Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
In a Disney princess bag behind the passenger seat lives the crash kit. Here is what you’ll find inside:
Going through photos of the last trip before my life changed, I see her. That me is there, radiating all the pain and exhilaration of the little mountain she climbed with her partner on their first day in Kaua’i.
I love that girl. She was hurting bad from a bum hip that would get replaced in a year, but she powered through it, sun-happy and heart-strong.
She started vanishing just a few short months later, replaced by a body-snatching invasion of Long COVID symptoms.
The worst of those symptoms? Post-Exertional Malaise.
Continue reading “Slow and Steady: Notes on PEM”
While we still have much to learn about long COVID, a growing body of research paints a worrisome picture, and more needs to be done to help understand, prevent and treat long COVID.
– Sens. Tim Kaine (D-VA), Todd Young (R-IN), and former Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) in The Hill, 8/31/23
Imagine this.
You board that long haul flight woozy from too many hours of debauchery. Your center row seat wedges you between a fussy lap baby and a linebacker whose shoulders take up half your headrest. Plus there is the dude behind you who spends the whole flight playing a first-person shooter game balanced on the tray table at your back.
Continue reading “Calling for a Skycap: Notes on Fatigue”
Me: I’ve been thinking a lot about where we were this week last year
Co-worker: Were we in WA? Where your whole life changed and you were so sick??
Me: That’s the place! I was about to be escorted off campus. But it was a great first two days!
It’s the one-year anniversary of my first (and so far, only) COVID infection and I’m spending it much the same way as I spent the week in 2022. Dizzy, queasy, exhausted, and trusting that work can get on without me.
And bored. So very bored.
Continue reading “COVID-versary”
46,000 of us on a Reddit sub. 60,000 on a private Facebook group. Tens (or even hundreds) of thousands still on Twitter despite the fallout from the buyout. Discord groups. Regional discussion boards. And circles absorbing circles as sub-types make homes in community with those suffering from ME/CFS, MCAS, and other illnesses.
These are just the collected few. We are always dealing with small clusters. Only 10-ish percent who get the virus will end up with post-viral syndrome. A percentage of those show symptoms severe enough, or enduring enough, to register among a baffled medical establishment as more than anxiety, aging, or “all your tests are normal, try meditation and drinking more water.”
Continue reading “See Here: Notes on Long COVID”
“Take Nothing for Granted”
Says the sticker inside locker 213.
It’s a sizeable sticker. Bigger than “Deposit Quarter, Take Key.” More insistent than “Be responsible! Always lock your locker!” It hangs there at a cocky angle. Shabby, smug, sure of itself. Shredded at the edges, about five and a half feet off the ground (eye level for some of us). The size just shy of a bumper sticker. An iconoclast. A poseur. Trying to be something different. To proselytize from unlikely, and unavoidable, public soap boxes. Not truck bumpers, no. Instead, utility poles. Bathroom stalls. Park benches. