A premonition

I think my last blog post was a premonition, a message from the future, because oh my friends and bunny rabbits and pages and sages and wise pebbles and my friends, I had a fall. A smear to the ground. A syncope. 

Sunday night I reposed upon the couch as per usual in my post chemo blur, waiting for the clouds to clear. But I was more flat, more like a cooling bowl of soup no one had blown on for a long time, more like an old congealing yogurt than usual. As I had said only a little while earlier on my blog, I felt much more flat and depleted that I thought I should have felt that day. I wanted to be planning my post chemo party and getting ready for a brighter future. But I didn't feel like it.

I glared upon the Olympics. I drank tea. I ate my traditional burnt toast. In a moment of forced cheer I decided to sip a Negra Modelo beer, hoping that it would make me feel more Olympian, avian, human. I took a sip, then another. It was cold and good.

Then.

A poison dart from across the veil of life pierced me and I was instantly plunged into cold boiling hot galloping ski jumping heart beats and I gasped - could not breathe or think. My heart was rocketing up up up faster and faster and I felt out of my body - in an instant. I tried to feel my pulse - I could not know how. I tried to talk to alert Mike that I needed help. Everything got black and webby with huge gaping Swiss cheese grey holes of smoke. I tried to get up and fell, laying my face on the cold floor. I was overwhelmed with sickness and doom and fear. I tried to get up again. 

I woke to my children crying and Mike over me. My head was on the wood floor, it was blessedly cold. The webs descended. Sirens were coming, my baby was crying and my only thought, even more than survival, was - do not let my children fear. My eyes closed. Men surrounded me and lifted me, pricked me and bled me, carried me and took me. 

"Often she dreamt she had two wings, and one was frightened, and one was happy."

Erin Bow

What did I know? No thing. 

Where did I go? To a dream.

Where am I? In a room under watch.

What did I know? I was falling.

What was I? A blue bird, a paper doll.

I was lifted and carried and strapped and pierced and bled and driven and bundled and touched and oxygenated. I submitted. I arrived at an ER Sunday evening dark. I was admitted (to Harvard!? No. To the world of real writers? No. Somewhere? Yes.) I am still here. I had what's called syncope - passing out, but they don't know why for certain, so want to be careful. Want to make sure my heart is ok. Chemo drugs can be bitchy to the heart in all ways - romantically, physically, emotionally, hilariously, absurdly. A wise kind doctorman from a wise kind continent said "sudden onset syncope can be notorious" so he wants to watch me. My new heavy metal band: Notorious Syncope.

I don't need anything.

I'm waiting.

I'm patient.

Literally.

My family is ok. We are all ok. My friends and family thank you again for your love. I hope to move past all this soon. I'll go slowly don't worry.

But I wonder what I knew.

MARGARET ATWOOD

Foretelling the Future

It doesn't matter how it's done,

these hints, these whispers:

 

whether it is some god

blowing through your head

as through a round bone

flute, or bright

stones fallen on the sand

 

or a charlatan, stringing you

a line with bird gut,

 

or smoke, or the taut hair

of a dead girl singing.

 

It doesn’t matter what is said

 

but you can feel

those crystal hands, stroking

the air around your body

till the air glows white

 

and you are like the moon

seen from the earth, oval and gentle

and filled with light.

 

The moon seen from the moon

is a different thing.

"Yesterday the bird of night did sit,
Even at noon-day, upon the market-place,
Hooting and shrieking."
(Julius Caesar, 1.3) 

Shakespeare