
Be hostile if needed. Be loving as much as possible.
If you don’t write poems, instead do whatever you love, whatever keeps you alive.
Today, my primary care doctor opened my appointment by telling me that he believes I’m a hypochondriac. I’ve survived and/or live with multiple illnesses, including cancer. I live with more than one rare disease, including common variable immunodeficiency, which is serious and life-threatening. I have autoimmune diseases, renal insufficiency, postural orthostatic tachycardia, and arrhythmias. I’ve been treated for atrial fibrillation. I have aortic root and ascending aortic dilations. And I have PTSD and serious, life-threatening, bipolar.
All of this is documented in my medical record at Intermountain, where my primary care doctor works. It’s not in my head. It’s not me imagining health issues that don’t exist. They exist, and I’m attempting to address them. I worked as a medical writer and editor at some of the best institutions in the country for years. When I get a diagnosis or face a health challenge, I do research and have the determination to address the situation however I can.
Today, I was asking about my fasting blood glucose being over 100 for the past two years. That’s diagnostic for prediabetes, but none of my doctors brought the high results to my attention. High blood sugar seems like something I should be able to discuss without being called a hypochondriac. It’s especially important given that my chances of developing diabetes are 3 to 4 times higher because I have bipolar disorder.
I was also at the appointment to discuss my BUN level and (BUN/creatinine ratio). My BUN has doubled in the past 5 months and is above the normal range. Perhaps that’s not an issue, but given my history of renal insufficiency and the fact that lithium, which I started taking at a higher dose 5 months ago, causes kidney disease in about 26 percent of patients, the higher BUN level seems like a valid issue to raise.
Healthcare systems don’t seem to welcome the type of patient I am—one who’s female, has chronic health issues, and has a mental health diagnosis. We wait years or decades before our issues are taken seriously and addressed. By that time, we often have medical trauma because of how the healthcare system has treated us or our conditions have progressed, often irreversibly, because we were gaslit into thinking it must all be in our heads, a point our doctors belabor.
If I can’t approach my doctor for routine care, explanation of test results, or to discuss a health concern—the very things primary care providers are supposed to do with their patients—without the entire encounter being dismissed as evidence of a mental health problem, then why am I even trying so hard.
This isn’t the first time this has happened here in Southern Utah. Another doctor at Intermountain denied the fact that I had atrial fibrillation despite a preponderance of evidence that I had the condition. I was denied the medication I needed because of his insistence that I didn’t have afib. Yet another doctor at Intermountain tried to tell me my diagnosis of common variable immunodeficiency was unfounded despite the fact that I have extensive documentation of that disease from accomplished immunologists who know how to diagnose and treat immune system dysregulation.
I’m tired. I’m tired of this treatment. I’m tired of this sexism, this ableism, this dehumanization. I’m just tired. These attitudes and behaviors on the part of doctors cause unnecessary and severe iatrogenic illness for those of us who are subjected to them. I can’t carry that burden on top of my actual health and mental health issues. I’m tired.
So I’m ill again. The usual with a side of falling to the floor hard this evening when my lower extremities tightened and everything from my toes all the way to the middle of my thighs contorted until I looked like something with gnarled roots—maybe Donne’s mandrake—that had been unearthed and hosed off before being tossed to the ground until it could be transplanted elsewhere or fed to the wood chipper or cut into little slices as part of a fiber-filled culinary adventure.
I mean, I know I’m not fibrous. I’m meat and bone. But I’m doing an extended tree metaphor thing here, so just let me be fibrous for the purposes of this essay.
My floor routine went on for several excruciating minutes and I couldn’t get my legs under me and I couldn’t pull my legs and feet and toes back into their proper shapes and relationships with each other and I couldn’t massage the tension away and the pain was like someone had exposed me to a nerve toxin and I couldn’t reach my phone to call my husband for help and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because he’d misplaced his phone and so I had to scream as loud as I could and don’t worry the neighbors never come when I do that and my husband burst into the room and found me splayed and broken like a cow that’s about to be scooped up from the fecal mud and dropped onto a truck headed for the rendering plant because she’s too sick to walk herself to her own death like all respectable—all good—girls should, even ones with spongiform encephalopathy.
