Beth Re-animated

Tip for the day: Black pee is bad.

To check my health today (like the weather), click HERE

A trip to the doctors and my pain meds are now almost double what they were three weeks ago, plus a referral for catheters. You may be wondering what death with dignity has to do with indwelling catheters when you are too weak to be able to transfer to get to the toilet. Not much.

I spin like the flower, slowly wind-stripped of petals, far, far below what I imagined and was informed the minimum of life would be. Even reading how patients with autonomic failure die only gave head knowledge, not ‘heart’ or gut-knowledge. First it was leaning that something like that could happen, suffocating to death, then it mentally understanding it was possible, then realizing exactly how it would unfold, as the individual parts already had, just had not all come together. Finally, with the diaphragm failing, and communication limited to half a word spoken in a pressure-less exhale, dying like that becomes one of the things to work against, to ward against.

Last night, after a tense influx of breath, forgotten, left me seeing spots and the feeling of drowning deep down in the black water, I reminded myself again, “Do not hold breath….as you are too weak to regain the oxygen, or the breathing.”

The heat and fatigue brought by circulation, breathing, sustaining a body brings about micro strokes. I am still prone to talk too much, though it often results in me face down (a photo book: 101 pictures of Beth face-down in interesting locations and foods).

Thank you for the encouraging messages. Less so the 'please send one last postcard now!', as I think you might have missed the point of the previous blogs from Cheryl and Linda and the Postcard Project.

Now that I am to the point where it looks like I might last the week, the complications of that crashes down upon me, in library late fees to regret at not getting a giant garage sale sorted while I still had the energy. I have over 50 postcards still to finish decorating, to write and send out. I have to try and see around the floaties in the eye from the starbursts of high blood pressure and dying capillaries, hoping the body will absorb them somehow and sight will be returned. The collection of eyeball blood bursts: ‘eye of a H junkie run out of places to shoot up’ is a bit ‘ick’. That and the worry I may be taken for a wheelchair zombie.

There is a Terry Moore ‘Brazil’ style organization surrealism as people openly talk about the days or weeks I might have. “Think I can make it until Thursday?”

“Not if you keep losing that much blood, and if the weather gets cooler.”

Reports go up and back as agencies try play ‘pass the parcel’, where Beacon, running out of workers who can get the concept that I am not 80, not bedbound, not apartment bound (all times), yet I am often more ill and more fragile than clients who are in bed 24/7. Also, in a given week, I may be in bed, asleep or just barely conscious for two to four days. Palliative organization says I am registered but not in my last three weeks (though different managers try to convince them otherwise), so no mysterious Black Van to come and collect me. Yet I am woken by EMT’s as a phone jostled by a worker sets off a ‘disconnect’ on my lifeline and being a high risk, EMT’s are sent.

In the horde of zombie fiction Rot & Ruinlurches ahead of the pack. Timely and apt this week in reading, it envisions a world of grief, where death hangs over the remaining people and culture like the Great War did. Benny ends up in ‘The Family Business’, which he enters at 15, in a world of small enclaves and the great vast land of Rot and Ruin, 300 million zom’s. His brother is a ‘closure specialist’ who, unlike the majority of bounty hunters out there is not racking up the kills for profit but finds individual for family members who want closure. Much as we try to remove the idea of death and us, people fear ‘zoms’ not just because a bite means becoming one but because it opens up a whole Pandora’s box of pain and loss in remembering the First Night, and that brothers, sisters, parents, children all remain out there, undead and unliving both.

I will try to find a posting schedule that works, twice a week, I hope, as I have a dozen posts written but for illustrations or rewrites. And I plan, if I can get some bleeding and body parts back under control, or working again, to get a bearable life, and a shareable life working too.

To finish here is an apt minute and 50 seconds, Into the Dark, illustrated by parts of the film 5 cm per second (the time it takes a cherry blossom to fall), recommend high resolution if possible.
Click HERE