Azalea

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Let's talk about something else today. This thing is dragging on and on. I want it to be over. I want to wake up one morning with no pain, no trembling or spasms or confusion and 20/20 eyesight, then I'll hop over to the place where they collect my blood in tubes every week and the blood will show no sign of infection: no evidence of spirochete flagella, no elevated this or that, just the right balance of red and white swimming along, nothing to see here!

Then David and I will celebrate with a bottle of wine, and I will have one perfectly chilled glass, and the next day I'll drive over to the pill collection center like a responsible citizen and heave my bucket of medicine into their special bucket of medicine which will later be incinerated, so that the fish in the river don't become dazed and sterile, and later that day I'll redecorate my bedroom just to signify how different things are going to be now.

We'll have a fat red headed baby and I'll work part time at the newspaper, David and I will argue a little over the bills and the dishes, and that arguing will sound like a musical compared to the silence of sickness. We have a second baby, a little girl with blue eyes, the fat red head is now a burly toddler who chews on his sister's arms and wrestles his dad. Money is tight but I go back to school, the newspaper throws me a goodbye party in the break room with a sheet cake, and I become a counselor who helps people who are sick with chronic or mysterious illness and I write a second book, a friendly guidebook for people with Lyme that says Relax, here is a road map with all the answers, this is the definitive guide to health, read this and only this, because I've done all the research for you.

And whenever I happen to run into you, you who is reading this, I fork over the squirming red head and the blond baby, the two lights of our lives, our little joys, and I say: thank you for these two. We tried everything to get rid of my Lyme, we did everything, and something worked, and now look who we have.

This is what scares us most. I can deal with my own body, my own day to day health. But Lyme is congenital, while it's still inside my blood and my organs there's a strong chance that I would pass it to my baby and she would not be born at all, or she would be born very ill. Or she would come on out just fine, screaming her lungs out while we looked on in awe, it's hard to say. It would be quite the dice roll.

I guess we never talked about something else. At this present moment, I suppose I don't actually have too much more to say. It's azalea season. I'm so lucky. I'm very tired.

If you're interested in helping, here is how, here is why, and here is how I'm going to say thank you.