Month: May 2018

Try And Try And Try Again – – Or Not

Gardens in early spring are broken, dry, and brown, but if you look underneath the leaf litter and last year’s mulch, you’ll find green.

It’s the same every year. I snap off the old dead stems and seed heads and toss them into the compost where they rot themselves into nourishment for the new florae. I try to clear the way and clean the slate. I add new plants, divide the ones too big for their own good, and remove those taken by the cold.

Every year, I start over.

But front to back, and side to side, my plot is filled with stubborn invaders.

Gooseneck loosestrife is lovely, but I didn’t research it, just stuck it in the ground delighted by its drooping cluster of dainty, white blooms. I soon learned it’s not meant for containment but needs its own space and will choke the life out of everything else to get it. An apt name, it is on the loose and causing me immense strife.   

There’s also common speedwell – – not native to North America, it’s certainly made itself at home.  Every spring, I think I’ll just give in and call it my ground cover. But, every spring, I tug and tug and tug it out, knowing my efforts are futile. It’s long runners will produce new shoots faster than I can say, “shoot.” I apply mulch like a pillow to a face and hope against hope it won’t resurface.

So, my gardening season begins in a sort of panic. Pre-Lyme, I was a butterfly – – fluttering from task to task; soaking it all up, productive and happy. But, I’ve become a caterpillar. I inch along, stay low to the ground, always seated. I pull the garden cart – – two steps then rest, two steps, then rest.

I am defeated before I start. It’s a simple fact.

I know gardens are never finished, even for the healthy. That used to make me happy, but now I’m more acutely aware that my growing season is limited and feel pressure to get it done; make it perfect. I want to make the most of what I have, but spring and summer outpace me. I can’t keep up anymore.

Gardens are places of constant change and perpetuation. They’re filled with decay, death, and disease, but they heal, even resurrect.  A garden can be suffocated by alien life; its residents killed by ignorant gardeners who don’t bother to learn what their plants need.

But, they endure. They not only withstand fire and freezing but rise new and vibrant from the ash and snow.

Gardens keep trying.

I am also in a perpetual state of succumbing to disease and decay, then standing again in healing and new growth; succumbing, healing – – always starting over. There are days, when dry, brown, and brittle are all I know and days of flourishing, of feeling bright, full of color and hope.

But, this year’s different. After four years of treatment, and at the risk of being overrun, I decided to stop. I told my doctor I was taking some time off, that I didn’t want to spend the warm days as a patient, keeping appointments, and swallowing pills, or worse, those brown, acrimonious tinctures so popular among Lyme-killers. I have had the same symptoms for a long time, without change, so I need to think.

Can I live with some dry twigs? Develop a rapport with these invaders? Can we function as one?

Do I have to keep snapping off the brittle remains of my old self, making room for new shoots only to find them dead again? Must I continue plucking and pulling at invisible bacteria, viruses, parasites only to find them alive because their roots are many and strong? No amount of pruning or pesticide has destroyed my vermin. Can I just call them my cover? Pretend they belong?

Is it possible to simply look away?

I mean, they aren’t unobtrusive.

The fatigue crushes. Pushing a spade into the earth is not always possible.  Somedays, I’m too weak and  worn-out.

I bend to plant, then raise up gasping for air, heart pounding, hand to chest wondering if it’s a heart attack or just a Lyme-fake. Can I ignore this?

The depression is dark, an immovable mass; the anxiety like pieces of paper in a blender, swirling, coming close, but never hitting the blades. Some days in the garden, I spend in numb defeat, ruled by blight, sitting in slumped surrender. Other days, I cry, knowing it’s too much, and like me, will never be what it was. How do I keep planting hope when I’m buried? How do I take root and find peace, when I’m scattered?

The roaming, restless pain can’t find a place to land. It rears its head without warning, subsides without a hint. It aches, stabs, stings, burns, spasms, pounds, pierces, throbs. Sometimes, my insides are a bug zapper, overrun by bugs, constantly sending useless zings through my neurons; firing without apparent purpose and with miserable aim.

My brain is another world, where the barometric pressure is prone to dramatic shifts. It swells with damp clouds; blooms with a disorienting mist that steals words, thoughts, the ability to spell, converse, or feel things. Can I be fruitful in a stupor?

