Let's Talk Peritoneal Dialysis!
Hey, I'm Jason. I'm a chronically-ill-super-freedom-loving-medical-self-journalist.
Disappointing Revelations
editor’s note: It’s a big commitment, especially considering I’ll likely be hospitalized again this week, but I’ve decided to write shorter posts this week, one each day. My math is pretty bad, but I’m shooting for 5-7 posts. I honestly don’t know why you’d need to know this to continue.
If experience creates wisdom, I’ve wisdomed the crap out of the past few weeks.
Dialysis—I think I probably knew this anyway—is a series of painful moments of truth. One after another they come, with their harsh realities and unwavering sciences. Oh, how they’ve come, in spades these days. Over the past 14 weeks, I have been in surgery, out of surgery, at home, at the clinic, leaking fluid from a hole in my body, feeling kinds of pain heretofore unknown, doing well, doing poorly and generally getting the medical equivalent of a beat-down by some serious cosmic forces.
Now, look, don’t get all crazy on me, but when things are going really bad, I mean epically bad–dialysis patients know “bad” and I’m talking about bad beyond the norm—anyway, when things are really bad, I have this uncharacteristic little habit of checking my horoscope to see if Mercury is in Retrograge. I think to myself: Self, there has got to be an explanation for this absurd level of suffering. No doubt this explanation will be on the web in a non-scientific, yet selfish and personally-satisfying way.
And so it was this week I surfed the web for a reason, beyond ESRD, which could explain why I’ve gone through so many goddam trials and tribulations. Here’s the answer I got, which made me laugh and weep simultaneously. Is Mercury Retrograde?
“No. Something else must be bumming you out…”
Well, yeah. I suppose I deserved that. In any event …
There is no explanation for the suffering any of us feel. That’s right, I said it. There are outlets for relieving the mental anguish of human suffering, like meditation or tennis or religion or a nice punching bag. But the “why me” never gets answered. Ever.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am not a complainer. I’m a chronically-ill-super-freedom-loving-medical-self-journalist who happens to have had a pretty difficult, yet richly informative, go of it in life. But there is always the nagging somewhere deep behind my usable brain, why me? It is with this question I spend my darkest moments.
Almost all of the medical events in my life have perfectly logical and proven scientific answers. This one particular unanswerable question is the obvious outlier. For me, it’s just a … painful truth.
Next time … a numerical summary of a physical pummelry.
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