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Mortal

I am feeling mortal.

I am in my post-pneumonia phase where people say, “Well, you LOOK great.” This is round four, so it’s not a surprise. It just took two years this time, instead of two months. In 2003 it took two months.

There are various things feeding in to this. A friend my age has had a stroke. “NO!” I think, “TOO YOUNG!” The death of the actor from friends bothers me mostly because he’s nearly a decade younger. Drugs and alcohol shorten the lifespan by quite a bit. A study checking for five things: inactivity, drugs, tobacco, alcohol and very heavy weight showed that the people with all five tended to die 20 years sooner than the people with none. That study was at least a decade ago if not two. So cross off about 4 years for any of those, sigh. A cardiologist recently said tobacco is worse than alcohol and now I am wondering how much worse? And how do they measure that? Tobacco kills more but serious alcohol use is a lot faster at killing people. Both of them affect all body systems: GI, heart, lungs, brain, bone marrow, liver, kidneys, and so forth. Even skin.

Also, the last lung test was still abnormal even though I am off oxygen and feeling mostly good. I am having muscle trouble though. Every morning I wake with really bad pain in both thighs and whatever muscles I’ve been trying to build. This has been going on since at least August. Since I think that this is an antibody disorder, it implies that the antibody baseline has risen to the point where my muscles are grumpy and hurt. Alternatively it could be a Long Covid issue: microclots could be clogging the capillaries in the muscles when I exercise and causing hypoxia in muscles, which means they can’t build. Muscle cells are fascinating. When you exercise the cells need more food and build new insulin receptors in the cell wall. So exercise changes the individual muscle cells! How very amazing. My muscles are resisting the build and it is very annoying. There is research going on re the microclots, but there is bleeding risk from the anticoagulants including strokes. So, um, well, I seem to be stuck. It is not stopping me from hiking and dancing and being active but boy does it hurt in the mornings.

This is not very bucolic, is it? I am still attending the Long Covid talks and it is really fascinating and quite scary. It’s just a very very nasty virus. I wish it would calm down. The 1918-1921 influenza really calmed down after three years, but there are no guarantees. Anyhow, at least I can dance!

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: bucolic.

The photograph is taken in Michigan in 2014.

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Ready

My camellia is on the south facing wall of the house and is budded and ready to bloom. It usually blooms here in late January or early February. The seasons confuse me here: I still expect it to be warm by April and it really is not warm then at all. We often see very erratic sun until July fourth, when the sun deigns to shine on us. By then the days are shortening already!

With the climate changing, I don’t know what the camellia will do. We had our record breaking day of 100 degrees Fahrenheit two summers ago. My plum tree had about three plums this year and one rhododendron died slowly over the next year after the heat. It put out blooms last spring but it was cold and cold and cold and it finally just moved on to leaves and died. I did water for the hot two weeks, but it was not enough. What further changes will we see?

For Cee’s Flower of the Day.

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Messy

Everyone I get to know and really become friends with, has a messy life with difficulties. I think we are terribly afraid to admit it, with the curated lives on the place that is not a book but has lots of Faces. I write that all of my patients are smart and they are. I had my own rural family practice for eleven years. My goals were more time with patients and to do good medicine. I succeeded at both. With more time, I could learn a little more about my peoples’ lives. People that I would never suspect of having very messy lives still have them. Does everyone in our culture have estrangements, family that they don’t talk to, parents that they find difficult, friends that they have gotten upset at and abandoned?

In high school my daughter says, “Most of the fights are stupid. Usually someone says something without thinking, even in passing. Person B takes it personally, gets upset, talks about it to others and then person C or D says something back to person A or shuns them. Person A has no idea what is going on and is hurt and upset. It is stupid.”

Adults do this too. I had a friend where I would think about something for a week and then go back to him. “You said this. What did you mean?” Usually he didn’t mean anything or meant something very far from what I was thinking. At least I went to him and did not add person C or D or E to the mix. He said, “You think about it for a WEEK.” Well, that was his own fault, actually, because he can’t tolerate anger. Even if I was upset or hurt, it was still interpreted as anger. Raised in an alcohol household and trained by medicine, I can hide feelings. After a while he could tell when I was chewing on something.

We grow up physically by our mid twenties, but often we don’t grow up emotionally. Especially if relationships are interrupted and colored by drugs and/or alcohol. People miss developmental stages. Everyone is trying to cope as best they can, but I do wish our culture celebrated mature calmness and quiet adulthood, rather than just the wild youth. Wouldn’t that be a change?

If you were to curate your life for something like the site that is not a book and has Faces, what would your ideal be? What do you aspire to? Kindness? Emotional maturity? Peace? My feed has friends, insects, birds, rocks, fossils, funny animal videos and music. I get almost no politics in it. I have not blocked anyone or anything. I try not to friend people I do not know. It is peaceful and a celebration of nature and yes, that is what I would like to curate.

Blessings.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: curate.