I’m just working the cow metaphor with that encephalopathy reference. Don’t worry, I don’t have mad cow disease. My diseases have other names, and so far at least one has eluded naming. That disease is all experience, the way Hellen Keller’s whole world was before water ran over her fingers and forever changed the way her body and mind met the world.
Reuven Tsur talks about Keller in his theory of cognitive poetics. I’m not making baseless statements about her just to illustrate my point, so please don’t get all, You’re being ableist and using Hellen Keller to do your dirty ableist work, Karen. The name’s Dana, and I’m trying to tell you how bodies break and how we live in them anyway. I’m trying to tell you I took a little spill. I’m trying to put that spill in a larger context that some of you may find important. Bear with me. Bear down. Grin and bear it. I’m trying.
My husband panicked the way he does when he has to confront the fact that I’m seriously ill. He got me up off the floor, then went into a fugue state in which he forgot about everything other than his lost phone. He flitted around in flight mode looking for the phone because it’s easier to be upset about the phone than it is to live through more than two years of thinking your wife could die, on top of fifteen years of intermittently thinking your wife could die, let alone this very moment when you’re seeing more evidence of your wife’s potential death on the horizon or at least more data that suggests whatever’s going on with her isn’t going to go away any time soon, if ever. And what do you do with that as a spouse? How do you live with a splintered wife for the rest of your life?
I almost said upper thighs in the first paragraph of this essay, but we don’t have tiered thighs. We just have the one main set, one main set of thighs. It’s the way I also think I have two noses, when I just have the one nose with two nostrils and the way I always think I have two butts because I have two butt cheeks.
The body is confusing. Taking inventory isn’t as straightforward as it seems. At one point in American history, a window was considered a single pane within a larger window. So a window with six panes counted as six windows. Why? Taxes. Taxes were assessed per pane, so each pane became a window. At least I think that’s true. My rhetoric professor, Dan Mahala, told our class that in college. This was in the ’90s, when institutions still taught actual history—or at least tried to—not the ticky-tacky history being peddled today.
If U.S. politics applied to bodies—which of course it does, mainly those of women and trans and nonbinary folks, but bear with me again for the purposes of this essay—we might very well have been taught that we have two noses and two butts, especially if that meant we could be charged more for lugging all that flashy and fleshy gear around. Two butts! Two noses! How indulgent of you. One of each is subject to the luxury tax! You clearly have spares that are purely ornamental. (Don’t tell the tax collectors about the set of kidneys dangling in our trunks or the lungs or whatever else is doubled up in there like sets of animals shuffled onto a dingy for safekeeping during what looked to be the makings of a pretty big storm.)
All that contrived body taxation would be a real pane, wouldn’t it? I mean pain. And trust me, the body is definitely a pain.
But I digress. Who turns to stone? I’m asking because that’s what my body felt like today. Sisyphus, maybe. You could argue that pushing stones turns him into the very thing he’s pushing: Something that moves but that isn’t quite alive; someone whose stony but who isn’t quite mineral.
Demosthenes filled his mouth with stones to learn how to speak clearly. But that’s not the same thing as turning to stone.
Oh, I know, I know! It’s those who gaze into Medusa’s eyes!
Whose stare must I have returned to be cursed this evening? It must have been someone in my dreams. I’d just woken from a nap when the compacting began, soles first, a crushing invisible force making me denser and denser. I felt the hardening creep upward. The stiffening. The molecular tightening. I couldn’t do anything about it. It was like watching a virus spread through a computer taking out file after file after beloved file and replacing them with junk code.
I realize I can’t make the stone metaphor work alongside my earlier tree metaphor. Adding the computer-virus reference is making things even worse. Let’s just acknowledge all of that and move on. I don’t have time to put the right slant on this truth. (My apologies to Emily Dickinson.) I’m sliding downhill, and everything I write is sliding with me. Besides, wood can turn to stone. I know. I’ve seen it. I have a chunk of opalized palmwood right here that makes my case for me.
That rock is science. It’s fact. And like science and fact, opalized palmwood is beautiful when you place it on a black light in a dark room. It looks like magic and could be passed off as such if your audience doesn’t know any better. A divining rock. A soothsayer’s stone. Not the soft, boring sandstone my body is becoming, the kind of stone miners here tossed to the side when looking for the good stuff like silver and uranium.
