Flotsam

Well, I’m glad THAT’s over. As you may recall, I got sick early last week—fever, weakness, general ill feeling. I missed work that Tuesday, but by Friday I felt well enough that I managed to vigorously humiliate myself in front of one of my mother’s Naked Neighbors.* Clearly, my illness had passed.
[Here is where I laugh darkly.]
About an hour after I woke up Saturday morning, I found that I could not breathe. Because it had come on so suddenly, I decided I had developed an Allergy. After all, I felt fine! Except for my suddenly blocked nasal passages, there wasn’t a thing the matter with me, and I sent the Actually off to work with a breezy assurance that I would be well by the time he returned.
Only I wasn’t, because some sort of Avian West Nile Flu Virus swept in during the afternoon, and by five o’ clock I was feverish, sore-throated, and cowering on the sofa in the dark, covered in my own snot. I was in the dark because the sun had set, and I was too weak to get up and turn on the light. When the Actually returned I whimpered “I dome think I hab an allergy!” and he put me to bed.

But the Avian West Nile Flu Virus was not finished with me. Sunday I felt worse yet, and Monday morning I woke up at 6:00 and knew that the only way I would make it to work would be via body bag.
The worst part of the AWNFV is how it saps your will to live. By midday I was no longer wishing to get well, I wanted only to die swiftly, as I told the Actually during one of my many crying jags.
“I just feel so awful!” I blubbered wonderingly.
“Yes,” the Actually said for the dozenth time that hour, “Because you’re sick.”

The Actually deserves a medal, or at least a commemorative plaque, for the way he took care of me during my bout of AWNFV. A lesser man would have left me to die in my own filth, but he made me soup, ran out to buy me cough drops and then back out again to buy me Alka Seltzer Plus Nightime Cold because I had decided that AWNFV was too strong for Ricola. He urged me to stay home from work and forced me to take vitamins. He overlooked my sweaty hair and cracked lips and the high-pitched whines I emit when I don’t feel well. I am unspeakably lucky to have him, and can hardly wait until May, when I will have a legally binding contract lashing him to my side. “In sickness and in health,” after all.

Today I feel much better—a little sniffly, but largely recovered. This is how it works for me: I get intensely, ferociously sick, but it moves very quickly through my system. Possibly because I am Swiss and efficient.
I apologize for not writing during my illness—I did start a post, but only got as far as the title (“Notes From a Deathbed”). My sickness coincided with a production deadline at work, so I have been playing a doomed game of catch up since my return on Tuesday, and I still have a paper to write, a paper that was due during the darkest hours of the Avian West Nile Flu Virus. I asked my professor for an extension, figuring I would be dead by then anyway, but here I am, recovered, so I suppose I’ll have to write something after all.

Friday is my HSG. Friday, as in the day after tomorrow, Dr. Doctor will come at me with a tenaculum and catheter to flush my womb with radioactive liquid while a nurse and radiologist watch and document the event on film.
What will they think of next!
I am a little nervous. I can’t help but be convinced they will find yet another thing wrong with me. After all, when I started this reproductive adventure a year ago, it was to investigate possible endometriosis**. The PCOS and, er, infertility, were discovered incidentally. So yes, I’m worried. I can see it now–Dr. Doctor squints at the films of my HSG:
“Hmm, what’s that marking on the uterine wall? It looks like some sort of…stamp, or brand…” She peers closer, then steps back in alarm.
“Nurse, does that say Edsel?”

*Remind me to tell you about that, by the way.
**Can they look for endometriosis on an HSG at all? Just curious.

Am sick. So, so, sick.
My eyes burn, but still I write to you, out of love. And also boredom.
I am getting my period as well, which I hope explains the constant weeping. Otherwise I am losing my health and my mind at the same time, and that just doesn’t seem fair.

Last night, I came home feeling headachy to discover that I had not even been named a finalist in a writing competition I entered a few months ago. This discovery sent me into a spiral of wailing and whateverwillbecomeofme, amidst much droll mockery from Miss Rothschild.
{Who, by the way, has taken up with a butler named Snide, because that’s just what I need, more people in my head. One snarky editrix isn’t enough, apparently–now I have a serpent-tongued English butler as well.}

A few hours later, feeling feverish and shaky–but calmer and full of pasta–I received the kindest, most perfect email from a reader of this site. The Actually walked into the living room to find tears rushing from eyes as I handed him my laptop:
“Read…email…it’s so wuh-wuh-wonderful!”
The Actually read it and agreed it was a nice email, and was I sure I was feeling ok?
“I love people,” I whispered, my eyes filling again with tears. The Actually felt my forehead.

I woke up at five this morning feeling like a rag. An old, old rag. An old, trembly rag with a fine coating of perspiration.
I left a message for my boss that I would not be in, wrote a possibly nonsensical letter to a coworker about some corrections to be reviewed, and then I went back to sleep.

Today there were panic attacks about the papers I have due this weekend and whether or not I would be summarily fired for taking a sick day during the busy season at work. These panic attacks were drizzled with a generous helping of tears about how people write me perfectly lovely email messages and I don’t even have time to respond properly and I can’t get my hair to do anything anymore.

