‘Twas the Night Before Treatment

Tomorrow morning, bright and early, I set out on a new quest. A new quest within an already new journey of the last couple months — this unforeseen journey with an autoimmune disease.

Tomorrow begins this new quest for healing and recovery. Remission.

Or so I hope.

It’s strange looking back on my life post-ER visit, post-weeklong hospital stay. It feels mostly normal now. I feel mostly normal, mostly healthy.

No crippling joint pain. No burning sinuses. No zombie-like anemia from dawn to dusk and back again.

I can walk. I can breathe. I can smile and laugh. The simple things that had become strained are now simple again.

The only huge changes to my routine are the pills I consume every morning. Along with the weekly or biweekly doctor visits and tests, I suppose.

It’s all still so bizarre, thinking about everything that lies beneath my skin, the stuff going wrong — haywire — the stuff I can’t see. The lung infection. Whatever’s still amiss with my sinuses. That my white blood cells continue to create these antibodies that decide to attack my perfectly healthy blood vessels.

Stop, don’t shoot! I hear my vessels crying within me. Now I know how the Jedi felt after Order 66.

Life would be so much easier — or at least easier to grasp — if we could see the problems, wouldn’t it? COVID-19 is such a perfect example.

If this virus were colored purple with hairy fangs, spewing like dragons from people’s mouths every time they entered a gas station or grocery store without a mask, we’d have announced decrees and passed laws months ago that required public masks and distancing anyfreakingwhere you went. No problem.

But alas. You can’t see the coronavirus. Not with the naked eye, anyway. And I can’t see my white blood cells attacking my own blood vessels.

And so I must trust what I cannot see. We all must.

I hope to deescalate my invisible problem tomorrow by starting on a remission treatment of immunosuppressants. I’ll be posting hospital updates to my GoFundMe page, if you’re interested in following me on this new quest (continued gratitude if you can give toward my mounting expenses).

Hopefully this treatment works. Hopefully my white blood cells chill out.

Hopefully I take a huge step toward healing tomorrow.

After all I’ve experienced, researched, and been told, I’m as optimistic as I could be. I’m hopeful. I am.

Of course, I also hear the whispers of what if. What if it doesn’t work. What if my body reacts poorly. What if we need to try something else. What if that doesn’t work. What if —

What if I’d just never gotten this disease in the first place? The ultimate what if.

Autoimmune life has taken such center stage this summer, I don’t even know where all my energies would have gone without my health issues these last few months. In many ways, this disease has indeed helped me reevaluate what really matters: my faith, my family, my friends. Making my storytelling endeavors a larger chunk of my “work,” and making my home the homiest it’s ever been.

I wouldn’t trade away the love and letters and re-sparked kindling for home that I’ve experienced this whole summer. This disease has helped me hone in what matters, what truly matters, as unbearably cliché as that sounds.

Like. Why am I wasting my time not working on another book? Not learning another language? Not learning (or relearning) guitar?

And why am I not connecting more often, more regularly with the ones I love, the ones who love me? Gosh I want to enjoy every moment breathed, every moment shared.

I want to connect the dots of this life with meaningful goals while holding hands (metaphorically, distantly, of course) along the way with people who make me cry in the best possible way.

And so tomorrow I step out for healing. My biggest one yet. Maybe I land. Maybe I fall. Or maybe it’s one of those awkward jump-stagger-getbackups.

In any case, I’m eager to join this dot to the next. I remain grateful for all the love swirling about me as I eye the ledge and look down and out with a deep breath, and

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