sickness — Blog

Several weeks ago (starting on February 24), I contracted the flu. I woke up that Monday morning coughing and with a general malaise. Soon after, I answered a phone call from my sister (whom I had spent nearly the whole weekend with) who apologized profusely because she had just came back from the doctor’s and tested positive for the flu (type-A).

Having not had the flu since I was a young child, I was skeptical that what I had wasn’t just a cold. However, halfway through that Monday my fever shot up and did not come back down again until Thursday morning. My head hurt so bad during the time I had a high fever that I could not sleep for more than two hours at a time, I could not watch movies or read because focusing my eyes on anything at all was excruciating. I spent three nights in a row awake nearly all night just staring off into space, weak, drained, unable to sleep, barely able to eat. I contemplated the concept of a virus, a lot. I wondered how my body was fairing in the fight.

Once the fever broke, the ride wasn’t over. I spent many more days in bed exhausted with a violent cough. My chronic illness decided to flare just as soon as my fever broke. I quarantined myself in the bedroom and my spouse slept on the couch and fed me all of my meals. For over a week, I pretty much only went back and forth between the bed and the bathroom with no physical contact from another human being and very little socialization or entertainment. The quarantine seemed to work because my spouse never got quite so sick, although did develop a cough and fatigue. Today, 19 days later, is the first day that I woke up and my lungs have felt normal, where my cough has generally subsided.

It has been a wild ride.

I have had a lot of time to think about health, mortality, gratitude, purpose. In the time that I have been sick, MFA rejections have been rolling in, a global pandemic began, and I had to cancel my trip to San Antonio for AWP which I had been looking forward to all year. In the end, though, this experience has really forced me to be thankful in a big way.

I have a ritual at night before I go to bed that I call the “gratitude rock.” I hold a fossilized coral stone I keep on my bedside table in my palm and think of ten things from the day that I am grateful for. With each item I let a finger unfurl until my palm is open to the stone and then curl them back in until I am grasping the stone again. I continued this ritual while I was sick and it illuminated things about my life and experience that I couldn’t have known had I not been so violently ill. I found myself feeling deeply and profoundly grateful for things like my bed, a moment of sunshine, a cuddle from my cat, a text from a friend.

Sometimes my nighttime ritual feels like a chore, a box to tick off. It is tempting to quickly list items like food, shelter, a warm bed, health, etc and not actually feel any gratitude for them. But, nothing in this life is promised. I am not owed any experience or circumstance. Allowing myself to sink into the gratitude of what I do have is a practice that has transformed my life.

I am grateful to be alive.