It's maddening. Crazy pains and fog and uselessness coming and going as it pleases, with no regard to my schedule or sanity. Like a phantasm, lurking just outside my peripheral mind-vision, refusing to be identified.
A symptom glides in and latches onto me like a vampire bat on a moonless night, catching me all unawares. Once the fog clears I start to learn how to deal with it as best I can, and then, as I start to get a hold on it, it changes and mutates. Sometimes it unlatches and flies away, but almost always after a new one has latched on.
Very rarely, in the last year, I have had brief spats of serenity. When all symptoms have fled. It has always come as more of a shock than the attacks. An uneasy truce of sorts. It hits me like the eye of an infinite storm. The storm undulates wildly all around me constantly, the same eye granting me its vision very seldomly.
And then that peace is ripped away, before I even know what to do with it. Like a day off you cannot even enjoy. More like a 20min lunch break during a hellish work day, and the only food worth getting is 11 min away.
And I can't shake the feeling of this shadowy observer lurking just outside of view. Ranging just on the edge of the fog of war. And he is shuffling these symptomatic cards around like the worst card game ever, dealt with nothing less than devious intentions, stacked from the start.
Playing around with them, moving them as needed. Face down to start with, he subtly bends a corner to show me its true face, then gently lifts it and takes it away. But there was a different card under it the
whole time.
So I am left with this feeling of near discovery at certain points in the cycle, like there's some grand truth under the next card, but it never shows. On the far end, almost the opposite point on the wheel from the calm eye of the storm, stands this maddening edge. And at that moment, I feel like if I tap at the glass just a little harder, I will break thru. But I have no idea if its madness or truth on the other side. Maybe both, or they're the same. And I've tasted both at those points. But just a taste.
And like the strangest of cravings, it is filed and categorized in my mind, never fully forgotten. It's an inevitable conclusion, an ending that's already been written, but not yet read. But I don't know if it's the end of the book or just a very long, convoluted chapter. The only thing to do is just keep reading. I always thought it was more about the story than the ending anyways.
And that is what it's like to live with a chronic disease.
