the-year-i-got-sick

[the-year-i-got-sick]

And in increments, the pain returned. I say "returned", but it never really left. Instead, as the days went on, the spaces between my headaches got shorter. From a manageable few hours without being hit, the gaps closed until I was left with barely minutes between episodes.

My head had chosen the best time to go into decline. The split between my parents had been years in the making, but converged with the worst of my headaches in October. The day we moved a five bedroom home that had been lived in for 10 years into a much smaller house, I lay on the couch while the removalists took things around me in to their truck. My whole family lifted and climbed and carried and packed, and I moved my aching self from piece of furniture to piece of furniture as the removalists took more and more of our house away. Eventually, someone came to pick me up from where I was resting cheek to the floor, and I was bundled into the car and over to Mum's new place.

October 2013.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

captaintalia:

that thing of when music rips your chest open and makes you spontaneously want to burst into tears like all of a sudden you are made of earthquakes and you can remember everything that ever left and you can remember every morning you will wake up lied to and your ribs won’t stop dissolving and here come the waterworks even though a minute ago you felt completely fine.

oh, that’s not a thing? oh.

September 2013

[the-year-i-got-sick]

Things improved for a couple of weeks, and slowly I slipped back into a semblance of a life. From the short one-block walk to the coffee shop every morning, to getting back behind the wheel of my car, re-engaging myself in these small habits that most of us take for granted was what reminded me that I was human. 

In September, Jessie came from New Zealand on a work trip, and stayed with me for two or three nights. This lovely girl who'd stepped out of the Internet and in to my hospital room a month before - what a strange world I lived in. We went out to bars, and I put on nice clothes and remembered how to drink alcohol. I don't know if it was the inebriation, or the immersion in a social life so enjoyable that I forgot my worries for a few days, but the pain in my head eased. We gave the bartenders at Mary's nicknames and backstories, and while we ate burgers and laughed about the bar manager who lived in a lighthouse, I was happy.

Of course with my never ending specialist appointments, it wasn't long before I found myself sitting in Medicare. The last time I'd been there, mum had called me to tell me that the tumour inside my brain was bleeding, so even though I was sitting in an uncomfortable chair with a bad headache and the person next to me smelled strangely of oranges and the ticket counter was showing A182 and the ticket in my hand was A199, I figured things were going pretty well.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

[the-year-i-got-sick]

captaintalia:

i haven’t tried to die not properly but when i spent two weeks in hospital wondering if i might i didn’t think i’d ever again find myself pizza halfway to my mouth in bed alone i haven’t tried to live not properly

September 10, 2013.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

September 8, 2013.

The day after Tony Abbott was elected, I cried all day. Not because of the fact that I was personally invested in the decision, and not entirely because of my explosive fight with the family that still had me not talking to them. Perhaps it was both of those things, perhaps neither. Everything felt broken and clumsily stuck back together in a way that didn't fit, and all I could see was the glue, and all I could feel were the cracks.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

captaintalia:

This is my “I was supposed to have brainz surgery but didn’t” selfie.

September 6, 2013.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

September 5, 2013.

I woke on the first day of the Jewish new year on the couch at mum's with a weight on my chest. There was a fog in my head, and I knew I had to ask for help. Usually when I come to my mother and tell her I'm feeling this way, her first question is always: why? Did something happen? Do you know what's wrong? But that's the thing about depression that's impossible to explain to anybody who hasn't felt it (and about the occasional doldrum days even when you're doing well) - it's nothing, and it's everything, and there's no reason, and it's all the reasons. I didn't even know how to begin explaining to her the sticky, sad feeling I'd woken up with. But I tried.

It was an hour or so later that we were in the study with Yael, and the whole day went to shit. There were less than two months left before the house we'd lived in as a family became somebody else's, before my parents officially lived in separate houses. We were beginning to pack into boxes all the things that had accumulated in the study - a study that had never really been studied in - over the years. It started as it usually did - Yael said something to me in the dismissive tone that she genuinely does not understand is cruel, that she will not acknowledge as problematic. And it escalated as it usually did: I asked her not to speak to me that way, she rolled her eyes and said something else cutting, I asked mum if I was crazy or if she was being nasty, mum refused to get involved, I felt bullied and Yael thought I was the aggressor for attacking her for "no reason". It was boring, and it was the millionth time, and it was infuriating, and it made me feel invisible, and it flared my temper in a way not many things do anymore.

