Story #2 The Symptoms, The Second Beginning

To read part one of this story "The First Beginning" click here.

The first year of grad school ends. You fly home, which is in Europe. But before you fly home you tear a shoulder muscle. Never before did you suspect just how much pain one little muscle in the shoulder could hail. It's impossible to raise your arm above your head, it's impossible to sleep on your side, it's impossible to hold the steering wheel as you drive. The strange thing about that injury? There was no mechanism of injury: no fall, no strain, no sharp movement. You did nothing and then you woke up with a torn shoulder muscle. Strange.

You feel exhausted in a way you never felt before, but a lot is going on and it's too much in your character, in your matter of fact way of dealing with exhaustion, too much in your never admitted sense of pride, to carry on. Push through. Your face is swollen. You do not recognize yourself in pictures. In the morning there is the sensation of not being able to open your eyes fully. But the eyes are not swollen. If anything it seems the cheeks beneath the eyes are swollen and the eye sockets themselves have sunken. It's odd. And you still don't know how to explain this to anyone. But your body and your face remain swollen, with small fluctuations in the swelling from morning to evening. You suspect the water retention drains from your face into the rest of the body, where it is more difficult to discern as easily.

Then the worst injury happens. You tear the cartilage in your left knee. Badly.

You are running on a treadmill as you do twice every single week, as you have done for 4+ years. This time, though, you run in a pair of shoes you haven't ran in before. About 15 minutes into the run, just as you are getting going, you feel a sharp pain in your knee. You slow down. Step off. You try running again. The pain is still sharp. You could run through it, and for a minute or two you do. But it does eventually dawn on you that this may cause more damage than good, so you stop.

The pain is so intense, so exceedingly sharp, like needle through bone, you hobble around your family home, hoping, deluding yourself, it will simply go away. It does not go away. It hurts to bear weight, let alone to walk. You think you must have broken a bone. After a few weeks you go to get an ultrasound done. The doctor confirms the torn shoulder muscle, and then refers you for an MRI for the knee.

The MRI comes back with very bad news: you have torn your retropatellar cartilage and have extensive cartilage wear on your medial tibial plateau. From what? You don't know. The doctors make a point of telling you that "cartilage does not heal." And the doctor you see says you will never do anything you love. You will never ski, run, hike, climb mountains, ever again. The most you will ever do is be able to walk on a flat surface. You feel the whole world shatter around you. Literally pieces of your life, all the things you love and live for, are falling and breaking to the ground. You walk out of that doctor's appointment—late June, mid summer—on legs made of mush, crying breathlessly, crying not in the controlled mourning manner someone else may have cried, you cry with despair and terror and horror, you cry as if you just lost your life. You stagger through the streets of Baden-Baden, Germany, crying like this. Everyone is looking at you with distaste, not empathy. You want to go up to them, to say: "I just lost everything." That day you drive back home, home is in Poland, you were going to stop somewhere but you just drive. You cry every time you think of what life will now be. The darkest room takes you into itself, closes all windows, closes all doors, and you sink into the blackest shade of black you've ever known. And you do not want to be here. You do not want to do this. Not at all.

Then things get worse.

You experience a migraine with a bright shining light in your eyes. The light is there when your eyes are open and when they're closed. The migraine is very intense and you've never had a migraine before in your life. The blinding bright light terrifies you. You cannot make it go away. You panic. But at the time you think it is cardiac arrest you've gone into, because your arms go numb, left arm first, from the hand to the shoulder, then your tongue and the insides of your mouth go numb. Fully numb. And you can't talk. And you can't think. And the light is there. You close your eyes. It's there. You open them. It's there. You are trapped with this shining thing in your eye. A bright burning white light in the center of darkness. Your partner, terrified, drive you down a mountain to the emergency room, which is a good 30 minutes away but you make it there in probably 15. On the way down the mountain—it is July and all the wildflowers are in bloom—you look at the tall green grasses, the blue wild chicory, the yellow little flowers, and you feel so at peace with whatever may happen next (it is a heart attack you think you're having). The peace is eerie. The peace you feel surprises you. You look at these grasses, pausing them for a moment in freeze frame as the car speeds, madly, forward. It's been a good life, you think calmly. If it's time to go now, you will go.

It is not.

The women at the ER take you seriously, take your blood, hook you up to a heart monitor, sit beside you. You cannot say your own name. The look in your beloved partner's eyes is not a look you ever wish to see again, or one you've ever seen before. It is the "I love you, please don't die" kind of look. And if you've seen it before you know what I mean. It slams through the heart. No heart attack, the tests confirm. A panic attack? "Could a panic attack do this?" Your partner and you ask the nurses. The nurse very kindly, very humanly, very empathetically, answers: "yes, it could." You stay in the ER for 8 hours in total. You are being monitored, just in case. You return home a little bewildered, a little humiliated, a little terrified of yourself. This suddenly unpredictable body you find yourself in.

What is happening? You want to, and don't, know.

The migraines carry on, but the blinding white light does not come back and for this you are grateful. Summer carries on. Your body feels wrong, feels like it is suddenly 80 years old. How else to explain it? You are made of lead, heavy stone, you are not a body of soft tissue, flowing blood, malleable tendon, glowing bone, you are a slab of marble: difficult to move, painful at every turn, not your own, and not your self.

You sink, what rises all around you is a depression—a net cast, weighed on each side with stones. It takes you down. Numb, exhausted, going from headache to headache, from pain to pain, your thoughts stop their natural patterns. Have you mentioned yet that you're a writer? The stories you weave and naturally track through your mind as you're doing whatever you're doing during the day—they stop. Your thoughts seem suspended in thick, black oil. You unbecome yourself. And feel dispossessed by something you cannot name, something you do not yet know, cannot yet see for it is too close, too close to discern any difference between yourself and it.

Everything comes to a terrible trough on a windy mountain road. You and your wonderful partner are killing time before an appointment at a clinic. You decide to drive up the mountain, see a small town, why not? You go. The road is windy, looping its exaggerated serpentine between steep hillsides. Your elbows hurt. Your elbows hurt like someone driving icepicks through the joint. "Stop," you say, "stop the car please." He stops. You grab at your elbows, at the pain that should not be there. A pain you've never had before. Osteoarthritis? Sudden onset? At 28? You feel as if you've been taken away on the tide of some dark terrible wave, which is now bearing you away from the familiar shores of your life, your body, and what you understood and trusted to be your own being. You are now on a journey you never wished to take, upon seas you've never known to exist, darker and more tempest than anything you've known.

"Good luck."