failing to breathe

Cool sunlight this final day of February awakened a desire to be outside.  Read that as a quality of being as much as a statement of place.  I wanted to BE outside.  Be the infinite shapes of green leaves—long thin palm strands, vesica pisces shaped oak leaves, fat almost spongy leaves of the (names I know not) plants populating the rim of my patio, the scalloped wide leaves of the hibiscus, the delicate and light leaves of the dragon bamboo...among all the others.  I ventured out with my wee camera, hoping to get a pic or two of maybe my beloved wee dragons but I haven’t seen any in quite awhile.  I hope that means nothing other than my timing is bad.

I’ve been really sick—horrific pain in my throat like swallowing sharp jagged rocks.  I was sure it was strep.  Today my nurse practitioner called to say the culture came back negative.  Then I have found something every bit as painful and difficult to get rid of as strep. 

Ended up going to the ER last night because I couldn’t breathe—my nasal passages had turned to quicksand.  I would swallow and my throat would stick with the glue of post-nasal drip and no air would pass through my nose or mouth and it was harrowing.  Too much stress of trying to get the kids squared away at school...I lost track of what I was doing to get well, time moving at a completely different rate than normal.  Apparently I had begun to consider the saline rinse as the same as gargling and when you over rinse, the ER doctor said, it has the opposite impact.  So there I was wondering what was wrong and just continuing to try to squeeze in a little more saline to open the passage, and all I was doing was making it worse....  Allegra D brought down the swelling and I slept in two hour cycles (every night since Friday or Saturday the longest had been 20 minute cycles).

It terrified me.  There was something i was supposed to do to make it right and I wasn't doing it.  I couldn’t fix it. In fact in abject ignorance and mindlessness I was, in effect, killing myself. What an awakening!  I prayed and it felt like the prayer wasn’t being answered—but of course it was ultimately. Seems annually (if not more frequently) something exceedingly profound and life-altering happens.  How fragile life is, especially our own...and doing something stupid, mindless, out of ignorance, that could somehow alter it forever or even lose it, profoundly disturbed me---but that was all shrouded in wordless fear.

Although there is a persistent hum in my head as if I were aboard a space ship, I feel so very much better today.  Now the search is all about how to prevent this from recurring. 

One more thing...I do not intend to break any copyright laws...just here to share Keat’s poem: 

When I have fears that I may cease to be
    Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
    Hold like rich garners the full-ripened grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starred face,
    Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
    Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
    That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
    Of unreflecting love! — then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.