Stroke

So: the news is – I never had the flu; I had, of all things, a stroke.

A stroke which fortunately left me with very little damage; for about two days I had trouble understanding and remembering things, but that has cleared up completely (as far as anyone can tell); and now there is a blank patch on my eyesight, at the upper right. Which may heal.

This is just about the smallest possible thing of this kind that can happen... but it is still terrifying – especially in my mood tonight: I'm sorry to say I'm really getting a sense of what this could mean for me, that at the age of 52 I could be susceptible to losing a part of my mind/brain/senses. When I first arrived at the hospital ten days ago, they were clear that the stroke was a function of one of my HIV medications; but for the past couple of days they've become suddenly less sure of that – it seems to have come out of nowhere, unsupported by personal or family history, or medical pattern, or probability. Just this... thing.

As the uncertainty of it seeps into my awareness, as I've realized how much more uncertain it makes my life – one which is already ludicrously uncertain: as though I needed this possibility, in addition to all the other disastrous possibilities/probabilities of AIDS, hepatitis C, living alone in a country where I'm not a citizen – I've felt suddenly even more disoriented about my own future, which has been uncertain for more than two decades: why, then, study with the Jungians, and get excited about a second career? Why bother to write anything, work on the AIDS book, deal with the drudgery of department meetings and undergraduate teaching and plans? Why do anything at all?

The worst prospect wouldn't even be a stroke where my brain turned completely to mush: it would only be, say, making it impossible for me to read, write, teach – no, I really can't go on speaking of this, it's too disturbing.

Honestly: is there not a point where I have had enough uncertainty in my life, in my future?...

And of course social workers keep coming back to the peculiar frustration that I live alone: that, despite having managed the HIV patient group for much of the past six years (which barely covered up a complicit plot by the group's organizers that I would end up partnered as a result), I'm still here alone, and various nurses and doctors saying, Oh, is there no one who can help you with...?...

I'm sorry to be so upset; I've been more sanguine (now there's a word that has new edges) about this for much of the past two weeks. But, just now, it feels like the most absurd and capricious of possibly-maybe, maybe-not-but-who-knows, demi-death-sentences....

Aargh. More existentialism than can be borne.

Comments

[Liz]

Why bother? Because you can. This is a call to seize the day, not hide under the covers.

But having watched both my parents' decline into incompetence, I have to say I toss and turn under those covers with similar fears (just not shoved in my face quite so rudely).

Bless your heart, my dear, and your tricky, faithless brain.

[Dave Robinson]

Why bother? I recall:
‘Grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not harbor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not absent from the negative whole.’
(Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 377–8.)

Hey, I am here if you feel I can help.