Sickness in Limbo
by M-X Marin
“The things of this world
exist, they are;
you cannot refuse them.”Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Through the nascent storm, walk away from the river. It’s my first winter near my grandfather’s grave, on occupied territory first named Gespe’gewa’gi, seventh district of Mi’gma’gi, the ancestral and unceeded territory of the Mi’gmaq, later christened Sainte-Anne-Des-Monts by my ancestors. Seven-thousand inhabitants nestled along the south bank of the St-Lawrence 49° North. Here, on a clear day I can just make out the northern shoreline. Here, I’ve learned that the wind is a fickle dance partner. From the occulted beach, turn south and pace a side street amid bluster, foot follows foot uphill in the snowdrifts, towards the CLSC perched above town. A reception clerk notifies the nurse of my arrival and I go to the waiting room. I'm the only patient at first, but others soon arrive.
Before the year of remote friendships, in a limbo reserved for the sick, I’m comforted by broken bread shared with friends caught in their own ouroboros. Each chronically healing body differs in its minutiae, yet sickness breeds a hearth around which to gather and keep warm. I reach out towards this fire, grateful for company that is not charity, for those whose “I'm sorry” is not pity. No pretense, no brave faces among the sick. No imperative to cater to the comfort of those who believe they are forever healthy. I wager that for one who knows that healing is cyclical, pandemic’s disruption of time may feel familiar.
A pandemic year has shown me that discussions of illness are no longer necessarily concerned with the need to convince or remind the temporarily healthy that bodily certainty, the self-assured confidence of perpetual health, is illusory. The news media has led a thorough campaign to instill fear, breed anxiety, and perpetuate the poisonous narrative that is the hero’s journey. From healthy, to sick, soon to be healthy again: disease shall be overcome. Illness must be overcome. So goes the story. Yet amidst a turmoil of organs, unsettled feuds remain. The calendar lies in tatters at my feet, torn pages unstitched as despair and hope enmesh a spiral dance whirlwind shreds my abdomen while delirium burns around me, fear succeeds joy, and, impatient to get a move on, I dream of spring. I await results, self-reparation. I repent at the altar of medicine, back to the pills after unsupervised cessation of treatment. I considered the immediate alternatives and found the pharmakon I know will at least mitigate symptoms, if never heal. My intestines weep red and I wipe away tears alongside feces. Now is not the time to gamble. In the clinic’s waiting room, I sit patiently in a black plastic chair supported by a stainless-steel frame, separated from the others visible through bolted plexiglass sheets. Eyes drift through the space, find, postered on the wall, a PSA about STI tests. Attention rests on the showcase of lovers in ecstatic touch.
The global immune response to crisis throws into sharp relief that healing is a learned skill. Needled for a thousand blood draws, I’ve come to reject the fiction of illness. I devise strategies for a sick life, a life of healing. There is no plotted course, no long-term plans, and illness is not the only story. I remind myself that healing goes on even now, that there is no teleological cure-all, that inner awareness, rest, and time off are necessary tools for survival. I am simultaneously responsible for my own touch-starved self and those few with whom I conspire, as I strive to tune into the resonance by which I may make my way my own. A voice down the hall: “M-X Marin?” I pull my gaze away from the illustrated longing and towards an old nurse named Thomas, whose steady hands are the only human touch I feel each winter week. We talk about the weather as he draws blood, cheerful and adept with the butterfly needle. This season, so he says, “has been exceptional, truly. Exceptionally warm, and brief, and bereft of snow. Trust me, this is nothing.”
