phantom limbs

There is an odd moroseness to this flu, a despondency. A heavy weight across the shoulders, a thickness to the throat, an ache in the lungs.

Back in the days when colitis was something I experienced almost daily, I had fatigued thigh muscles much of the time, a side effect of the prolonged pain and intensity of the attacks and effort and time on the toilet. This had a weird translation- I found I feared exercise. If, when exercising, I would feel fatigue in my thigh muscles, I would panic as if a colitis attack was imminent, and would back away from the effort as quickly as I could.
I had associated the two unconsciously, and tied together two very different things through the specific sensation of fatigue of This muscle and That one.

This experience is a little like that: the heaviness, the weight, the ache, all feel like grief to me. It does not matter if my brain says Flu or says Virus, the sensations speak to my body of grief, and then I find I am responding to that, I cannot help it- a second layer, grief management, like a phantom limb.

I finally have a clear positive OPK after a fake out a few days back. It is day 11, so for me, this makes sense. My body is on its schedule, no one else's. And there is such sincere comfort in that.

There is much happiness in the internet-- Traci and her fabulous positive that makes me so joy-filled I think I may bust open like a pinata. K with her 2 or 3 miracles on board.
And I see those two lines on the fucking OPK, and hope that sometime soon, those two lines will mean something different, something wondrous, and that I will be able to push through my fear of losing and allow myself to have. And hope that having will last a whole lot longer than a few short months.

I worry I will not get pregnant again, and if I do, it will not last. I asked my clinic if I get so lucky if they will keep me longer, keep me through the point of my loss, let me learn with them if something goes wrong, not with a doctor I do not know, and a wand person who seems alien and hostile. They said yes. And there is relief in that. But there is also this sadness, this heaviness, this feeling like what if it never happens again.


I sit here on the sofa, the cat on my feet, snow swirling in the back clearing-- heavy one minute with rain that sends it down fast and splattering, then a moment of drier smaller flakes that fall straight down, or then caught up in a swirling wind that rustles the dried leaves on the little deck, or the snow rests a moment, the air clears of it, and then it begins to fall again. It changes every moment, is not accumulating, the earth is taking it in as rain.

I am so grateful for the evergreens, the hemlocks, if my woods were bare, barren, I would be sadder than I can express. I love the closeness of the trees, the way they stand against the sky, the deep green and near black of the shadows, the way the last yellow leaves lie on their branches, having fallen but not quite yet made their way to the ground.