It has been twenty-eight months since I first started feeling ill, twenty-six since I first realized there was something seriously wrong with me, twenty since my first hospitalization, fifteen since diagnosis, eight since we finally made some real headway with medication management, and three since I have started to feel like myself again, at least at times. Along the way my family and I have traveled up and down the east coast to see doctors, to visit hospitals, to look for answers, solutions, advice, and sometimes even just a bit of hope. I have long ago lost count of the doctors I have seen: the internists, the gastroenterologists, the endocrinologists, the neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and cardiologists. I have had enough blood drawn over the past two years to thoroughly exsanguinate me several times over, had enough needle-pricks to get me into the pincushion hall of fame.
Through all of this, and all of the doctors shrugged shoulders and pop psychology I have known that there was indeed something very wrong with me physically, yet at the same time I have always harbored some small degree of doubt, a little uncertainty born of the unpredictability of this disorder, of the reality that I never can quite pin down exactly what it will do to me, of the fact that I have never seen anyone else experience what I experience.
That is until today, when I saw this video, and felt so completely that I was looking in the mirror.
I am sure the lingering doubt will always remain with me, returning with each episode for which I cannot pin down a cause, and with every episode I do not have even though the same circumstances have triggered one a score of times before. But today, at least, I recognize myself in this mirror, though the fact that I do see myself in that video -- the paralysis, the labored breathing, the vacant stare -- reminds me that I hardly remember the me I once knew.
No comments:
Post a Comment