I’ve just spent almost two weeks in a cabin on an island, without internet for the most part. Here’s what I learned: I miss the internet only when it’s cloudy and I am bored and need to occupy myself. Which was like two days, because it was thirthy degrees celcius outside and I am not used to this heat. There was only blue sky and blue calm water, nothing I had to remember or worry about. Lots of bathing, catching and then releasing butterflies with my cousin, seeing family I hadn’t in a long time and nostalgia of being reunited with my older brothers. They also lured me up on some mountain in just slippers before they also managed to get lost, but that gave me nostalgia too so I can’t really complain much.
A couple days ago I also got my head back enough for the first time in over a month to start reading Oatbringer by Brandon Sanderson. When I read a hundred pages in one sitting the first time, at 2 am, I was ecstatic. I’m sure it sounds obvious, but I didn’t realize just how much morphine pain killers fucks with my head until I stopped them. I almost forgot baking lemon cake, fishing, driving boats at high speed and relaxing. It was a dream.
Here’s the recipe to the best glutenfree lemon cake I have ever made, before this post takes a darker turn.
I hope this all sounds as lovely as it was, but then there’s the part where I just spent almost two weeks in a cabin on an island because one night three days into my stay I could not breathe. *brief pause as I notice a spider on my leg and kill it with my hands, I want credit for that* Anyway, I woke up and noticed something was wrong, an hour later I could not breathe, the tightness in my chest didn’t stop. I was just hospitalized for a lung infection and gallbladder surgery, not to forget I had misplaced my glasses, so I took a weird choice – woke up no one and wandered out of the cabin to get some fresh air. With the phone camera in front of me I then saw the shrubs move and a badger walk out, a distance away from me. I’ve met these badgers before, they are very cute and will also bite your leg until it hears a crack, so I ran for my life. Which looks more like walking slowly, hunched over, when you already can’t breathe.
So the day after I spent eight hours in emergency rooms and then three awful days in the third hospital of the month. The first hospital visit had been a ten days stay on the other side of the country, where I live, the second one for my minor gallbladder surgery I had just days before. This third hospital I had been to before, but I was nowhere near prepared for how awful it would be. I was in less pain than before. The people I shared room with however were very sick, and looking back there’s no way they got enough pain treatment.
One old lady barely stopped crying the twentyfour hours I was with her, both in pain and because she didn’t know where she was. She kept asking me to help her, confusing me with a nurse because of my young age and I couldn’t get up from my bed. That was the first time I lost it completely and broke down crying. Another lady was just bones, she got worse until the final morning she was swatting the nurses hands away, begging and yelling for them to let her just die, why couldn’t they let her just die. The nurses were nice to me, but acted like this was okay. Maybe it was normal to them, but in no way was that okay. Having been stuck unmoving in another hospital bed weeks earlier, waking up crying from pain that lasted hours, even with morphine, something in me could relate too much. I felt so bad for them, and there was nothing I could do. And also at this point, my situation wasn’t getting better either. So I broke down for a second time. I did not stop crying for hours until I had gotten out of that hospital, feeling mentally much worse than when I arrived. They hopefully got rid of my infection though. Don’t think it was worth it.
I also had to go back for a colonoscopy (google it), where you have to take laxatives which was a minor nightmare as they didn’t work properly. No inflammation in my intestines this time, which means my ulcerative colitis isn’t flaring on top of everything else so that’s some good luck.
I don’t know if one should focus on the good or the bad. On the fact that I still barely can’t walk some evenings because the hospitals never had time or resources to figure out why my joints are swelling, or that I cannot laugh without wheezing in pain. At least I notice very much how often I have laughed these days. But last week I could finally be in the ocean without my body hurting, two days later I could submerge myself in water completely without lungs burning, a day later I could swim! It sucks to be in pain, to so much need a break from illness and having to fight to only halfway get there. This last year, I could probably sit down and count the times I’ve cried. Until now, because I don’t seem to be done no matter how many lovely days I fight to put between me and those hospital stays.
I’ll be back with book reviews soon, I’m so excited to be reading again.
Also I can’t leave my books at my dad’s house, they won’t survive long without rain damage –
aquapages 