I charm even myself, some days.

I just went to take my temperature to impress you all with my illness but now it is only 99.3.
It seems like it ought to be much higher.
Do you know that I have almost NO appetite at all? That is how close to death I am.

The Actually has gone to fetch me mashed potatoes to fight the virus, and I may try to disinfect myself from the inside with some brandy.
In Switzerland, dogs are always bringing sick people brandy, after all. Aren’t they?
Perhaps I am delirious.
Tomorrow you may expect either a better entry or a regretful announcement from my estate…

Wow. Apparently nothing gets people talking like the subject of weddings. I have never before had so many comments, ever. Have they tried this strategy in the Middle East? The next time a passel of frowning and taciturn leaders of the Arab world are assembled, I think Kofi Annan should smile brightly around the table, clasp his hands together and say “So! My daughter is getting married, and she needs some advice…”

The unexpected side effect of your enthusiasm was the rekindling of my own wedding-related excitement. Which makes it sound as if I wasn’t excited about it before, but that’s not precisely it, either.
Originally I was giddy, and full of planning vim and vigor. The Actually and I designed invitations and called caterers and picked a honeymoon spot. And then, about ten days ago, we booked a venue and got the contract in the mail. And I had a crisis.
The crisis began as purely monetary, spurred by the realization that these people wanted me to send them $1200, in cash money, as a deposit. I shuffled around for a few days getting hivey whenever I thought of the contract and avoiding calls from the caterer, and sweeping all my planning cards into a stack and putting them in a desk drawer.
Next, one of the TWO close friends I am inviting informed me that she may not be able to make it after all, and I began to consider eloping. Wedding, Schmedding. Sure, I’d like to have a party with bunches of family and pretty pictures and lobster-stuffed-tenderloin-stuffed-cheesecake, but, well, I’d also like a chauffeur and working ovaries, and neither of those things are going to be dropped in my lap any time soon. Besides, the $5000 wedding budget my mother has so kindly gifted us would make a solid start towards a down payment on a house, and blahblahblah-di-blahblah.
Because I am an obsessive a self-reflective sort, I soon realized that this crisis was about more than money. It was about my craven, irrational fear, and my belief that if I cleverly refrain from having any expectations, they cannot fail to be fulfilled. Part of me feels about this wedding the way I imagine I would feel about a pregnancy—perhaps if I can avoid believing in it, I can also avoid feeling foolish and devastated when it inevitably blows up in my face.
I am afraid of hearing a doctor say “I’m sorry, there’s no heartbeat,” or hearing the Actually say “I changed my mind. I don’t want to marry you after all.” And I am afraid of all the moments after that—calling friends and family, saying Hey, you know that date I told you to remember? Forget it.

Luckily, a few minutes an hour of reassurance from the Actually calmed me down enough to stand in front of the mirror and firmly tell my reflection that I. AM. GETTING. MARRIED. And then I bought a wedding magazine.
And then I wrote my last entry, and was deluged with sweet, excited comments, and started getting giddy all over again, and did you know that you are supposed to save the top bit of the wedding cake to eat on your first anniversary? I didn’t, but what a delightful idea! And look at this lovely dress! (But not in that color!) And also, what flowers might go nicely with white peonies?
And I took my planning cards out of the drawer. And we all lived happily ever after.

Except.
Compiling a guest list is perhaps the trickiest piece of diplomacy I have ever attempted, and I live with a moody poet and three cats, so that’s saying something. I think the Actually and I initially had twenty-ish people we planned to invite. Innocently, we showed our guest lists to our mothers {Ed. Note: Why? Why did we do that?}, and then it began:
“Well, if you invite Delightful Aunt you have to invite Poisonous Aunt as well. And of course that means including the Shiftless Cousins. And the younger Shiftless Cousin is engaged to Town Bicycle, so you MUST invite her…and if you invite Town Bicycle, you’ll want to send an invitation to her mother, Remorseless Tramp. She’s one of my oldest friends, you know.”
Suddenly we are at fifty people, and it is only by skating on the edge of (apparent) rudeness that I am able to keep the number that low.

I woke up this morning feeling like myself. Perhaps still subtly unwell (and running a fever), but firmly myself, back in possession of both my reasoning faculties and my perspective. I was so relieved to find myself returned that I twirled around on the sidewalk outside my house. As I drove to work, the public radio station played what sounded very like a country song, and instead of scowling and forcefully changing the channel, I bopped along in my seat to the banjo and wondered when the trees got so green, the sun so shiny.

I haven’t had an episode like the one that descended upon me this past weekend for quite some time, but I recognized it instantly: whether caused by medication irregularity or emotional whim, these episodes are all alike in their ability to convince me that they will last forever, their ability to strip me of every coping mechanism and bit of faith in myself that I possess. During these episodes I remember hospitals—the time my father spent in them, the weekend I spent in one, and my fear since I was a little girl that I would end up institutionalized. Or worse, that I would build a happy life for myself, and one day, maybe as I was unpacking groceries in my sunny kitchen, madness would swoop grayly down and take me without warning.

It seems amazing that only three days have passed, but that is all it was, and now I am back at my computer, clacking gratefully away.