Healing begins when I listen to the flesh. Then, breathe with the world and find myself at home within the wave of ongoing creation. Stand still by the estuary at the mouth of the river Sainte-Anne before it pours into the Saint-Laurent. Ice shatters, sends waves up my spine, and I know that the invisible flows beneath the rustle of snow are the same movements felt in my veins and heard in the cracks of the ice. Warmed by the sun under too much turquoise sky, I give thanks for the chance to live such beauty another day, another night. Perhaps COVID-19 will “end,” perhaps the news cycles and feeds will move on. What then? Will the transience of the body itself have gained any respect? Spring turns to summer and solar rays are talismanic but no protection against insect bites. Deep in the forests of the Bas-Saint-Laurent, stiff limbs shed fatigue as they awaken to use. Months go by without a blood test. Hands learn to hammer metal and till the dirt, worries are few. Black flies are not all avoidable, but plantain leaf grows in poor soil and makes an effective poultice. I learn to walk, tread through the fields of foxtail and couch-grass, attuned to the pollinators whose hum guides my step with care so as not to crush blossoms underfoot. Healing is of the dirt and water, my breath, my bones. Healing is the love my heart sings for my body’s proteins, thrombocytes, cytokines. Its ligatures, its fats, sugars, carotids, spinal liquidity, and all the microbes with whom I share this organism. Healing is that peculiar sensation in the optic nerve confronted with sublimity, an old growth forest or an open sky. The muscular jouissance of a footstep. Healing is felt in collaboration with the chemical agonists at work on my spine's marrow. I have so much to learn from the health and sickness of the trees, the birds, the frogs. The creak of limbs 50 feet above, the withering bark, the barren branches. Autumn, the black tar spot on fallen maple leaves, the first scent of snow. A raven croaks above. The black bird is telling me to pray, to notice the decay.
Battered by winter, it is unclear whether fatigue is physical or existential. Perhaps it is both. Into the vial my blood flows, examined for deficiency in order to track my risk of bleeding. I am an aquifer from which Thomas’s needle extracts groundwater. My diagnosis? Hematologists call it chronic immune thrombocytopenia, but sickness extends beyond blood platelets and is not contained within such essentializing. Sickness is chthonic. Sickness is to be lived not as something to be cured, escaped, climbed out of, but as a maze from which there is no exit, no future. Healing is a labyrinth. Healing is acknowledgement that Aceso is too the daughter of Asclepius. Treating such complexities with words, in an attempt to cure pathology according to numbers on a chart, all this is too abstract, while healing and immunity are anything but metaphor. Still, my blood specialist treats my case entirely over the phone. Without that imperative to strive for a mythical life free from illness, a sick existence breeds wondrous possibility. I am armed with fresh clay through which I mold my body; reams of blank paper upon which I compose symphonies for my ligaments. The possibilities are not so remote. I choose to live. Perhaps eden sank to grief, yet presence flourishes still. I am not in a circle of hell, but a quiet place, a simple place. Not the void, just somewhere to gather and sing songs.
Thomas withdraws the needle, affixes a small bandage to the leaky prick, secures it with plastic medical tape. I will wash off the gummy residue for three days. I thank him and say, “see you next week.” Back outside, the blizzard has thickened. Across the hospital parking lot, I can't see the water in the distance. On a clear day the visibility stretches for miles, rounding the horizon. Now, I just glean the outline of an oversized, white-painted wooden cross planted at the cliff’s edge; a martyr’s memorial. So, I’m back to the walk, foot after foot, down towards the river, north. Down the same path I followed up, arm gently cradled to staunch the pinpoint wound, curious whether today it will leave a bruise. I do not refuse sickness, I do not refuse the ongoing collapse of so much I take for granted. I strive for love in limbo and accept that which I cannot control, to better make meaning from those minuscule decisions that shape each day. I am doing things in the stillness. I do all I can with the silence. The best with what is, right now. Any answers come only with time, unbidden, like old friends. No right, no wrong, only intuition. Still I heal, take pills, and attempt to make sense of this bodily enigma. I know I am not alone in this, even if isolated in the cold.
ABOUT THE CREATOR
M-X Marin is learning to devote the rest of their life to living in quietude among loved ones. Writing is for them a passion, an archive, a mode of self-defense. Their homepage is https://mxmarin.ca. You can reach them directly via email: mx[at]mxmarin.ca.