Monday, March 23, 2020

Ordered Mind - Illnesses Past

Engaging in luxurious brain dumps, I support the natural order of our universe.

Beyond saying I want order I am at work to achieve it in our micro-world. 

As usual I address this need for order when I am in the process of looking for something that I cannot find.

Oh yes, I'll get those.   I know exactly where they are.   Oh, I moved them.

In this case I have tossed my collection of Briarwood Smoking Pipes... Who needs them, other than as props?  I've had some since childhood, some thirty years ago, some fifty years ago.  Lost.  So what?

In my pipe search, which would have taken a second had I left them where I knew them to be, I embark upon a lengthy and otherwise un-taken path of discovery.  Through this minute concern I accidentally chance upon other forgotten items in my catalog of massive and greater neglect.  The "as yet undone" is impossibly pervasive in my life since I have taken on way more than I can ever accomplish.   I am a speck in the universe?  I am The Speck.

We, here at the apartment, address this ordering of the universe as a family.

Through discussion I confront my deference to the church of the unknown,which becomes synonymous with religion and magic, and to chance, which translates into fate.

There is the rational world, restricted by natural laws.  Somewhere in there I discover serendipity.  My memory of events, a precious few of them may be noteworthy, are my examples to prove the results of serendipity at play.  (I give no such examples here.   None come to mind.)

I'm connecting one prepositional phrase to the other here.  Everything is nebulous and inexplicable, and I live with this.

Since we're currently concerned about curbing the spread of a Corona Virus (#19) I begin here to offer my history of illness.  I will promptly become discouraged from doing so.

It's basically that I have been exposed to illness and have become ill for an extended time thereafter.  I began having a flu shot when our daughter was born, which means twice in my lifetime.   I became very sick in 2011 after I visited a friend who was dying of cancer.  We had a fantastic time together but he was very sick and nobody stopped us from sitting with him in his cramped and inexplicably sealed and stuffy intensive care room.

Influenza is a viral infection that attacks your respiratory system.  We can't visit people who have it because their influenza becomes ours.  We become lost in three months of influenza, and then forget about it.  Three months disappear.

I'm writing this essay to apply my general feeling that we are always exposed to illness and our conditions are terminal, but why shall I discourage this opportunity for us to work together as a planet to address a natural occurrence?   We are preparing to collectively prevent climate change.  This is a momentous occasion in our collective development.  As I lose my illusive savings I confront opportunity, inspired by others confronting it more rapidly, more productively.

Anyway, my periods of illness, specifically respiratory, used to extend for months, and I suppose they will happen again.  If at some point it gets too impossible to breath I will die but though I have felt the webbing in the lungs and I've coughed up a storm, it appears that the coughing is a way of opening the breathing and my otherwise shallow breathing habit is forced out of practice.

As I child I would have palpitations, mostly alone after it became obvious no one else could do anything about them.  They would extend for  hours, perhaps days.  I would lose consciousness regularly when I changed altitudes by, say, standing, and the more I addressed the problem the more I prolonged it.  Being inconsolable, I confronted death alone.  At some point my heart would just give out.  I imagined the irreparable damage to the heart walls.

At some point I discovered that deep breathing simply forced the heart into a normal full-cycle pump pattern.  I pulled in a deep breath which was the ultimate opposite of what it felt like I could do while palpitating.  It broke the tachycardia.

What has happened since I turned 46 is that the whole thing stopped.

The medication I took up to that point both caused and controlled my palpitations and apparently reduced my libido, which was probably just as well.

I'm currently of the opinion that we just have to get through this.   I don't want to discourage preventative measures as it is an opportunity to forge new ways of connecting with another, in addition to realizing the possibility of connection.

We are experiencing such a wide range of events in our single lifetimes!

There's so much to do and not doing requires the same amount of effort as doing so...

(Update:  I was concerned about finding those pipes and found them by looking deeper into a drawer I had already checked.)