On the body

WARNING:

This post is very frank and personal and does not hold punches. In fact, it revels in a little bit too much info. I would strongly encourage skimming or skipping outright, if you happen to be a female blood relative.

But I post it out of optimism and hope that it's the apex and now the pendulum is going to start swinging back up.

It started with the feet, at least the most noticeable of the most recent round. Fluid flooding down and settling and stretching the skin taut, first with the toes and then working up through the knees. To be unable to squat because it asks too much flexibility of your knee, or rather it asks that the bubble of fluid behind your knee be relocated elsewhere—not impossible, but intensive in both time and massage—how does one explain this to a room full of 2^nd graders while your uber-boss, the wife of the director of the entire school, watches on? Were it not indecent to do so, flashing lymph nodes swollen to the size of large blueberries might help, or flashing the oozing, festering scabs with angry red veins spreading the joy.

And it's hard to place the physical depletion. No way to show the intestinal grinding, the wearying ache of an ever=present hunger, the body saying, “Yeah, I could go for a burger right about now; no worries, though—if I don't get one, I'll be digesting myself within an hour, and there's still some flesh hanging around.”

Showing the ribcage might work: it's disconcerting to see every bump and knurl where there should be pecs, to see the contours not of shoulder muscles but the concave spaces in the scapula.

But that just makes people say, “Eat more,” as if it were that simple and straightforward. When? How? When? If I eat to my physical satiation, it's an absurd quantity that rockets straight through. If I eat mindfully and cautiously I am hungry and regret not eating more until I have the chance to eat again, which is extremely dangerous because now I've ben thinking about eating for an unfortunately long time and am especially predisposed to wolfing down whatever comes at me.

And then there's the question of what—few things make my mouth as happy as a green papaya salad with the spicy peanut-lime-chili dressing and a fresh black crab crushed in with the mix; I'll refrain from telling stories, but say that in the battle for digestion, the papaya takes about two hours to escape relatively unscathed.

There's always a big bowl of rice, and usually something fried on top. Day after day, meal after meal, rice. The sugar rush and crash. The little spoonfuls of chili fish sauce ladeled on with salt-laden guilt. The constant search for a way to make it seem like more than about my least preferred starch.

Not to imply anything new or exciting; save for the rice, the hunger and gnawing boniness have been my life for a goodly while, at least long enough to consider them unremarkable. But here, things are different. Magnified.

On the one hand, I had a very easy time uprooting and moving 14 timezones away because I had little to keep me stateside; inversely, I have even less—namely, a job—calling me back.

And then there's the physicality of absurdly-swollen ankles, a wardrobe that no longer fits, the question of passing a physical for my work permit. How bizarre to wonder if I'm in physical condition to pass such a routine deal, what would've been borderline asinine even before it was presented as, “Show up and say you're healthy.”

While I am thankful to be in a country with superb medical care available—provided you know where to go and can get there, etc etc etc—the down side is that I've been to the good hospital in town enough times that they know me, and they still remark at my blood pressure, pulse, and weight.

It became an issue that I had not only been to the hospital but went back, followed by a prosthetics appointment with the dentist. My big boss has to sign receipts for me to get an insurance refund—teachers are insured for X amount per year—and her bootstraps are steel-belted oxhide.

“Also, I need to find a gastroenterologist. Someone who specializes in the stomach and intestines. Do you know where I can find one?”

“Why you need that? Just go hospital.”

“I did [I did not add that I had been—weekly—for the past month] and they said I need to go to a specialist.”

“But why you need?”

An awkward, embarrassed pause. “Because even though my liver, kidneys, heart, lungs, and blood are healthy, my body is not synthesizing protein and is essentially shutting down. They've run all the diagnostics they can come up with, hit me with a huge barrage of drugs, but they can't figure it out.”

“You no need special doctor, you need eat protein—more fish. Beside, it all money, and you have not so much more.”