But guess what? I tricked you, and you didn’t know any better. Petrified wood isn’t stone. My science wasn’t science, and my facts weren’t facts. Here’s the truth. You ready: Though the phrase petrified wood or petrified tree comes from Ancient Greek πέτρα meaning “rock” or “stone,” literally “wood turned into stone,” petrification doesn’t change organic wood into stone. It merely preserves the wood’s shape and structural elements.
Sometimes language gets things wrong. Sometimes, even the Ancient Greeks got things wrong. Is it so hard to believe that sometimes we get things wrong? That we get things wrong most of the time, actually?
Maybe I’m not turning to stone. Maybe parts of me are just undergoing a change, being preserved. My shape. My structural elements.
My husband found his phone. It was in the garage. He went out there frantically looking for it like a prospector trying to lay claim to a seam of silver in a sandstone reef in a town called Silver City in the 1870s. He cast aside all the piled-up crap garages tend to take on as his world was reduced to two things: phone and not phone.
When he found his phone, the world made sense again. I was in a chair by that time live-tweeting the unfolding disaster. My upper body still worked, which meant I could be a writer and write things down. So I wrote things down just like Richard Siken says we should. What else would you have me do? Come unglued?
This is marriage. This, too, is marriage. Sometimes it’s broken. Sometimes there’s no diagnosing what’s wrong with it. Sometimes it’s all experience and no name and no remedy. Or maybe no remedy is needed because legs are not roots and flesh is not stone and a phone isn’t something jacked out of the Earth for profit or for prophets.
Sometimes a phone is just a phone, and we can use it to hear the voice of the person we love more than anyone else on the planet. Sometimes we can take that call. Sometimes we can’t no matter how much we want to. We just let it ring through to voicemail and hope the love of our life leaves us a message that we can receive when we’re ready.
Before the Industrial Revolution, people slept in two shifts. The first was from early evening until sometime in the middle of the night. The second was from early morning until it was time to get up and start the day’s work. The waking period in the middle of the night wasn’t just for reading or sitting by the fire. People played cards, canoodled, had little get-togethers, and more. It was dark and cool and simply a good time to be awake. A romantic time. A playful time. A productive time.
In 2008, when I had one of my bouts of thyrotoxicosis—which made sleep difficult and resulted in severe sleep anxiety—a therapist told me about two-sleeps. She could see my sleep patterns falling into that rhythm and encouraged me to embrace that rather than fighting it. I had charts and graphs and other excessively detailed stuff documenting my personal sleep woes because that’s how I roll. It was a lot, the way my personal wardrobe database, which I maintained for six years, was a lot. (I can be a lot or, as I like to say a lot a lot—think quirky, colorful, dysfunctional.)
Hold up, the therapist said. Maybe, just maybe, instead of being hypervigilant about your sleep, you could try this approach instead. Hers was for sure the better plan. It was hard to let go of my recordkeeping and data management, but I did it at her urging.
The change in perspective and approach got me through those long months until my thyroid function returned to normal. I should note that thyrotoxicosis isn’t like hyperthyroidism in that you can’t treat it. You just have to wait it out. The whole process from thyrotoxicosis (or thyroid storm) to hypothyroidism to a return to a euthyroid state takes about a year.
A long damned year that’s difficult, creatively productive, and hard on a marriage, or at least has been hard on my marriage. It’s not easy to live with someone who has a snack-and-book midden stashed in the bed because they need to eat constantly and must always have reading material ready for those inevitable jolts from sleep. And also a slew of notepads and a handheld recording device so flashes of brilliance can be documented, such as aphorisms that float in on the ether and strange dreams that can’t not be cast in stone or at least scrawled in pencil in feverish, sloppy detail. (Pencil because, while graphite is an inferior writing material, I have a no ink-in-the-bed rule, as should everyone. We have sheets to think about, folks. We don’t need to add fighting ink stains to our list of daily tasks, especially not when we’re thyrotoxic.)
It’s not easy to live with someone who’s in fight or flight for the better part of a year, edgy and jumping at every little sound, balled up at times saying I can’t take it when will I feel normal again, whose OMing her way through moment after excruciating moment, who asks her mother-in-law in Iowa to have a bag packed in case she needs to come take care of her when she’s thirty-six years old and her mother-in-law has better things to do like tending to her gorgeous, gazeboed yard and going to church and keeping her husband from wandering into the back of the garage never to be seen again because he’s finally going to put that classic car together, the one that’s been a tangle of pieces and parts strewn about the property for four decades. In short, someone who’s devolved into a twitchy little miscreant. It wasn’t easy on Jon. I wasn’t easy on Jon. But two-sleeps made a big difference.