As I yank speedwell, and ponder what to do, a tiny green butterfly stops for a sip from one of the relentless weeds. I smile. My nemesis, is this little pollinator’s vast spread of sugary nectar. I’ve heard it before and have said it myself – – weeds have purpose. Struggle and suffering feed our character, nourish our souls, and point us to God. I could end this post on this inspirational note; could list the benefits of trials and the hidden blessings of chronic disease. In my writer’s brain, the butterfly is metaphor for mind and heart; for the way they discover sweetness in weeds. 

But, that rosy conclusion wouldn’t be an honest picture of how I feel, not right now. From my little stool, in my big garden, in front of me, I see a small circle, cleared of weeds, filled with multi-hued snapdragons. But if I look left, right, in front of, or behind those flowers, I see speedwell. I see gooseneck loosestrife. I see my perennials looking for air, for light, and finding little of either. I see small gain and huge loss. Clearing this circle was costly and painful, and it won’t last. The dragon slayers are waiting to move in.

This ring of frilly, radiant dragons represents a few good days and some small victories, but mostly, treating Lyme has been like pulling weeds with long, stubborn roots that worm through my body, finding and taking everything. Sometimes, it seems treatment only clears the way for a new batch as soon as the medicine stops.

A successful garden, free of weeds and pests, starts with healthy soil; invites good soldiers – – ladybugs, toads, spiders – – to stand at the ready and make quick work of those bugs that would do harm. It has just enough hours of sunlight to warm the ground without thieving all moisture. It catches the rain and draws it toward the roots; doesn’t hold it on the surface in pools and puddles that corrode.

My “soil,” my internal bed, isn’t healthy. I’ve been looking for green, digging in, doing the right things – – diet, exercise, sleep, meditation, prayer. Ideally, these actions should feed my defenders – – those good bacteria and antibodies. They should open a path for nutrients, supplements, and tinctures to reach the places where they can do their promised work.

But these things work until they don’t. Sometimes, they just don’t. And that’s the problem.

This disease keeps finding its springtime. It keeps starting over, forcing me to do the same. I just don’t know if I can keep it up, keep pulling internal weeds, when to the left and right and all around I see illness – – a snaking, complex, foreign system – – that has made itself at home and thrives at my expense.

This disease will never be finished. I know this, and I know that means my efforts to vanquish it will never be either. It’s one of the first things I learned about Lyme – – that remission and maintenance are the goals, not cure. But, I feel so weary thinking of a life spent clawing out small circles of open space, a life of choosing, over and over again, to try and get done what I cannot. That choice, repeated many times, is wearing me down.

Of course, I won’t give up my garden – – not yet. I’ll do the best I can and try to be content when my efforts to eliminate speedwell or all that strife fail. I’ll try not to look at them, but instead focus on the plants I choose – – the ones I’ll nurture. I’ll look at butterflies when they show up, if only for a moment.

But, my body . . . I don’t know. I am losing the drive to clear the way and clean the slate and am, perhaps, at a place of surrender to the reality of more weeds than snapdragons, more shade than sun, more gasping than breathing. I am understanding that I may have to dig a little deeper to find the green and that I may not be strong enough to do it.

Lyme Disease keeps trying.

 

Lyme feels like this.

 

Psalm 119:49-50 Remember your word to your servant, in which you have made me hope. This is my comfort in my affliction, that your promise gives me life.

 

Tired (Sick)

 

“I’m just so tired.”

You’ve heard us say it, if you’re still listening, maybe hundreds of times. We say it with furrowed brow, slumped shoulders, and shaking head as if, after all these years, we’re still bewildered by this level of fatigue.

It is confounding, after all – – this weariness. It doesn’t feel like a part of us – – not a true part. It’s an interloper posing as a piece of our original self; an implant, installed into our being, not by an alien race, but by a tiny tick, or a flea, a mosquito – – where we get it is actually a matter of debate, even though you may have heard differently. But all we know, is that we are succumbing to the invader. We can’t help it. This is not a fatigue that can be soothed by sleep or erased by caffeine. It cannot be swayed by a brisk walk in fresh air.

