Happy endorphins float through my body on and off all day
and night.
This sense of joyful mental well-being has never been as
consistent in my life as the last few months. Even though I projectile vomited my breakfast
this morning, even though I can’t sleep through the night, even though I grieve
on the couch with Ben when we mentally prepare to go to the Royal Women’s for
brain checkups.
It’s a three stranded cord, this joy.
Being on the brink of something new, after the longest,
dreariest, waiting season of my life.
The magic of feeling a tiny human move within me all day
long.
And something most people usually have: blood flowing.
These
years with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome have been faint, weak,
powerless. I’ve been living half strength, like a watery apology of a cup of
hot chocolate. Full bodied, full creamed, or shall I write normal....I lost the memory of what that felt like. I knew my
autonomic system was dysfunctional, I could rattle off my wordy diagnosis, but
I couldn’t recall how I was supposed to feel. I wondered sometimes if I was a hypochondriac.
How much of my inability to do things was physical, and how much was mental? I
wondered if my aversion to hanging out the washing and cleaning the shower was
more laziness than chronically low blood pressure. I wondered if my default
position of asking Ben to bring something to the couch for me was a deep
growing slothfulness.
And then my blood volume increased in the second trimester, because I was growing a
baby. Standing up, the most taken for granted of abilities, became easy. There
is no blackness, no crouching to the ground as I wait for blood to reach my
head. I lift my arms up to the washing line, and I don’t feel like I am ebbing
away. I took my first bath in four years, and I didn’t start to pass out, so I
started to take them multiple times a week, for the joy of it. I don’t do
intense cardio, and yet I can still stand and walk. I go and buy the groceries
for the first time in years, because I can stand in a queue, I can stand in fluorescent
lights. The blood doesn’t drain from my organs, leaving me a quickly wasting
shell.
The lady at the checkout saw the load I was carrying, and presumably
my baby bump, and said, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you standing there with all
that stuff. You can just put in on the counter while you wait.” I am grateful
for the kindness of strangers to me while I’m pregnant, but the cruelty of
invisible illness is acute. The bump I have out the front, which induces the
compassion of society, it is no trouble to me. I have been far far sicker while
not pregnant; while standing there slim and normal to the eye, no offers of
seats or help. Because no one can tell that my blood had settled in my legs and
my head is light. No one can see that I feel like lukewarm and woefully weak tea, that I am silently
disabled and there is nothing I can do about it.
I want to bottle this blood, to feel like this always.
Blood is a life spring, invisible and essential. I don’t know how long it will
last after I give birth, or when I will return to my watery, strengthless,
invisible reality. I don’t want to go back there, to live grey and drained. I
don’t have the words to describe the bleakness of the normality I am on vacation
from. All I can think is, if you can stand unsupported and not crumple like a
paper bag, life is sweeter than you know.
For now, that is me. The life I’m growing inside me is also giving
me life.
So much icing on the cake.
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