Posts Tagged ‘illness’

The third Monday now from the day when I was fever-felled. I am very slowly regaining my strength after a week of dangerously high fever and no food to speak of to sustain me. Today was my first solo dogwalk with Jayne the giant hairball slobber king Pyrenees. I didn’t go the full route…perhaps a half mile total. But it was sunny, in spite of night-time lows in the 20’s and there finally were swallows on the power lines! In spite of snow spitting spitefully at our windows all last week as I lay still a-bed, perhaps spring is here?

I read a lot while I was recovering, though not so much the first week when my eyes burned along with the rest of me. My lengthy recovery reminds me with force that I am no longer young and my body will demand more gentleness from me now. However, the rest of my world is nagging—the house needs a good cleaning, the garden has been in arrears now for three weeks. It will stay a bit in arrears, I fear, until walking the dog doesn’t leave me ready for my bed again.

I thought about my aging process as I lay helplessly ill. I thought of over 4000 young men and women who will not age, nor lie in a soft bed with family at hand. I thought about the perhaps 29,000 wounded, some of whom do still lie a-bed, wondering, no doubt, how to reclaim their lives. I thought about the military adventurism sapping the military of life and vigor while enriching contractors and others who profiteer in concert with the specter sucking America dry for a contract of lies. My nation seems as ill and prostrate as I still feel, and there is no doctor with a vial of truth, it seems, to effect a cure.

And my reading material has included a book by Jared Diamond about how societies “collapse” or fail. Part of that discussion was the ancient Anasazi civilization in the very area we considered retiring to in our older old age! It is a precarious place, and its continuance even now depends on strong government to control water supply and distribution. I don’t know if I would have the wherewithal to build a place there that would make me feel sufficiently secure in case of political upheaval rocking America’s boat!Do I, I asked myself, staring at the ceiling and taking pills, really believe my country is on that bare edge of popular insurrection, ecological disaster, or national bankruptcy? I am not finished with “Collapse” yet, but I’ve read enough that I am more uncertain than usual if I want to be in a more fragile environment! Even here, survival in the face of any of those three things would be difficult—in the desert Southwest, it might be impossible. And imagine, I have not really got to the sections of the book (if such exist) where a horrendously ruinous WAR helped a nation fall.

I tell myself it is illness making my view so bleak, weakness sapping my normally “can do” attitude. And I tell myself to go eat, drink something warm, and drive on.