In early May this year, I woke up with a sudden fever and brown blood on my sheets.
This tiny letter is late because I’ve been afraid to write it: not afraid of any of you, dear ones, but afraid to face myself. The truth is that I never imagined I would be well-equipped to write about sickness, until I became very, terrifyingly sick myself.
Between May and July 2021, there were times I felt I would die. Now, I’m better. How to write about the space in-between? The fever? The blood? The pain in the chest like a series of sharp and clever knives, preparing me for a feast at some fine fucking table? Maybe I should begin at the beginning, but to do that, do I need to tell you about the first time an overdraft of sugar showed up in my ancestors’ blood?
This is my arm, with a burst blood vessel beneath the skin, the result of a bad draw. All my life, I’ve known I have uncooperative, elusive veins. Earlier this year, my blood was taken so often that if I rolled my sleeves up to the elbows and turned my hands out, you’d see a patchwork of bruises, twin maps of mottled purple, angry pink, red.
I had never been seriously ill, and now I was ill all the time, all over my body, in the middle of a pandemic, alone and away from my family, with no easy access to doctors.
How should I write about it? Should I begin at the end, where I can tell you that I’m better? I worry about that approach. It implies I’m starting with relief, doesn’t it? What if I told you that my bill of clean health scares me almost as much as my diagnosis of rampant type 2 diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol did, three months ago? Perhaps it scares me more. Because I know what happened to me in the in-between, in the fight to get better.
Because I know there were moments where I gave up the fight completely.
Something settles over your body when you are certain you might conceivably die. When I was surest I was either going to die, or be in pain for the rest of my life, I was also unable to write. I couldn’t do what I am doing now, for you all, for myself. It wasn’t happening. I wasn’t working, and I wasn’t *working*. How, how on earth do I tell you about all that?
I’ll start with the diabetes.
It’ll be at the heart of Unkillable, because how not? Because finally, I realize, it is impossible to tell you about the quality of my heart, without showing you the source of all the sugar that was in my blood.
❤️❤️❤️