I still approach my sleep this way if I wake up in the middle of the night. It’s a two-sleep night, I think. Rather than toss and turn in bed, I get up and do what I do, which is read and write and, sometimes, snack. Tonight, I’m up with GI distress and heartburn because of unfortunate but yummy birthday dinner choices yesterday evening. I came home and crashed, accidentally, at 8:40 p.m. and woke a few minutes ago bloated and nauseated, like a puffer fish that didn’t mean to puff and can’t unpuff and whose innards are on fire.
Is this a good time to write? Who knows. Will I produce anything of value during these waking hours? Based on this journal entry, it doesn’t seem like I will. I just know it’s not a good time to be horizontal. It is a good time to take Pepto Bismol and be vertical. So that’s what I’m doing until my second sleep begins. (Technically, since I’m sitting down, I’m vertical then horizontal then vertical again.)
Metadata paralysis is a real phenomenon, and folks like me live the experience every day. If you see someone with obvious symptoms of metadata paralysis, let them know you care. Take interest in their metadata tree. Say things like, “Good work. What a lovely metadata tree you’re working on. So many branches. I can’t wait to see what it grows into.”
Part two of this essay will be redacted in its entirety because it’s boring. Why? It’s self-indulgent and not self-reflective. The metadata here is value: subset one, possesses; subset two, doesn’t possess.
I’m falling asleep sitting up. Hello, theta waves. Bring on the strange brilliance.
I get it. His name is Jack Tripper and he trips all the time as part of his physical comedy. He also trips out on what others are doing and saying, so he’s also a metaphorical tripper.
Quick on the draw isn’t something anyone’s ever called me with regard to understanding plays on words, but they did call me fast fingers in grade school because I learned to count like lightning on my hands during math drills as a workaround for my dyscalculia and working-memory deficits. I won those drills. Laugh away, children, laugh away. What the world needs is a dyscalculia superhero named Fast Fingers.
Dyscalculia is either part of dyslexia or it’s a separate but similar entity. It depends on what metadata you use, that is, how you organize the information pertaining to each phenomenon.
Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. Dyscalculia. That looks funny. This calculia. Miss Calculia. That’s Ms. Calculia to you. Dana “Ms. Calculia” Martin. Now there’s a name. A Dana by any other name still can’t count to ten without using her fingers.
They gave me a free dessert because it was my birthday. That’s what happened with dinner. And also a plate of fried everything. That part wasn’t free. I paid for the plate of fried everything. My metadata here is dinner: subset one, fried everything; subset two, dessert.
I didn’t have to eat it. I wanted to eat it. Then I didn’t want to eat it but kept eating it. I’m trying hard to eat. I need to eat. My metadata here is health: subset one, presence; subset two, absence. Or is it life: subset one, congruous with; subset two, incongruous with?
My throat is getting dry. The Pepto Bismol is coagulating, if that’s the right word, near my uvula. One time, a big, hard thing traveled from my sinuses down into my throat. I choked on it for a while, then coughed it into a tissue, thereby saving my own life. It was fossilish and had ridges like the roof of a mouth. This incident (or shall I call it an *indecent*) happened in from of my mother-in-law. The metadata here is mother-in-law: subset one, what not to do in front of; subset two, what I did in front of. Additional metadata is bodies: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange.
As with bodies, also with minds: subset one, amazing; subset two, strange. Or is the main category bodymind: one thing, not two? As in, we mine the bodymind when we should be embodying it. As in, why is the bodying of the bodymind something we mind, whether it’s ours, yours or mine? As in, what’s mine is my bodymind and is not to be mined.
This is a real mindfield. Good night. I’m off for part two of my two-sleeps night. May our collective dreams break the bough, rattle the house, and set free a wee mouse who runs the mazes of our minds. Wouldn’t that be amazing.
Insomnia Diary Entry One: The price I’m paying for going to bed at 9:29 p.m. last night is waking to strange dreams and observations at 1:29 a.m. this morning. As if that weren’t bad enough, my weaving room clock is four hours slow for some reason, so when I dragged myself in here to write down my strange dreams and observations, it said it was only 9:29 p.m. I feel like I slept zero minutes, not two-hundred-forty weird, totally off, minutes. What do I do now? Eat? Vomit? I hate waking up like this, being off like this. My ear wax is melting. The light from this pink Himalayan salt lamp is too bright. I think I need to hydrate.
