Existential

Very tired and weak today; and a certain amount of confusion, trying to negotiate with messages and phone calls from family and friends. Some of their confusion (as opposed to mine) is understandable; when I was in the hospital a number of my colleagues visited me, and I was talkative and cheerful – at least for the most part; the increased medical uncertainty, the physical weakness, the existential panic of the past few days hadn't set in yet, and I think most of my colleagues decided I was fine and they needn't worry. Then I started to feel worse – weaker, more worried....

I'm finding it difficult to cue people as to how they are expected to react: is this serious, am I panicking, what's going on? My message to visitors in the hospital was, at first, just a kind of 'war story': no biggie, don't worry, it's serious but I survived. Then I got more tired and less sanguine toward the end of the hospital visit... and now I just can't manage people at all, I don't have the energy.

Some are reacting with concern, figuring out that something serious has happened and I'm truly frightened. (And many of them know that, after more than two decades with AIDS, I'm not easily frightened about my health.) And then I can manage their concern... which many express by phone, asking for explanations that... well, I'm not always feeling quite up to giving, or repeating. Partly because I really don't know what to tell them: should I be reassuring, or – but what else is there?

This must be some of the withdrawal that old people experience when they are ill or weak, and can't always be articulate or entertaining about it. It is difficult, though – people are busy; and as someone who lives alone, it's hard to know how much to involve them in my worries and concerns, given that some of those worries may be exaggerated panic reactions in any case.

I feel like an old soldier, tough and unafraid of a host of dangers, suddenly confronted with something unexpected, something unknown, and filled with fear because it is outside his training... or perhaps I am merely like a dog in a dogfight, turning and yowling at the discovery that yet another dog has bitten him in the butt.

***

The downstairs neighbors are playing some sort of singing games, imitating pop songs, but only with their voices: it is actually charming in a way – but it had me disoriented and alarmed when it woke me at around 11:30 pm: are they magic rituals, is something weird going on? Well, it's just singing – and not unpleasant singing: actually, culturally, it seems a remarkably innocuous and cheerful thing to do, to get together on a weekend and sing pop songs.

But my first impressions, of incomprehensible magic, of rituals and drones, of something strange and eldritch going on in the room beneath me, are still with me, making it hard to sleep.... Do people who have had a stroke, and been left with more confused brain functions than I currently have (such as, as my sister reminded me today, my mother), hear things this way? Does the world become magical, threatening, more possible and open, but also more threatening, more complicated?

And if it were... is there a magic that could help me now?

Comments

[Liz King]

Paul, you are so eloquent, and I appreciate your reflections on what you are going through – which many of us may face sometime. Thanks you for reporting out from that scary hallway you are walking down at the moment. I'm looking forward to seeing you back in the living room, though.