In my last blog I mentioned that I still have a ton of processing to do with regard to my new autoimmune disease. In the weeks to come, I’ll continue piecing myself together on this blog as well as my other blog, Your Other Brothers (stay tuned for our new podcast on this topic, releasing later this week). Maybe I’ll even produce a video or two, too.
Having an autoimmune disease is obviously a huge development in my life. I can’t not talk about it, and I need to do so. Need to drain, expel it from my inundated head and heart. Need to blog about it, share it with loved ones, pray and cry and wrestle about it with God.
I need to educate myself and understand what I’m up against, but I also can’t obsess over this disease at the cost of my livelihood and sanity.
Yes, it’s a big deal. It needs to be treated, and I need to be careful. I quite literally need to stay alive.
But I also need to live.
It’s been interesting returning home with this new diagnosis after a month away at my parents’ and in a small-town hospital. Immediately I noticed the change in season. Summer had transpired in my absence. Everything in the Blue Ridge had turned vibrant green, and it was raining upon arrival. My apartment is tucked into the hilly trees, and everything felt way more lush than I’d left it.
Contrast that sensory experience with the never-ending desert of a pandemic that continues to escalate in America and in my state. Mandatory masks and limited hours for local businesses.
I thought maybe I could escape Asheville for a month and fast-forward to a pandemic-free paradise; instead the sands only lengthen, and it’s another adjustment within an adjustment within a most difficult year.
Having an autoimmune disease means my immune system is now compromised, attacking my body’s healthy blood vessels for no good reason. I’m out of whack.
I soon hope to begin remission treatment, an immunosuppressant that will really throw my body out of whack. I’ll be all the more susceptible to sickness and flus and viruses, which is really great, considering the aforementioned pandemic of our lifetimes.
Gosh, I’m hearing more and more stories of friends affected by COVID-19, even losing loved ones to the virus. It’s real; this is all too real.
I used to think I was immune to it all, myself and my loved ones, especially me when I had the healthiest body of my life — oh the bliss.
Not anymore. Now the thought of getting groceries freaks me out. Don’t even get me started with laundromats. Just lock me into my apartment until 2021.
And yet at what cost?
Because while I must tend to my physical body, what of my spirit? What of my soul? What of my relationships, both here in the Blue Ridge and abroad? What of continuing my journey to integrate into this little mountain town, my home of the last four years?
How do I stay safe but also plunge headlong into risk, terrifying and breathtaking, seeking discomfort that blooms into a more bountiful life?
I want to be the adventurous wanderer of yesteryear, the man I’ve been becoming my entire adult life. Want to thrive and be made more alive than I’ve ever been.
And yet I also want to remain alive, period.
I recently returned from a weekend trip with my family to visit my newly born niece. Goodness, she’s the prettiest little baby. I’m astounded how beauty can happen amid the clutches of what feels like the collapse of our very society. How God is working — creating — even in this swirling madness.
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It filled my heart to hold my new niece and to reunite with my parents, brother, sister, and brother-in-law — the first time all of us had been together in months.
It filled my heart to be in their presence — but was it wise for my body? What if one of my own family members was a virus-carrier? Should I have even side-hugged them? Or what if I touched a contaminated gas pump or bathroom handle along my route?
What if I start experiencing symptoms with an already infected lung and an immune system that doesn’t know how to protect me anymore?
What if
What if
What if —
It’s all a bit dramatic, or is it? I’m lost some days, having to navigate this zig-zagging line between prudence and paranoia in the starkest way I’ve ever had to do with my body or anything.
Safety and risk. Sickness and health. Life and death.
A family visit or not?
Ecclesiastes has long resonated with my melancholic soul, and those first few verses from chapter 3 have pricked me like yet another bloodwork needle to my right arm:
For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.
That last one — a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing — wow, do I feel that.
That’s me. That’s now. I shouldn’t be within six feet of people, let alone hug them. I really shouldn’t.
A staple of my relationships, a staple of my travels in how I typically greet and bid adieu to friends and family and dear readers is no longer something I should do for the benefit — survival — of my physical body.
But what of my soul? How long can I go without a hug? Without receiving one, without even offering one?
Looking down at my precious niece in my arms, I realized it’s really something, how we need physical touch to survive. Need to be swaddled. Need to be held. Need to feel the warmth of another human emanating against us, if only to affirm to one another we are not alone in this desert.
To embrace another human for my soul, or not to embrace him or her for my body? Life with an autoimmune disease during the pandemic of the century: one calculated risk after another.
And the calculations don’t stop there.
I can’t drive for Lyft or Uber anymore because I’d be in far too close proximity with folks who have God knows what circulating about their bodies. And so my budget must compensate elsewhere.
I can’t get on an airplane. Cannot travel nearly as much, or at all, to my soul’s preferred delight and overflow. And so my soul must find its overflow elsewhere.
I cannot work out to the degree I’ve been passionate about for the last year. Along with the medications I’m taking, my body is now getting pudgier than I’d like it to be. And so my body must strengthen elsewhere.
Perhaps most critically is this notion of continuing integration with my home of these last four years. What does community look like in this season? How many people can I see face-to-face at once? How regularly? Inside or outside only? Do I require someone to wear a mask across from me at the table?
Can we hug?
Or is this simply — annoyingly, tragically — a time to refrain from embracing?
What a thing all of this is. Calculating and compensating and drawing physical and relational lines and literally praying for the best.
God go with me. God go with us all.