I think if it weren't for the fact that just an hour ago I'd been confessing to mum that I was feeling so down and so frustrated by my pain, I might not have left. My sister yelled, with no sympathy, no sensitivity, and no consideration for what I had on my plate, and my mother, cowardly refusing any conflict, would not call her out even while I cried and begged to just be treated like a person.

Assuming the results of the MRI I had on Tuesday are good, they have postponed indefinitely the brain surgery that I was supposed to have today in preference of treating my tumour with medication. Had my family forgotten the surgery was supposed to be happening today? Did they think I had? Did they not know me well enough yet to suspect that I would be lost inside the gravity of that all morning?

I’m about to go sit in a park with Dylan, and I feel like I should be feeling lucky and happy and positive and free, but for two days I have felt nothing but the ick of depression creeping in to my blood, and today I fought with people I love, and I can’t stop crying in secret bursts, and the inside of my head is isolated from everything outside of it.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

captaintalia:

Locker room inventory: 8 rings, acid wash jeans, 1 necklace, denim shirt, striped top, 1 pair timberlands, 1 pair knit socks (hidden), studded wallet. Still looking sexy in my paper robe, don’t you fuckin worry about it.

September 3, 2013.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

September 3, 2013.

you tying my tongue (that has never known knots, that has always won hearts) you mildly deteriorating vision frames pointed in the other direction you with your face that makes me feel like i know  you make me feel like i’m missing out

[the-year-i-got-sick]

captaintalia:

Yesterday Ali and Bert came over - the first time I’ve seen Bert since they moved here from LA and the first time I’ve seen Ali outside of hospital. The feeling of unlocking the front gate, seeing them walk up, waving at my pals - it was like remembering. The sunshine, the ease of having friends come over to visit, the springtime, all just simple things I haven’t felt in a while. They arrived on my doorstep with strawberries and a coconut and a bunch of handpicked flowers and I hugged them and I, god damn it, I was already so happy. (An aside: Jade thinks that this tumour has been the cause of my feeling things the way I do, the depth with which I have experienced each emotion, and the way my emotions have reacted to experiences for years. The tumour is in my pituitary gland, which regulates hormones and has been fucking with mine, and the doctors say it may have been there all my life. Jade may have a point. Imagine they take it out and all my anxiety and sadness about janitors and tearful happiness about friends with coconuts becomes muted…) Yesterday was the best day I’ve had in ages. We sat for so long, everywhere. We sat in my backyard and we talked about what I’m dealing with. I told them I suspected the tumour was aggravated and kicked into action by the trauma and anxiety I experienced in 2012. Bert and I talked a lot about defeating and shrinking it with the opposite of that: I am gonna blast this thing with positivity. We sat at the coffee shop near my house and talked about love and death (ha) and needing and clinging and about how they are adjusting to the move and about how to fight generations of ritual and instil the values they want in their baby. It is amazing and lovely to watch my friend’s belly grow. After lunch she sat, jeans undone, and looked at us both. “Guys,” she said, “I think you should know: I have never felt more pregnant than I do in this moment.” We sat in the park and I smoked a liiiiiittle bit of a joint with Bert and ya know what? I had maybe two headaches all afternoon. I don’t even care if it was a placebo effect. Ali commented on how it really has just been like two straight years of negative stuff happening to me, there was no other way of looking at it. I agreed - it’s bizarre - but in the interest of positivity, I told her a change has to come. It has to. Right? "It already is." Bert answered me. "It’s happening right now. Big events move on small wheels." I thought about that for a second. Or maybe more. I think I was a bit stoned. "Yeah," I said, even a bit tearfully because he was right, he was right, he was right, damn it he was right, "Sometimes so small you can’t see them." "Always", he agreed.

We whiled away the afternoon together until the sun was gone, and when they dropped me back home I was sufficiently high and sleepy and happy and I hadn’t had a headache in hours. They hugged me and I loved them and really, how nice to just be around friends doing friend stuff again.

