Hospital-iversary

This time last year I was in the hospital. I was in so much pain that I would shake and whimper, which disturbed even the friends who'd come to help me through it.

These hospital-iversaries are never fun, because it never feels like something that's behind me. Just because I survived it a year ago, doesn't mean I won't be in the same situation again sometime soon.

I know because I've been here before. Literally, too: I am writing this across the street from the New York ER that I entered two and a half years ago.
I sit at the Mexican restaurant that my visitors would frequent.... I'm never able to eat when I'm in the hospital, and after a week of that, I could always smell the restaurant's scent that permeated into my friends' clothes.

I'd look out of that hospital window on the 8th floor, and watch the little people down below doing their little people things. Picking up after their dogs, wiping the snow off their cars.....menial tasks, but ones I longed for instead of being poked and prodded and pained.

I've always said there's a part of you that has to choose to heal. To be healthier, to leave your sickness behind like it's a terrible boyfriend.

And so here I am, eating the forbidden food if the healthy, one of the little people, doing those little people things; on the eve of once again being trapped in a tower too high up for my hair to reach the ground.

And I don't feel healthier. I've tried to leave my sickness, but today I went to a medical appointment in the same office as oncology.  People who look death in the eyes each day, and today I met their eyes as well. I face pain daily not death, but I recognized their gazes. The feeling that the sickness is in control, we're just passengers praying our genetic and circumstantial seatbelts will be enough to protect us.

I wish I could go one day without having to notice my health. And maybe that's the issue: I no longer believe that to be possible.

So something needs to change. I'm taking care of myself, I don't need to be surrounded my nurses and doctors, I'm eating, I'm doing my little people menial tasks, and still- I want more.
So today I am deciding to find out what that is and go after it.

And that is a decision fitting for the temporal and geographic anniversaries of not feeling in control.
I am choosing to believe again that it's possible.



(Photo of the food to come)