On Admitting Mortality

The first time I woke up and could not move or speak was indisputably the scariest moment of my life. I’ve experienced things that would have any person’s heart pounding out of their chest; looked down the barrel of a gun, into the eyes of someone intent on hurting me badly with nothing between us, watched my husband flip an ATV at more than seventy miles per hour and slide across an icy embankment limp, found the ground coming at me entirely too fast when I was supposed to be sitting atop a horse, been pinned underwater by my own ATV after an accident not sure if anyone had seen it happen or would come to help, in a car that flipped 5 times before coming to rest on its roof. But in each of those incidents I have been in control — even if only of my own reaction. I have been able to scream out for help, to move at least a limb, to see more than darkness.

Sleep paralysis, as I would find out much later it is called, gave me no such comfort. There is no control, no ability even to react. You cannot move, cannot open your eyes to see, cannot speak. All you can do is hear, is know that you are awake but that your body is still asleep. And for how long, you never know.

The first time was about two and a half years ago. I never surmised at that time — or even shortly thereafter — that it may have been related to a severe concussion I’d experienced a few months prior. Lately, I’ve been wondering if it is more and more. At first it would last just a minute or two. Yesterday, it went on for at least 10 minutes. I know because I could hear the TV. It also used to happen only periodically. Once or twice a year at most. This year it has been more like once per month. And there are other … symptoms, that indicate perhaps the concussion I thought I’d recovered from did lasting damage.

There is the fact that I cannot lay on my back without pain shooting through the bottom of the back of my head — precisely where it was, by the way, that I was injured; precisely where it was that hurt excrutiatingly for a week during the concussion fiasco of 2006 if I so much as sat upright. There is the fact that sometimes, despite my once very quick-to-the-draw mind I forget very simple english words for days at a time. The fact that I’m not anywhere near old enough for that to be blamed on age.

It has been a few months now since the first time I connected the proverbial dots; since I have thought that perhaps these symptoms are related. It has been a few months since I have had to admit mortality inwardly. With all of the reckless, stupid, dangerous things I have done admitting even to myself that I can be harmed — potentially irreversibly — is hard. Admitting it aloud, even harder.

It’s not that I am so naive that I believe things — bad things — cannot happen to me. I know that. I know. I have been hurt. Badly. Repeatedly. But always I have recovered. I have healed. I have not had to confront the fact that some day, some thing may not heal. May not have really healed like I thought already.

And that is what is most difficult. Confronting once and for all the very real fact that my idea of fun may not always be my body’s idea of it. That my body may not be able to compensate for all the things I want it to.

Right now I’m still not even sure if that means I’ll stop asking it to.

Tagged as: photoblog