Insomnia Diary Entry Two: Based on my symptoms, I’d say my TSH level is moving around wildly again and that it has been since I started a new dose of thyroid replacement and a new form of the medication, this time an amber liquid that burns my gums. My body no longer knows what to do, how to regulate, its TSH levels. Within a month’s time, I’ll swing from clinically hypothyroid to severely thyrotoxic. This has been happening every month for a year or so.
Heart palpitations are back. Big tears are back, rolling ones like dew drops on iris leaves in Kansas on any given spring morning. Nausea is back. Exhaustion. Word-finding issues.
I forgot my maternal grandmother’s first name two days ago. (It’s Ruth, a word I always see as red, like a ruby. Ruth, my gem of a grandmother, my red velvet cake grandmother, my faceted grandmother throwing off an eerie red light, my film noire grandmother if the lighting was black and red, not black and white. And she, Ruth, surely was all of those things. So how could I forget her name, given all the ways synesthesia allows me to vividly see it?)
I confused trammel and trample yesterday. (I didn’t just make that play on words in a post for fun. I actually forgot the difference between the words, then turned my language-related malady into a wry comment on nature and culture, or something like that. A real poor-me of a post.)
I forgot traffic (n.) and traffick (v.) both exist. I’m still not convinced they’re both real, but the dictionaries seem to think so. I’m pretty sure I’ve been leaving the “k” off the verb form for years, a startling realization that leads me to ruminate about all the other words I must be getting wrong without realizing it. It’s like my late-90s disk and disc meltdown all over again. Floppy? Frisbee? C or K? K or C?
I’m so tired of being dyslexic and having auditory processing disorder and working memory issues and attention deficits with ironic hyperfocus and rumination and neat and tidy OCD and complex PTSD and regular PTSD and other flavors of anxiety on top of my primary immunodeficiency and autoimmune diseases and arrhythmias and dysautonomia and possible kidney issues and whatever the hell is going on with iron overloading and concurrent anemia and TSH issues that come and go without explanation and that cancer I had and may still have and the edema and the asthma and whatever else I can’t even remember at this moment.
It’s a lot, folks. It’s getting old. Y’all, I just want to move around the cabin of life freely and with some assurance that I’m doing an OK job at that. Instead, I end up back by the lavatories when I think I’m heading toward the emergency exit. It’s sheer disorientation much of the time: in my mind, in my body, and at the seams where my mind and body meet the world.
I was trying to make a play on the cabin reference above by following it with the lavatories and emergency exit references, but it didn’t work. It’s too jumbled, the image too burdened. I can’t bring myself to delete the attempt, though, because my body-mind really worked hard at it and I’m so exhuasted and here come the big dewy tears and this water isn’t hydrating me at all because I’m still a walking desert and my GI tract is full of angry fists that feel like a mob is trying to punch its way out of me and I’m so awaketired, so hungrynauseated, so tinglenumb, that the cursed trinity (cabin/lavatories/emergency exit) isn’t going anywhere. It’s staying put. It’s evidence of and a testament to my dysfunction.)
All the hunger all the time and all the eating all the time without moving the needle on the scale at all are back. Parasthesias are back. Maybe some neuropathy, too, which I don’t even want to acknowledge, but the weird stabbing pains in my legs and the sudden feeling of having stepped in water when there is no water aren’t going anywhere, it seems.
Some of this is also from having dysautonomia. Some of this is from having immune system dysregulation and all the diseases and conditions that flow from that dysregulation. Not all of this is because of my TSH dysregulation, and I suspect that dysregulation isn’t a thing on its own, anyway, but instead flows from some combination of my other health issues, as well as from my trauma. Traumas, let’s be honest. It’s traumas, plural. It’s also trauma and trauma (v) if trauma can verb.* I think it can. Think: She will trauma her way through life. Think: May she trauma in peace. Maybe we should spell the verb form differently to avoid confusion, like traffic and traffick. But what would trauma look like spelled any other way? Whatever form it takes, it all looks like ruin.
