I’ve been missing writing, so I’m going to attempt to do a post a day for a while, just to get back into the habit.
As has so often happened, a spring crisis derailed all of my lovely plans for the year. In mid-March, Catharine got hives. And I don’t mean one or two; I mean all over her body. They landed her in the ER at one point, when her eyes and lips swelled up. She’s taking a 24-hour antihistamine four times a day (doctor’s orders), and for a while the one she was taking turned her brain into Swiss cheese. She’s had periods when they were so bad that she couldn’t focus or think or really do much of anything except scratch and try not to scratch. It is mid-November and she’s had exactly half of one day hive-free. We think we’ve figured out some things, so we’re hopeful things will continue to improve, but it’ll be months before she can back off the antihistamines.
The only good thing this whole debacle gave us was a new psych med that was intended to be a temporary counteraction to prednisone and made her mood better and more stable than she’d experienced in her adult life.
A more stable mood on her part is the only reason we’ve really made it through this period. She’s been less able to be present around the house, especially because she also sprained her knees, and the resulting load on me has made things really hard. I’m at capacity, which means when she asks still more of me, I have a tendency to fall apart. A friend challenged me to do more in the way of self-care, and I’ve added solo movies and trips to the coast with a friend to my calendar, but the reality is that my energy is limited and that is always part of this complicated mix.
So, we’re still here. I’m still struggling to figure out how to have the inner life I want, the writing life I want, in the face of what we’re dealing with. In some ways we’re so privileged, and that can sometimes obscure for me the ways in which we’re dealing with more than most people. I can’t do it all, just because I want to and because I have fewer (maybe? differently) limitations than she does.
Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, and dear friends are coming over to cook and play cards and hang out in PJs, because we’re fancy that way. It’s the first time in a long time I’m feeling anything like the holiday spirit.
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