Steady Hands

Friday, February 17th, 2017 – 2:47 pm

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I don’t care to be your inspiration. I don’t want to educate people on conversion disorder. I don’t need to teach anyone about PTSD. I just need to live my life in peace. I just want a fraction of control regained over body and mind. I just care to feel like someone I once recognized.

We thought everything was fine. We always think everything is fine. Until it is no longer fine. Maybe if I get angry, I can push through this for a couple minutes without crying. Recovery isn’t pretty or useful for inspiration porn. It’s ugly and painful and scarring. I remember quaint days long since gone when I thought my recovery from two opiate detoxes and two drunk decades were my biggest trials to survive. I used to joke about the book of Job and God’s humor at my history of losing everyone I care about and always getting the cutting edge diseases. My humor is waning.

Yesterday morning, Amy and I worked through another of my violent, dissociative breaks. It was my fifth one in the last year. What quickly shot me seconds away from a trip to the emergency room ended instead with my shaking speechless in the kitchen as she held me for several minutes, running my hand under cold water. I tried to stand upright while we both cried and I came back. She moves fast and holds me tight every time.

Then I had seizures for several hours after that. They keep returning sporadically for minutes at a time, even waking me repeatedly in my sleep last night. Something old, something black and blue, borrowed tremors from tired old trauma. Aftershocks of aftershocks. I hate this disease. I hate feeling helpless. I hate no longer trusting or knowing myself.

In other ways, I have physically shown improvement over the last few weeks and months, which made yesterday’s event more of a scare and surprise for both of us. But of the last five events over the last year, Amy was there to stop the last two from escalating to the point of my possibly hurting myself or someone else. We are fiercely fighting for one another, more than ever before in our thirty years together.

I daily feel like a different man and often hardly know who I am. But I know I will always be in her sure and faithful hands.

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