So I was given the chance to be especially thankful for the affordable, high-quality healthcare as I decided not to say, “And here are the rest of the receipts.”

As I contemplated nuking up two bowls of egg-white with flavorful whatnots, bringing even more hardboiled eggs to campus, what clerks or vendors would think if I started buying flats of eggs every day, of going up to triple the dosage of my protein pills, or going straight for the Anabolic 5,000 powder a pharmacist offered, a coworker, the guy who lives just outside this part of reality, chimed in: “I read this book once about a lady just like you, skinny and couldn't gain weight despite eating all sorts of fast food and fatty stuff, and she started fasting and it worked. She actually gained weight once she got all the garbage out of her system, and she wrote an entire book about it. I wish I still had it so I could lend it to you.”

Thank goodness for small blessings, right?

(I'm hesitant to, but as long as I've already put so much else out there, I might as well include that this is the guy who taught himself Thai script—before he could speak the language—by copying Genesis, and who has been butting heads with our manager to use books of the Old Testament in his English classes. My listening in bemused silence has been construed as sympathy, so I get to hear all about it with great regularity. Sometimes there's a down side to being polite.)

Flash forward a bit. Here we are today, in the close-enough to here-and-now. I woke up with a different sort of pain in my ankles—just a dull, throbbing, hit-by-frying pan ache. When I looked down—or up, as it were, since I've been sleeping with my legs elevated—I saw real ankles. MY ankles, NOT the swollen, bruised, immobile ankles of an obese geriatric (consider that the below-posted photo of my ankle was taken when it looked good, for the same reason I've not taken photos of myself, which is probably the inverse of why I don't take photos of so much of Thailand).

Damn, it was a sad sight. Aching is to be expected. But I had not expected the desiccation to have spread so far.

A word on legs, I guess: I like to think of myself as physically fit and active, a hiker and skier and biker and all that. Even over the winter, when things were going sketchy, my legs were strong and able; even as my ribs jutted and my pelvis stretched skin taut, my quads were defined and solid, my calves flat and strong planes of muscle.

Skip over the Thai massage to the exact here and now==there's a goodly bit of interim, but I'll get there.

After a traditional massage, a wave of welcome circulation brought wretched feeling back to the legs. Now, just like the arms, the legs are covered in a web of veins that give the impression of honed and toned muscle but in fact indicate not the inverse so much as the absence thereof.

In the month they've spent hidden under swelling, my legs have disappeared.

Now, my legs look like a ten year old's attempts to make a jointed snowman—oddly shaped knobs connecting somewhat misshapen limbs. Most of the bruising has cleared my feet and ankles, so now it's a matter of the cysts and pustules left by sundry creams and ointments I thought would help.

One hand can reach ¾ of the way around my thigh; when I look at my calf, it's the size I think of my bicep should be (once was).

And there is no elasticity, no spring, just a geriatrically creaky immobility and skin stretched taut over bone.

But somehow I feel better. Maybe it's the two handfuls of pills I take any given day. Maybe it's the dozen or so egg whites, spiked with aromatics and spices, I eat in a day. Maybe my body is just tired of being sick and tired. Whatever it is, I'll take it.

I hurt on so many levels: I miss home, miss family, miss the mountains and trees, hurt from bone grinding on bone, muscle devouring itself to keep critical components in gear, the bike wreck, skin pinched between bone and unpadded chairs, the occasional bit of muscle trying to rebuild, from the bike wreck. Did I mention that the bike wreck still hurts prohibitively?

But underlying it all is a dull sort of post-workout ache, the one that says, “You've sure taken yourself somewhere, but it looks like we'll make it back not just in one piece but all the stronger for it.” Maybe it was just untweaking from the Thai massage, or maybe it's because of the massage, but I'll take it no matter where it's from: bottom line is that it's hope and reconstruction, it's a step in a direction other than where I've been, and I'll take it.

If absolutely nothing else, it gives me reason to go back for more massage, right?