on and on and on

The thing about being immuno-suppressed is that it eats into every aspect of your life. Things that might give another person a day or two of discomfort can take you down for a week or two (or three). That week or two is spent in bed, possibly largely out of it tending to the things that Absolutely Need tending to, and thereby driving the illness on even longer. Laundry stacks up. Dishes stack up. The smell.. oh, the smell stacks up too. If you've got something bad enough to leave you with a monstrous fever and you've thrown up on your bathroom floor and can't clean it up? Yep. That stays there too.

Since I started my daily regimen of pills & supplements, I find that my life goes quite a bit more smoothly. I do not spend every day in a state of vague malaise due to always having something picking at me. I do not fall quite so behind on my work as I did before. When I do get ill, it does not last as long, and I recover (remarkably) to the point of health I was in before the illness pulled the rug out from under me.

Yet even in this there is no little frustration. I would love to be dependable. Reliable. Even to myself. I have difficulty scheduling things, for fear of the big what-if. What if I'm feeling ill that day? What if I'm spending that day trying to catch up on all of the things that Needed doing before I fell ill? And that's not counting the years of general catching up that hover all about me and cast their ominous shadows into the light of my improved spirits.

I certainly couldn't hold a conventional job then, and I don't think I could manage it now. I'm still down too often. Even at that, what about my reputation for meeting my deadlines? Those are easier these days, and I do take on more, but even so...

What if all of this good health doesn't last?

I wonder these things, coming out of a stomach flu that took me down into dehydration, which took me down to very much worse. Still sore from the repeated poking of needles trying to find my sunken veins. I caught up on the dishes, and while I was not up to washing them, stripped my bed of its sick-smelling sheets.

But what if I'm sick again tomorrow? What if all of this energy (and even recovering I have more energy now than I did before) siphons away?

I wonder these things, wishing I had enough energy back to write something more than a distressed rambling stream of thoughts.