* Why did Facebook turn my n in parentheses into a thumbs down? I’m too tired to fight you on that, Facebook. Have it your way. You always do. We’re all just here for your profit and pleasure, Facebook. Don’t think we don’t know that’s the case.**
**Oh, I know why. I forgot the periods after the “n” and the “v” on second reference. Fine. My bad, Facebook.
Insomnia Diary Entry Three: I think people count sheep when they can’t sleep because sheep sounds like sleep, so we’re indirectly invoking sleep by using sheep as a kind of mantra, one that allows us to sidle up to sleeping without getting sleep anxiety as we think about how we’re not sleeping.
Oh, no. That’s not it at all. Apparently, shepherds in medieval Britain had to keep a headcount of their sheep each night if they used communal grazing land, so they counted their sheep before going to sleep to ensure they were all there.
Still, I think my thing is also correct: I think sheep works because it’s a stand-in, soundwise, for the thing we’re trying to do, which is sleep.
Insomnia Diary Entry Four: I had two thoughts upon waking at 1:29 a.m. First thought: I’ve reached the age where I can no longer tell if physical exertion is building muscle or destroying muscle. Second thought: The price I pay for whatever I’m doing is having to do more of whatever I’m doing.
Insomnia Diary Entry Five: I am not dovetailed to this world. I’m glued and stapled to it.
Insomnia Diary Entry Six: When someone starts a sentence with the words I’m no conspiracy theorist, you can put money on the fact that a conspiracy theory (technically, a conspiracy hypothesis) will complete that utterance.
Insomnia Diary Entry Seven: I’m no conspiracy theorist, but I don’t trust the water here in Toquerville, Utah. On record, our water management people said at a city council meeting that they sometimes forget to check the water pumps. Then, earlier this year, one of the water pumps broke, and our irrigation water was turned off until a new pump could be ordered.
I just don’t know. You know, govnmnt and whatnot. You never can tell. Never can tell. No, sir. No, siree.
I do know that, without proper filtration, there’s one-thousand-one-hundred times the “safe” amount of arsenic in our water, and that figure isn’t hyperbolic. I looked into it. You know, inurnet and whatnot.
What I’m getting at is this: I drank all my water just now, and I needed more water. My husband and I recently bought a fancy office-level water filter thing that makes cold water, hot water, tea, and coffee. We decided to do it because govnmnt and inurnet and all that, and also because my gums were starting to burn after brushing my teeth with, you guessed it, the local water. (I see a pure D bona fide theory emerging here, not just a measly hypothesis!)
We love the new water filter thing. Just adore it. It’s like the watery baby we never had. We coo at it. We pet it. But it makes this rattling sound whenever it’s used as it pumps more water into whatever parts of the machine need water pumped to them. So I couldn’t fill my water bottle with filtered water just now or else I’d wake my husband up and he’d be all why’d you wake me up you’re ruining my sleep and I’d have no choice but to be all because my own sleep is ruined forever and always and we’re married and this is the for worse part of it which you agreed to in front of that pantheist minister in Eureka Springs Arkansas during a freak March snowstorm back in 1999 so deal with it just deal with it and rub my shoulders while you’re here and get me some filtered water too please and thank you and I love you and don’t leave me and hold me and get away from me and I’m sorry so so sorry I’m just so tired and hurt and tired. And I wouldn’t want to do that, so here I am filling myself with liquid arsenic, folks. The things a good wife does. The things a good wife does.
Insomnia Diary Entry Eight: How do I select my titles? That depends. Sometimes, I write a big thing while I have insomnia, then I look at the thing, my eyes fall to some of the words in the thing, and in my bleary state, I think, Gee whiz, those random words seem like they’d make a good title. Usually, they do. Case in point: Henceforth, the collective title of these insomnia diary entries shall be “Cabin Lavatories Emergency Exit.”
Actually, I think I’ll make the whole series into a poem. But first, I must sheep. I mean sleep. One two three four. Or arrhythmically like my heart: one two (pause) three (longer pause) four.
Insomnia Diary Entry Nine: to sheep, perchance to leme.
Insomnia Diary Epilogue: I slept. Finally. I dressed up like Liza Minnelli after we got back from Jon’s doctor’s appointment, the one about his liver, and I took a hot, stupid, mid-morning nap on top of the covers and with my little dog between my legs, her favorite place to sleep. Was it comfortable? No. I had sequins on and big flashy earrings. All the material from my jeans somehow managed to bunch up between my legs. My dog was bristly like the hairbrush my mother made me use for well over a decade, the pink one that was passed down to me after my sister left the home.
