Sicko
a poetic balm
Sunday morning at 3:30 a.m. I awoke with a thunderous coughing fit. Then came the headache. Then came the congestion. My head felt submerged and my body achy. For 3 days I stayed in bed attended to by my canine nurse. My misery was all-consuming.
By Wednesday I was a little functional although it was still rough going. And today I’m still not fully better but I’m on the mend. I sound worse than I feel. But I also don’t feel great.
This week I had no energy to write. No energy to read. Mostly I watched TV, scrolled on my phone, and slept. Fixating on every iota of pain and discomfort, I became a stew of desolation. All I could do was wallow.
So in lieu of a well-articulated treatise on pain, a PDW-ized meditation on discomfort’s meaning, I leave you with a poem by David Budbill. It’s from his final collection Tumbling toward the End, which was published posthumously. These words were an easement in my own pity party. Minimally they proved yet again that humanity seems to be a ubiquitous condition.
Here’s to healthier days ahead!
A Poem about Pain
by David Budbill
I can feel myself slipping away, fading away, withdrawing
from this life, just as my father did. When the pain you're in
is so great you can’t think about or pay attention to anything
but your own pain, the rest of the world and all other life
don't matter.
I think about my friends with dementia, cancer, arthritis, and
how much more pain they are in than I am, but it does no good,
their pain is not mine, and therefore, no matter how magnanimous
I might want to be, their pain is not as important to me as my own.