Sickly

By Beck

This week saw some Medical Excitement for me – I phoned the local clinic, because I’d had severe chest pains for several days and my ARM had gone numb and that was it, I was having a heart attack, and the local clinic was like GO TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM RIGHT NOW so I did.

Heart attack! I thought. Heart attack at 37!

But it wasn’t a heart attack. It was an inflammation of the chest lining, which hurts but is not all THAT serious, and my arm was numb because I was hyperventalating, which you’d think I’d have noticed. And I am sick but I am getting better and not feeling too awful, all things considered.

When I nearly died that time – four years ago now – I came home with this sense that however much longer I had with my kids was a gift, was time that I very nearly didn’t have. But going to the hospital on Tuesday, I felt very achingly that this was not enough time, that I would always be greedy for more. And yet if I had been told four years ago when I was sick that I would have four more years, I would have been elated, four years spreading before me like an unearned gift, time to spread myself into my children’s memories. 

But I am – more or less – fine. We get used to things, and we expect to have them forever and my future stretches sullenly in front of me. And I am amused by how this sense of being lucky and blessed fades away and gets replaced with the dishes I have to wash and the sheets that need changing and the infernal litterbox. My heart aches, a bit, to know how quickly I am ungrateful, how quickly I forget.

And now I am going to go cuddle up with my hot water bottle and continue feeling sorry for myself and maybe – maybe – a bit lucky, too.