Yes, I had to use my grown sister’s hairbrush when she moved out of the house. If that doesn’t prove to you that I’m the product of Depression- and Dust Bowl-era Oklahomans, nothing will.
See, the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl made my mother frugal. I get it. I do. But seriously, who keeps a hairbrush around that long, washing it every month in the sink like it was going to the spa, rescuing it from various dogs’ mouths and returning it to my drawer covered in an ever-lengthening tactile Morse-like Code of tooth marks? (Maybe that would make it Braille-like. Who cares.)
I didn’t even know people could buy hairbrushes until I was seventeen and saw them at the store. Don’t ask how I never saw them before then. I have attention differences, and my mother probably steered me away from the expensive beauty aisles, especially after my father died and we were trying to make it on her income from the state mental hospital, where she worked as a psychiatric nurse for thirty-five years.
Anyway, at the store back in those days, I was always busy taking the empty glass Coke bottles in to get our deposit back or to buy some cigarettes — if you can even call menthol Virginia Slims that — for my mother. I never saw any hairbrushes until the day I did as a teenager and my mind was blown. I bought one on the spot. A Goodie.
I confronted my mother about the decades-long hairbrush ruse when I got home. She just shrugged or something, then probably took a sip of her vodka, then took a drag of her cigarette, and clicked the clicker to watch the news, something she loved to do because she was passionate about politics. She was a feverish democrat who was in the closet about her political opinions until my father died, then she let it all loose. She’d call all her nurse friends when anything remotely of political interest happened, like the time Reagan came to town and two kids sneaked a big protest sign into the rally.
I know the kids who did that. I wasn’t one of them, sadly. I still had a perm and claw bangs and listened to Duran Duran. I had no desire to tape parts of a sign to my body so I could smuggle them into a room full of adults, then assemble the sign once I was inside. I didn’t want to get arrested. I didn’t want to be dragged anywhere. I had Guess jeans. I had a Coach purse. I was going places in my jelly shoes.
The point is. I took a shit nap, but it was still a nap, and I’m grateful for it.
I’m still pretty violently ill. I have a five-hour training tomorrow as a substitute teacher with ESS, who recently hired me. ESS handles subs for numerous states, including Utah, New Mexico, and Oklahoma. I might be able to use ESS to claw my way out of this state. (And of course I love teaching.) I may have to reschedule the training if things continue to go the way they’re going now.
Listen, all I want is the ease my childhood hairbrush knew. I want to lie in soapy, hot water whiling away my time staring at the nicotine-stained plaster ceiling, not a thought in my bristles, not a pain in my handle. Is that too much to ask? For a little time like that?
That brush. On brush-washing day, I remember having to comb all my hair out of it as my mother ordered. I remember being told to dry it off with a towel. I remember having to position it so it could air dry in the sun streaming through the bathroom window before it went back into the drawer.
That brush was my mother’s favorite child. It’s so obvious. Coddle, coddle, love, love. Hugs and kisses, little brush.
I want this acute health situation to be about bad spinach, mild food poisoning, but the evidence — shared by me last night in the second installment in this series—suggests something more is going on, as always. Maybe if I just don’t eat between now and tomorrow’s training, I’ll be OK. This is the same approach I’ve used as a workaround in the recent past that’s contributed to my losing more and more and more weight.
Conversely, eating more and more and more when violently ill won’t result in my absorbing any calories or nutrients, as they’ll just … ahem … shoot through me like Big Bertha, the tunnel-boring machine used in Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel project. Except it won’t be like Big Bertha at all, because she got stuck for two years starting in 2013 and eventually had to be partially excavated for a repair to solve the issue. Trust me, nothing’s getting stuck inside me and nobody is going to cut into me to bring my body the spare parts it needs to operate properly again.
So to eat, or not to eat, that is the question. To train, or not to train. I guess there are actually two questions at this point.
and trauma (v) if trauma can verb.* I think it can. Think: She will trauma her way through life. Think: May she trauma in peace. Maybe we should spell the verb form differently to avoid confusion, like traffic and traffick. But what would trauma look like spelled any other way? Whatever form it takes, it all looks like ruin.
Dana Henry Martin 