Yarn, Peas, Pain and Disease.

Just a check-in to let you know that I am okay; if utter fatigue and pain which seems to exist on a cellular level is “okay” (Actually for me it kind of sucks!). Here are two of today’s images from the Port Townsend Street Market. The first is a woman who was selling and spinning yarn. When I mentioned the Canadian blog, “The Yarn Harlot” the woman spinning said, “Oh, isn’t she Amazing!” Well, the colours are.

Here Linda stopped to get $2 worth of peas fresh from the garden that morning. She helped me eat some peas while I lay down on the Coho Ferry later because she was convinced that Canada Customs would confiscate her 78 cents worth of uneaten peas. And with peas this fresh and tasting of sun and summer that is a crime to a farm girl. For a non-pea fanatic, they were pretty good.

I read part of a fictional book today on a family dealing with cancer, or not, as the case may be. What struck me, and angered me was the absence of the details, the vital details that go into disabilities and illness. The parents don't just come home with a label and then some counselor showing up at the home (the greatest irony was this was set in Victoria (local author); as Linda got a counselor after I was sick 15 months; I am still working on getting mine). Disability and illness is about medication and reactions to medications. It is about medical appointments and your loved ones trying to demonstrate love. They do things with you that you always enjoyed but now you are too exhausted to participate or even recognize the meaning in the effort. It is about the depths of new feelings from fatigue to pain that are “gifted to you” and how the different people around you learn to cope with that, or don’t. None of that was in this book. We had the loving, we had the sick, we had the fear of the frail person. We didn’t have the “getting used to”; the part where everyone is tired, bored even with the disability or illness; or where people grieve the ‘person they used to be....” while the person is still THERE.

But right now, pain muddles what was once clear. And I am still in shock from finding the fragility of myself in this trip; unable to ride as a PASSENGER in a car, without passing out, without medical distress. To be unable to shop because my system is too weak. I made the journey, and I looked like a norm, well, a wheelie norm, but I passed out partially or completely about eight times in three hours. What cost for a few peas, eh?