A Wild Aloha To You – Your Morning Dawdler

Thank you Rory! Your questions this week hit several nerves. Thank you for giving me a reason to talk about my body and my world.

Have you learned anything new about your personality that you didn’t know beforehand whilst on your blogging journey?

I haven’t learned anything about my personality, but I’ve learned a huge amount about my body and how it works and what has been going wrong with it.

I have been either anemic or almost anemic for most of my life. Until recently, it was never severe enough for it to get much attention. But for the past two years, I went from being slightly anemic to being seriously anemic.

The thing about anemia is it has no symptoms. It is a condition that produces symptoms. Weakness and exhaustion combined with an inability to sleep. It makes your white blood cells go crazy trying to fix you which it does by giving you really severe asthma (e-asthma, or eosinophil asthma) — and it attacks your red blood cells, the lack of which is the origin of the problem. It is ultimately an immune system problem, but it’s a very fundamental one. It’s so basic it produces problems that circle back on themselves and like a dog successfully chasing his tail, bites itself in its ass.

Right now on television, they are offering “pills to cure eosinophil asthma, aka e-asthma” which may be the most common form of severe asthma. But they are offering pills to cure it without suggesting you find out what has caused your body to produce so many eosinophils that the asthma leaves you unable to breathe. They should not be offering a cure without finding out what has caused the problem in the first place. That’s dangerous.

I had no idea a few weeks ago what a eosinophil was or for that matter, what any of the various white cells were or did — and why mine were so incredibly high. Everything is related to everything else. That is mostly what I’ve learned. You don’t have a symptom without a source. When you have a lot of symptoms, even when they seem to have nothing to do with each other, it is probably not true. Peel away the layers and they will be related somehow.

The interconnectedness of everything applies to your body. The way your body feels relates to your emotions and your relationships and all of this changes the quality of your life.

I don’t know how long this “fix” will last. It might last a long time or very briefly, but one way or the other, I feel like a real person again. I can walk up the short flight of stairs from the ground to our house. I can breathe without an inhaler. It isn’t making me young, but it’s making me feel human. That’s huge!

What are your last thoughts of the night before you turn your lights off, ready to sleep?

My last thought is wondering if my sleeping meds are going to work. Hours later, I wake up and realize, “Yup, they worked.”

What is the most ridiculous thing you have ever heard anyone say, write, or blog about?

Too much to summarize. Too much stupidity. Too many people who actually believe the world is flat, that strange creatures live in the middle of the earth. Too many people who vote for people who loathe them and don’t even realize they are loathed. I can’t begin to wrap my head around it much less sum it up.

What can you do today that you were not capable of a year ago?

I can breathe. I can stand up without pushing myself up. I can climb six stairs and not be gasping for breath. Huge. Majestic. Amazing.

Categories: Anecdote, Q & A, questions

Tags: #Photography, humor, Marilyn Armstrong, question and answers