August 28, 2013.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

captaintalia:

i don’t know if it’s having spent almost as much of the last two months inside a hospital room as i’ve spent outside of one, or if it’s that i know the air is changing on the other side of the world and bringing the fall breeze and the promise of pumpkin everything, or if it’s just that it’s been almost a year since jesse and i left for our trip around america, and i keep thinking of all the moments and the people - "surprising" my kindred spirit melissa and arriving to a welcome sign because she’d already figured it out, meeting shy for the first time in DC and feeling a bit like i’d fallen in love, road tripping from portland to sacramento to LA with fawn and listening to every song and eating every donut and looking out the window at every landscape together and then wishing we could do it again, meeting jaime and alex and nugget for the first time and feeling like we’d known them forever while we stayed in their house and played in the snow and drove all over Maine like we owned it, being made at home in foreign cities by friends like estin, who knew me well enough to take me to a bar that was also a barbershop and that only served grilled cheese -

i don’t know which of these things it is that has stirred it so violently, but my wanderlust is kicking.

Late August, 2013.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

24th Aug 2013.  It’s the first hangover I can remember in forever. The first time I’ve really been out and partied since before all this shit got so bad. Jade and Nat and I had gone to a party in a back street warehouse, and I drank like I had two weeks left to live because a part of me, let’s face it, was worried I might.  Coffee helps marginally. My mother calls me with her regular how-am-I morning call. But for fuck’s sake - does she have to throw in to this one, in that contrived pitying tone I’ve heard a thousand fucking times, “I heard some really sad neewwwws”?  “Really?” I ask her snappily, incredulously, “really?”  She doesn’t know my temper is flared by the fact that my head is throbbing and my mouth tastes like last night, but she thinks better of it anyway and tries to change the subject. Of course it’s too late - “go on then, tell me your really sad news,” I say. “No, no…”  Maybe she really has realised she shouldn’t have said anything, I don’t know.  “Just tell me!” I’m over the dance. “J—- has cancer. Hodgkins or non hodgkins or you know. It’s so sad.”  And I am so angry straight away, before I am even sad, how narcissistic is that? Angry that she would think it’s ok to have that conversation with me right now. Angry that she hasn’t thought critically about how I am worried that people are talking about me in exactly the same way. I feel the heat of my temper make itself at home in my chest, even though I feel disgusted at myself for my reaction, knowing that my illness has nothing on his. It’s just that the gooey tone in which I am told sounds so sick and transparent to me that I haven’t got the room to feel anything but fury. Sorry J—-. This, like everything else right now, is about me.  “I don’t want to talk right now,” I tell her, and I hang up.  She probably thinks that this has hit close to home and I am overwhelmed with emotion.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

Hey Tal. Old friend here. I love you and think you are magical. XO

Naw, more clues pls. x

[the-year-i-got-sick]

captaintalia:

finally got my typewriter back #reminders

[the-year-i-got-sick]

August 2013.

They discharge me from hospital, and I'm feeling better for a few days before the pain returns. A few days after the headaches have crept back in to my temple and my cheek and my neck, I receive a letter from the hospital letting me know my surgery has been scheduled. I read the words, so bureaucratic, so unemotional, like a template where they have just substituted the patient's name and the type of surgery they are having. It feels like congratulations! we are pleased to confirm your brain surgery!, like they have no idea what effect the letter they are sending is going to have on the recipient. In my quiet moments, I go to a place where they fuck up by a millimetre and I end up with brain damage, or changed somehow. I’m scared, I’ve treasured my brain and I don’t want them to take it from me, there’s little I’ve loved more. I don’t want these to be my last weeks as this me, and the ‘oh you’re going to be fine’s aren't enough.  They just reek of everybody else being too scared to talk about it.

[the-year-i-got-sick]

August 2013.

But I’m scared to reach into the things I feel because I know they will be too big for the world, and all the Bon Iver songs will be inside my skin, and I will burst quietly - it’s not dramatic - I softly feel why Adam put that loop around his neck, I know how sometimes the whole earth can not be contained inside my body.