If you ever watched Reba, you can take it from here — and please don’t forget the “Hey-hey!” from the second-season funkification of its theme.*
Moving along, I’m playing it safe today and writing this while fully awake, following a mishap last night in which I sleepily hit ‘publish’ on an unedited post with an incomplete final paragraph. It was, to the best of my recollection, the first (and hopefully last) time I’ve done that in 25 years of writing online, and it almost gave me a heart attack.
Scrambling to fix it before passing out cold, I thought “The good news is, I caught it so quickly that no one should notice.” To put my mind at ease, I glanced at a traffic dashboard that showed it had already gotten a hit — probably as I hemmed and hawed about whether to add a disclaimer clarifying that I was making fun of my sister, not trans people.** Apologies to anyone baffled by the error, and rest assured you didn’t miss out on much.
This will be a short one because there’s a lot to catch up on today, from chores and cooking to errands and French Open viewing. I’m going to try to distract myself however possible because first thing tomorrow morning I’m meeting with the speech and physical therapists, and even though it’s not a big deal the whole thing fills me with dread, mostly due to problems properly mimicking movement.
The therapists, like my neurologist, will know how to deal with it; it’s a common form of apraxia that was first noted, embarrassingly enough, by Crankenstein. She was trying to teach me a maneuver she’d just learned in fellowship and rather than get annoyed by my inability to follow her demonstrations, her eyes lit up and she started asking questions.
“Show me how you’d use a pair of scissors,” she said, her smile widening as I apparently failed the test.
“How do you dial a phone?” and “How do you brush your hair?” were next, and “How would you shoot a gun?” Her amusement was obvious, which annoyed me, and she explained why she was asking and what she’d observed. Next, she showed me what I’d done for each request, followed by the correct (i.e., non-apractic) way to mime those actions.
At this point in my life, on the early side of middle age, I’m largely past feeling embarrassed about everything that’s ‘wrong’ with me, particularly in medical settings. That resistance to being perceived as ill disappeared with the rest of me almost a decade ago, when I was too sick to fight it any longer. Besides all the usual IBD indignities I’d been accustomed to since childhood, I had to submit to a few new, technologically advanced ones, like swallowing and expelling a camera that snaps photos nonstop on its way through your digestive tract.^
As you flush a tiny flashing camera down the toilet, it hits you: “Someone’s going to review all of this.” It was either then, during what felt like a sleazy encounter with the world’s perviest paparazzo, or when a nurse held my hair back as I vomited after chugging contrast — and a second entered the room, concerned, to ask if she was OK — that I accepted there’d always be tradeoffs. Losing dignity in one way (by being dependent on, or vulnerable in front of others) to regain it in another (by improving my health) was worth it.
These therapies will be worth it, too. And when I feel like an idiot every time I have trouble with something simple, I’ll remind myself that I already frequently feel like an idiot at home while struggling with things that used to be easy — like changing shower curtain liners or not hitting the ‘publish’ button prematurely.
* Crankenstein has been “Hey-hey”-ing with a fierce regularity this weekend (to quote Robbie Benson in Ode to Billy Joe), after a week of binge-watching while finishing her latest journal submission. She occasionally punctuates these exclamations by smiling into the distance in the same hammy, wide-eyed manner as Reba, a flourish added upon learning it was my favorite part of the first season’s credits. Fortunately, she’s shown no interest in the mawkish full-length single that spawned the theme.
** Not that I won’t also make fun of trans people. Part of acceptance is being treated like everyone else, and you’ve seen how I treat everyone else.
^ I only wish I were joking. Here’s the weird transmitter belt and device that collected the images. The only reason I have this photo (or the hospital bed one from my old IBD awareness week post) is that Crankenstein wanted to see what it looked like; I prefer not to have photographic memories of illness or hospitalization. This is also a reminder of how terrible Tracfone cameras were, because there’s a big honkin’ scar right there that I doubt anyone can make out.