This lassitude is as thick as tar, coating our limbs, drip, drip, dripping into our brains; sucking at our feet, pulling them toward the ground – – like we’ve been given a super dose of gravity. Sometimes, it’s a dead weight that sits on us. Other times, it’s a quivering mass that quakes until our insides tremble and we are muddled; desperate for sleep yet wired for wakefulness. We may be walking, but we consider crawling – no really, we think we may have to crawl to make it around the next corner, or one more block. But we know if we get that close to the ground, we may give up altogether. Cement, dirt, grass – – it won’t matter. It will all look like a place of rest to us; more appealing than taking another step.

We have lost seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks of our lives to sleep; to heads full of fog. And still, we are tired and sleepy. We have fallen asleep on the job, in our kitchens with our heads on the hard, cold countertop, in the middle of conversations, in parking lots, or at the side of the road between errands. But oddly, not in our beds at night. We have only quantity, not quality.

Our heads are giant, dead boulders, and our necks can’t hold them up any longer. Our eyes are not seeing what’s right in front of us anymore. Our ears, through all the incessant ringing – – the year-round chorus of spring peepers – – they hear only a muffled, far away version of whatever it is you are saying. Sorry. We have slipped away. A people possessed, we have followed, bleary-eyed, our little intruders into the land of nod; like Dorothy in the poppy field except we our forced to remain. There is no Scarecrow or Tin Man to carry us out.

We haven’t done anything to warrant so great an exhaustion. We stand up and feel tired. We sit down with a sigh, as if we’d just completed a long run or a hard day’s work. Of course, we haven’t. Most of us can’t do much, but still, we imagine never getting out of our chair again, just melting into the fabric. Oh, sweet inertia!  Sure, someone might sit on us, but at least they won’t ask us to do anything.

“Let’s go for dinner and a movie!” you say. Inside, we cringe. An evening out? After all the hours that came before? After all the hours that have already chipped away at our strength, energy, ability to think or speak, or comprehend? Pay close attention, and you’ll notice a slight widening of our eyes, a hesitation in our response. Our feet shift as we wring our hands. We are panicking. You heard that right. Panicking. We finally manage to utter a, “Sorry-we-can’t-make-it,” then we may try honesty; tell you we don’t feel well. Or maybe we’ll manage to summon a concocted excuse from the murky, sludge we keep calling a brain. You in turn, may smile and continue to plead, “C’mon, it’ll be good for you – – it’ll cheer you up!” People keep telling us what will make us feel better as if we haven’t had this disease for four, ten, twenty years; as if we don’t know what will make us feel worse. But, maybe we’ll get lucky, and you’ll remember that we told you we have difficulty concentrating even in silent spaces, or that we have tinnitus that makes the noise of a theater unbearable. Then you’ll see us as we are and offer an easier option, something without crowds or noise; something that doesn’t last too long.

Please don’t misunderstand, we know you mean well; that you care for us. That’s why we feel torn; terrified we’ll be included, terrified we’ll be left out. Sometimes we go because the latter is our biggest fear, other times we stay because we’re bone-weary and don’t care if we’re ever a part of humanity again.

We just want a real timeout, a rest that revives. We nap and nap and nap to no avail. Our nighttime sleep is so full of vivid and odd dreams that we sit up in the morning wondering how we got into our bed, convinced we were out all night. Maybe we were – – our minds aren’t right, you know. We check our feet for mud, our bed clothes for twigs or grass.

You think you know what we mean, by ‘tired’ or ‘sleepy’. As a matter-of-fact, that’s what you say, “I know what you mean. I’ve been so sleepy before that I just couldn’t keep my eyes open.”

You, thankfully, cannot hear our mental response, “No, I know what you mean.” We could suggest you swallow a box of Unisom to get a clearer idea, but that could be a danger to you, so we just nod in agreement while we disagree.

We want you to know that when we say, “I am so tired,” you would be wise to translate that as, “I am so sick.” We are tired because we are sick. We can’t do the kinds of days anymore that fill the body with satisfaction and lead to a well-earned, healthy exhaustion that, in turn, produces a fruitful sleep. Our weariness doesn’t come to us, it doesn’t grow as the day wears on. It just is. Those invaders I mentioned require energy, and they think nothing of taking ours.

So, we are tired.

Because we are sick.

Lyme feels like this.