A couple of summers ago, we visited Rome for the first time. Over the course of a day of exploring, which for some people meant mostly complaining about the heat and how hot it was and also it was hot and we should get gelato (again) (etc.), we kept seeing these neat marble signs on certain walls.
We tried to figure out what they were. (It’s funny but even a few years ago we were less likely to check on our phones than we are now; there would be no tension in this story now since we all would already have our phones out and probably wouldn’t have seen the signs.) Were they from old Rome? What was their story?
Finally, we gave in and looked it up on our phones.
Divieto Di Affissione: “Post No Bills”. The explanation–that it was just a municipal warning not to put up posters and ads on the walls–was considerably simpler and more prosaic than any meaning we’d considered.
My headstone would read something like “Beloved wife and mother. She found complex solutions to simple problems.”
Case in point is what I’m doing right now. I’ve missed writing what’s in my head on a blog for a very long time–probably since I looked up and it had been a long time since I spent more than a few hours away from lying on my bed looking at the ceiling, since I had started storing up energy to do things like take a shower or make a cup of tea. But first, I needed to brainstorm some blog topics and get better versed on current affairs and find my camera.
Then I looked up again and all of those things were still true but I was home after a hospital stay and anyway since I didn’t have a lot of symptoms, just the tiredness and the heaviness and the fogginess, maybe I should just wait until those went away, it could only be a few weeks now until my vein started knitting itself back together, and besides I should decide on a theme, maybe coffee?
Then, weeks later, the pain started.
For a while there was nothing but the pain and feeding the pain the drugs it wanted and then sleeping it all off. I didn’t know it was supposed to hurt. I wasn’t expecting it. When you leave the hospital after a C section they send you home with pain medication. When you leave with VAD they do not. I guess they are waiting to see if pain will suddenly hit you like twin punches to the back of the skull and then just sit with you like a dear friend come to visit, holding your hand all day and night. I guess they are hoping it doesn’t.
Anyhow pain did come to visit and then I had a great reason not to blog because, well, pain was visiting and I was hurting too much to set up an Instagram schedule so although I thought about writing I did not do that because there were too many things to do already, such as dosing out medication 1/2 pill by 1/2 pill and logging all of it in an app because it’s more complicated that way and trying not to think about entire small towns falling to the thing you have thirty of in a bottle.
And the tiredness and the breathlessness and the heaviness and the fogginess were still there, and maybe it would always be there; but what if it wasn’t? What if I woke up one morning and was all better? Wouldn’t I feel silly for having written about it all, accepting any possible sympathy, when there are people with worse problems, people with more pain? So I reminded myself how it would need to be really good writing and applicable to my healthy self so I’d better wait until I got healthy and also until I figured out CSS so I could really customize the website.
Here I am! To recap, it has been six months since I first went to bed and mostly stayed there, only leaving for the most important occasions, and every time I went outside on my own feet and was in a place without falling over I felt like the biggest liar and fraud and it was almost a relief when, the next day, I woke up feeling like I had run (and won) a marathon the previous day. (“See? I really am sick!”)
Six months since I sat at my desk at work and felt like I was, in my own small way, important because the work that we were doing was so special and important and everyone around me felt it too and truly, our corner of the world was changing and changing for the better. I am not so important now and the work I do is to mostly try to stay awake and order groceries online. Having pretzels available for snacktime matters, in my small household, but does not have much real world impact.
It has been, oh, four months since I showed up at the emergency room with something totally unrelated and discovered part of a vertebral artery was slowly peeling apart like a tiny, incredibly essential banana and that it was good I had come in and good that the ER doctor had followed a hunch and sent me for a contrast CT scan because otherwise I might be dead! And no one ever used that word but that just made it louder!
It has been let’s say two months since the pain started, since it decided to hold on and not let go for ten solid days. And when it let up, that is when I thought see! You are getting better! Aren’t you glad you didn’t blog and then it came back and it’s here now and at some point today I realized that, at this time, I am not going back to work and I am still in bed and I am not better and this is now.
And there are many complex, sophisticated, beautiful ways to start writing a blog but the simplest one is to start writing a blog post and I just did so, I guess, welcome to my blog.