A Tincture of time

43

PREVIOUS CHAPTER

Reality strikes damning red ink through Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, mocking linear, rational, redemption arcs. I’ve failed.

Career, friendship, agency, sanity, confidence—everything falls away. I can no longer look at screens, any screen, even my phone sends nerves barreling. Watching films—once Dave’s and my favorite end-of-day unwind—now sensory overload; my brain dispatches buckets of adrenaline to fight perceived danger.

I isolate, hide, and rarely leave the house. And when I do, I am a toddler clutching Dave’s hand, unsure of gravity and my fraught relationship to it. More adrenaline spills out as the sidewalk interrogates my assumptions—upright, solid and reliable, now akimbo, liquid, and unsound.

Late summer, I finally meet with a neurologist—Portland’s leading “dizzy doc.” I enter his office certain he has an answer. Hope is hard—I’ve been carrying it in my pocket for months, the possibility of this doctor not having answers is inconceivable, crushing. After listening to me convey, for what feels like the hundredth time, all my bizarre experiences and sensations, he orders two days of extensive testing at Legacy Hospital’s Vestibular Lab.

“It’s not going to be fun, I’ll tell you this right now. But we may get some answers.”

I nod, obligingly. I’m a “good patient.” I’m appeasing; I downplay symptoms; I’m quick to tell a doctor he’s right or she’s helping me even when I feel like I’m dying inside. I project all my absent father issues on male physicians. Maybe he’ll think I’m so smart and so sweet that he’ll go the extra mile to make sure I get better. He’ll look forward to the day when he sees me out in the world succeeding and think, “I helped her.” He’ll be proud of me.

He was right. Two days of vestibular tests — designed to put maximum stress on all the visual and auditory connections to one’s inner balance — are not fun. He was also right to use the conditional verb “may,” leaving room for no answers at all.

“Kim, you passed your tests with flying colors. Your vestibular system is working great!”

Ordinarily this kind of daddy high-five would projectile-shoot glitter from my eyes. But instead, I’m deflated and in disbelief.

“So that’s it? But what do I have? Are you saying nothing is wrong with me?” Maybe I haven’t conveyed how dire this is. Maybe I try too hard to look ok, to be pleasing. I can’t go on like this. Does he think I’m making it all up?

“I’m diagnosing you with cervicogenic vertigo.”

Cervic what? It takes me a moment to realize he’s not talking about my cervix.

“I’ll prescribe you twelve sessions with a great vestibular PT— she’ll work on your neck — and you may feel some improvement. And if that doesn’t work, we can start drug-trials. Benzos, anti-seizure drugs, anti-anxiety drugs. They have side-effects that you’re not going to like though.”

Contempt smolders inside my belly. I may feel some improvement? I can barely hear him anymore as he rattles off drug names, possible complications, dependencies. He starts to read my face. I’m no longer speaking, only trembling.

With an attempt to comfort me, he says “A tincture of time.”

I stand up; the floor trampolines. He reaches out his hand  and my misinterpreting heart leaps toward it—a gesture of warmth and support delivered on a scribbled RX for Diazepam.

“The body heals itself and doctors take the credit,” he chuckles as I walk out the door.

I hate his flippant remark and the kernel of truth it suggests. Time can be the ultimate healer, at least in the more broad sense of healing— the kind of healing or “post-traumatic growth” that may not cure bodies but can sometimes heal spirits—a person becoming more virtuous, more brave, more connected because of illness or tragedy.

But I don’t want my spirit to grow. I want to be fixed.

I wobble home thinking about his parting words. If this is true, are all treatments, protocols and dollars spent along the way, just buying time? Time is also the ultimate killer. What if time makes things worse? Not everyone has access to resources and support; sometimes time destroys us.

I recall a story Dave once shared about fishing. In his youth, he and his grandpa would bait and drop lines at the same time, but Dave never caught the first fish. One day he asked “Why do you always get first catch?” To which his grandpa replied, “Because you’re not holding your mouth right.” So Dave studied the old man’s mouth, somedays more clenched, somedays slack, mimicking the countenance. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. But if it did, Dave attributed it to the shape he held his mouth.

Is this all healing is? A misattribution of causality? I examine each day under a microscope. If I wake up one morning and feel slightly less dizzy? It was the broccoli. And the next, I feel worse? The pillow. More sensitive to light? The weather, Pluto squaring Disney, solar flares. I scrutinize each scenario, identifying the reason for my malaise and grasp at answers to my salvation.

I search, seek, chase—the illusion of a fix never further than the shape I hold my mouth. But the pursuit compounds the suffering. I am stuck inside a Chinese finger trap of my own making. After six weeks of strain-counter-strained hope, the physical therapist—questioning the accuracy of my diagnosis—sends me on my dizzy way, no better than the day I started.

Surrender and defeat vie with each other in stifling shades of grey.

I resort to spending my days in the cushioned kitchen nook—dim lighting, upholstered foam, dampened sound—a safe place for my now unbecoming life to retreat and unbecome.

In this 6’x6’ womb, I insulate myself against the life I once knew and wait. First, swaddling myself with darkness, and eventually, wool.

An old Christmas gift stashed away, the Beginner’s Guide to Needle Felting invites me into a lasting distraction from symptoms. A fiber art of the most rudimentary form, I repetitively pierce wool fibers with a sharp, barbed needle, matting loose fibers into solid shapes. Maybe it’s the repetition of needlework, or wool’s warm, muffled mass in hand, but I lose myself in it—for days, weeks, months, and eventually years. The cushion under me doesn’t stop moving, walls continue their undulations, but the process helps drown it out so I don’t, I can’t, stop. Needle felting throws me a lifeline just as I’m about to go under. I hold on, each shape giving purpose and flesh to the thin-skinned vulnerability I can’t express and no one can see.

With a scary phase of heavy-hitting drug trials in my treatment future, I instead head to Colorado to follow a new lead. I pack a few changes of clothes, some wool, a replenished bucket of hope. I plan to bunk at mom’s for ten days. I stay seven months.

NEXT CHAPTER

Rex IX reminds even in my most wretched state, I am still lovable

Rex VI & VII teach me to find the calm that holds the movement, two seemingly opposite experiences in a lasting embrace

Rex XI & XII suggest that compassion and kindness might be the best RX of all