Two Years Old

This is an excerpt of writing to commemorate year 2 since I was diagnosed with Acute on Chronic Heart Failure. In a lot of ways, the 2nd week of January, 2023, I look at as the first time I died at 40. The two years since have been this weird liminal space where I find myself this weird adult yet toddler, fumbling to figure out life all over again. I'm lucky to get a so-called 'second chance' yet I still grieve what 40 years of existence gave me, what I still have to shed from that previous life, what is appropriate to nurture. It's perhaps again, WEIRD that I put such writing and work among the claptrap that is the overt focus on work and labor as identity that is Linkedin. However, I am a writer among the doldrums of my day job in Grants Management hell, lol.

I’m writing this around two years after I landed on the asphalt beneath a Volvo’s bumper.

I can still remember that liminal space that I still wonder if it’s the space your brain plays tricks on you about whether this is “it.”

I felt the suspended animation, the release of control of your body, the sensation that you no longer have to draw breath.

I had spent up to the moments before making my father lunch, then meeting to discuss emergency funding for flood victims and just general political gossip with Ofelia in the offices of YUCA, before getting in that heaven’s waiting room of a Gold Buick to make some extra money doing Astrology readings for the staff of Lyon Martin.

I was busy, but I was dying at the same time.

I had been struggling not to vomit up meals since Fana and Morgan’s wedding in October. I had what I thought were just asthma attacks shortly thereafter. Frothy phlegm coughed up came shortly thereafter, followed by actual vomiting, struggling to walk, struggling to perform the rigors of keeping a 75 year old parent alive despite all their efforts and bad habits that counter it.

There are times I’m surprised I didn’t collapse in an aisle of Safeway or didn’t go into Cardiac Arrest behind the wheel of that Buick. By Christmas people were noting the weight loss. I had gone from 235lbs to 215 according to the scale in the Bathroom. My skin was getting more pale than it got in Portland.

There’s no need for photos of that 3 weeks of my life, for the memories are still fresh.

I was a fall risk. I couldn’t shower for days. I have a profound need to bathe daily, I’m a Virgo Rising to a fault. The twice daily iron injections didn’t burn as much as people said they would, but the 4 blood draws a day I still can feel in my veins.

I only cried three times.

Once at the overwhelming loneliness of being confined to a bed, days on end, with nothing but television to distract you. Second time, in front of the hospital therapist when she begged me to let go of still trying to manage my father’s life from my literal death bed. Third time when the shock vest salesman was valiantly trying to teach me the ease of wearing a defibrillator vest that I had to charge nightly and keep an additional cell phone for reporting purposes on me. I couldn’t take showers longer than 5 minutes, for if I stirred potential arrhythmias while cleansing my skin, I could die in the shower.

I frankly still cry at the precarity of it all, the loneliness of it all, perhaps hold on desperately to the few that offered at least a distraction, or a respite once all of that settled somewhat, and I came home to the fresh hell of still being expected to take care of my father. Take care of him while my arm was in a sling, a new lump of a metal device and stitches under my left armpit.

I was told to keep all of this hush hush from the general public quite often, which I think is a disservice to myself and to others. I still grieve having lost control of what wasn’t even my life, but how I cared for others.

It’s taken a healthy bit of vulnerability and force from others to even consider taking care of myself first. I still feel remarkably selfish when I set a boundary. I still wonder as time passes whether those that did help eventually developed grievances when I was no longer a victim they felt a need to take care of.

Recovery can be wild that way, and as my dear friend Ted Rees wrote about his own cancer journey in 'Hand Me The Limits,' there’s always going to be a part of you that is sick anyways, no matter how healthy you look.

It’s a wild part of aging even if you look relatively young. Forgive me if I don't take a lot of what is the performance of 'adulthood' that is attached to capitalism seriously anymore, for I can't. I can't look at this social media platform in particular, as we head into another year of genocide, a week into a year where whole sections of the Los Angeles metropolitan area become realities out of Octavia Butler's predictions and take any of 'this' seriously. I really question those of you that are able to do so, to continue on with the normalcy, the complacency, the hidden sorrow of your own lives as if a raise is going to save you.

Sometimes I truly feel like I'm only here so I don't get 'fined' in that very Marshawn Lynch way, still looking towards what's delightful and worth hanging onto in this existence. It really isn't 40 hour a week labor for health insurance in a society in collapse, I know that's for sure.

I'm still figuring it out with almost a toddler like curiosity AND frustration. The picture below is mere minutes before I headed to the airport to return to the Bay Area after spending the first part of the holidays with friends I've known for 20 years that are more like family than mere friends. My natural instinct to be in and tell a story showing up, as Geneva asked me to read one more book before I left. Those moments are far sweeter than any RFP win I hold with a team.

Here's hoping you're finding your own moments on a couch rather than at a standing desk.