Disease: A Snapshot

20/03/23

Cycle 2, Day 3. 

I have become fastidious about updating my food log, for no other reason than that it gives me some form of structure to my life. The little grids in the excel sheet give me an illusion of form, of organisation, as my body churns and rages with the medication coursing through my veins. 

Today has been difficult. The exhaustion has been mind numbing, a fog that I struggle to walk through, that forces me to take deep breaths, to allow my breaths to connect to the limp mind to the rest of the body so that I can put one foot in front of another, form words through my bulbous tongue, function. 

My husband is kind, as he has been kind throughout this entire ordeal, taking on a bigger share of the work that comes with living in a home, of having a family, walking the dog in the morning, preparing breakfast. I crawl out of bed, take an impossibly long time to do my morning things, stumble out into the kitchen to help with whatever I can, boiling water, washing the dishes in the sink. 

On days like this, there is no start, and there is no end, only a continuum of existence. 

This piece was first published on RIC Journal. Click here to read the full story.

Cover image sourced from here.