THE ADVOCATE, complete at 82,400 words of shitty first draft, so begins the process of editing, editing, editing, rewriting, and editing. I read through the ending again last night and made a few minor rewriting changes. I felt satisfied with the ending even though it didn’t happen exactly like I had planned. Sometimes characters just […]
Apparently, I try to extubate myself when I wake from surgery with a breathing tube still in. Why do I wake up with the breathing tube still? That’s a good question that I’d like to ask of the doctor who decided during my second surgery to leave the breathing tube in for 22 hours longer […]
When I woke, it was, at first, the same as any other time I’d ever awakened. I faded into awareness. I could hear my best friend’s voice calling to me. I opened my eyes, and she was there, hovering over my face. “Hi!” she said, her eyes red, her voice unusually, artificially cheerful. I thought […]
I was talking to my daughter last night, and she has started this cool book, collecting words. Mostly, she’s writing quotes and slogans and phrases that mean something to her and writing them in this tooled, leather-bound book. It’s an awesome collection of positive phrases and quotes that I really enjoyed reading through last night. […]
I complain–a lot. To anyone who will listen, I complain about how hard life is right now. I can’t do the things I want to do, like walk. I sit in my chair and look at my bed, a hospital bed, in my living room where I sleep alone, and I think it should be […]
One of the hardest things I think for someone who is chronically ill and who has a special diet because of that illness is for them to get through the holidays healthy and well. There are so many reasons for the holidays being hard on those with chronic health issues, from the added stress of […]
A couple of years ago, I broke my ankle, shattered it, really, and ended up having to have surgery on my foot. It was dangerous because of my CTEPH lung condition. A lot of people with CTEPH have trouble coming off the ventilator after surgery and end up needing to be trached for life. It’s […]
Don’t call me that. You have no right to call me by my name, much less to call me baby, sweetheart or darling. You have no right to speak to me so familiarly like nothing ever happened between us, like the words we spoke had never been uttered. Don’t look at me. You have no […]
I have multiple chronic illnesses, such as a lung condition called CTEPH (a type of pulmonary hypertension), psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondlitis, severe hashimotos hypothyroidism, and adrenal insufficiency. I’m on high dose steroids, which affects my blood sugar levels, so I’m temporarily diabetic on top of all of that. Oh, and I’ve had three strokes, and […]
My butt goes numb when I sit for too long, and my fingers and toes tingle and go numb from neuropathy, but I want to talk about a different kind of numb today. I’ve talked about it before when I talk about depression and feeling numb inside. That feeling where nothing is wrong but not […]
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