I think the worst thing about having a mentally ill parent is the fear it has given me. My aunt Marie, who grew up during the Depression, watched her parents continually struggle for money. As a result, she saves things—sugar packets from the tables of restaurants, plastic silverware, department store boxes, ribbon, tinfoil. Growing up, the world must have seemed to her to be a changeable, unreliable place, and I think it did to me as well, but in a different way: I don’t worry about losing my job or my house, I worry about losing my mind. It is this fear, ironically enough, that is at the bottom of my anxiety disorder. I wake in the night, worried about some small thing, or with my heart beating heavily from a dream, and it trips an alarm—I rapidly convince myself that a night of sleeplessness is only the first in a series of events, events that will culminate in me shuffling through a psych ward in my slippers, every moment suffused with the pain of anxiety, my mind unable to hold a single joyful thought. People who say “The only thing to fear is fear itself,” are, I think, missing the point: Isn’t that enough?
I am terrified by the possibility that mental illness might strike me when my children are just old enough to understand what is happening. I am paralyzed by the specter of post-partum anxiety. Most frightening of all is the prospect of becoming suicidal–not that I have ever had a suicidal thought in my life, mind you. But I am afraid of suicide the way other people are afraid of snakes or bears; I think of it as something that happens TO you. Rational or not, I fear it in my bones.

But today I am well, and the moral of the story is never, ever, skip a dose of Lexapro. Better yet, never take Lexapro in the first place—choose something gentler, like Prozac. Oh, how I rue the day I abandoned Prozac! Of course now I can never switch, god help me.

Tonight I will celebrate the gift of my fine, healthy mind with wine and salmon and a Gilmore Girls DVD.
And perhaps a cookie. I think I deserve a cookie.

There were so many possible reasons for me to sniffle, hurk, and finally sob in my car yesterday morning, on the way to work.

It could have been from the heat—it had been over 100 degrees the day before, with humidity that inspired an argument between me and the Actually about whether the air felt more like walking through pudding or like being wrapped in still-damp towels hot from the dryer.
The tears could have been the aftermath of my morning protein shake, a shake that I am certain was one part chocolate soy milk, one part sidewalk chalk, and two parts rancid prime rib.
Or I could have been despondent because I would be spending the workday smelling like a hobo: When I walked to my car, I attributed the dank, mildewy smell wafting through the air to the world at large, via the last night’s rain. It wasn’t until I merged onto the freeway that I realized the source of the odor was my own sleeve, via the shirt I had hung to dry the night before.

But, as it happens, none of these things were the reason for the “I’ll-be-damned-if-I’ll-cry-off-a-perfectly-good-makeup-application” rapid blinking.

I was just so tired of not being pregnant.

I know! I am a little embarrassed even writing it. After all, I was the one who was so gung ho about putting off further reproductive efforts until after the wedding—champagne fountain and all that, you’ll remember. But…But, but, but…

Maybe it started when the empty office across from me was filled, a few weeks ago, with a newly hired attorney—due in September. Possibly it was the realization, as I attempted to rearrange my Bloglines account, that nearly all of my blogging friends are now either pregnant or the parents of real, live babies. It could be the fact that no matter how pointedly I ignore it, the calendar reminds me that I would be getting ready for a first birthday party in a few weeks, if the kid had only had the courtesy to develop a heartbeat.
But none of the things I have listed get at the crux of the matter, which is that I just really, really want to have a child, and I have wanted it for a long time, and it doesn’t matter what caused my sudden backslide into misery. The result is the same: me, not pregnant, ruining my mascara as I hurtle down the road, hiccupping.

I have dozens of reasoned yet passionate explanations for why I want children, someday. What continues to puzzle me is that lurching, knife-in-the-sternum feeling that every month I wait is one month too many. Aside from all the obvious ways that wanting a child is different from wanting something else–like, say, a book contract or a pony–the sense of urgency seems to me to be unique. There are times at which I find my desire to have children, right this very minute, completely mystifying. Sometimes it seems that the part of me that is perfectly content to wait until the perfect time arrives to commence childrearing is an entirely different species than the part of me that cries every time I get my period. Sometimes I tire of the Sybil-esque switching from one position to the next—wait, don’t wait, wait, don’t wait.

Today I feel much better, but I do have an appointment at my clinic on the 18th. Yes, I am slinking back to Dr. Doctor with my tail between my legs (which will probably make it difficult for her to conduct the exam—BWAhaha!)
I’m not really sure why I’m going. Our plan was two quick IUIs next summer before moving straight to IVF in the fall. Even on that extended timeline it is somewhat of a mystery how we will finance IVF—there is no way, financially, for us to do so any sooner than we had planned. If I were ovulating on Metformin we could try a smattering of natural cycles in the interim, but HA! HA HA HA HA HA!
Ahem.
Gracious, I am like a sulky teen today, what with the whining. I might as well stomp my wee foot for emphasis.

I no longer remember where I was going with this post, except to ask—do any of you ever feel baffled by the strength of your desire for children? Just utterly flummoxed by the inability of some part of you to be patient and listen to reason?
Also: Do you think my RE’s office has a bridal registry?