As Seen On TV

I reckon being ill is one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill and is not obliged to work till one is better. ~Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, 1903

And maybe he's on to something. This morning I stayed in my bath robe until noon, reading the latest Mark Haddon book while stretched languorously on my bed in a stream of June sunshine. Feeling particularly and unusually tired, I moseyed downstairs, lazily flicked on the telly and plopped on the sofa to watch an old episode of ER while my tummy lurched and burned. It was the one where Mark Green rented that beach house in Hawaii after he realized his brain tumor was terminal. I hadn't seen that one before and for some reason when the tears came, they wouldn't stop. I feel more than a bit silly admitting that here, but the part where he wanted to write letters to his daughters for them to open at their graduation or on their wedding day really got to me. I guess it reminded me of the way my own father didn't get a chance to finish his Christmas cards.

There was a question about whether my father's death was intentional. He had metastatic colon cancer and at the end, he was in a lot of pain and taking a lot of medications, it would have been easy to lose track. There was a brief inquest by the medical examiner, but ultimately ruled out suicide by means of my father's half finished stack of Christmas cards. When my sister and I were collecting his things from the house, we came across one card that was actually in progress, pen laid out across the paper and then we knew for sure. He was the kind that sent a card out every year to everyone he'd ever met.

I always wondered if he had intended to write the same kind of letters like the good Dr. Green on TV, my father was so meticulous about so many other things surrounding his death that it always surprised me that the letters never surfaced.

I tried to remember the last time I cried and couldn't. It must have been years, probably not since around the time that my Dad died. It was that breathless kind of sobbing that leaves you covered in snot and so very thankful that you're alone. I cried for my Dad at first, but then it turned into something else. Something shifted. A letting go. A release of nervousness over my own health and the culmination of frustration and embarrassment at feeling so fucking miserable all the time.

In 45 minutes, the G will be taking me into the hospital, again. This time the doctors will be putting the camera down my throat and into my belly in hopes of discovering the cause of my misery. I'm nervous, I've been fasting all day and am feeling tired. I hope they find something and I hope they don't. It's a strange dichotomy.