The Community of the Wistfully Unwell

[Watch the lion cubs for a dose of oxytocin, the love chemical.]

Well, we're definitely not in church - just got up at 10:30.  Which means I took some necessary pills, cleaned last week's newspapers off the kitchen table, and am still on my first cup of coffee, in my robe.  I doubt that we're going to be up to meeting folks for lunch.

Slept a lot yesterday, too.  A night in the ER just takes it out of you at my age.  At least Tom got to go home at 1:00 and get maybe 7 hours of sleep.  But they woke me up every hour until 4:30 for some stupid thing, like my list of meds - which they should have gotten first thing.  I finally got in an observation room and was let to sleep at 4:30.  Interrupted by a very loud girl to take me to get the goddam ultrasound, which is why we were there - as in why is the left foot swollen?  I woke up at 9:00 with a tray beside me of cold coffee, cold white flour pancakes and cold wheat toast.  What are they thinking?  The ER is definitely worse than the regular hospital, and it is not built around your comfort and rest.

When you're young, you miss a night of sleep and you can recover in a day.  This is going slowly. 

Looking forward to Downton Abbey!  This makes my life almost worth living, this and friends, especially Laurie, who e-mails, comments, and plays Words with me.  She is often invalided by back pain herself.  How good it is that we poor invalids found each other and can share our dumb invalid lives online.  The community of the wistfully unwell. 

I am reading this book, I've mentioned it, How to Be Sick.  Toni Bernhard, the author is just permanently very sick following a strange virus, pretty much lives in bed.  Even after years of this she finds herself hoping to be able to attend something important, but flattened by fatigue.  I think that, like me, she hopes she might feel better some day. That's the killer. I am not impressed with glib talk about accepting uncertainty when it comes from someone who is healthy, can work, thinks they have decades ahead of them.  But when Toni talks about it, she knows what it's about.

As for my trip to the ER, the doppler ruled out obstruction by a blood clot or some other mass.  That is a start.  But it feels like a failure, somehow.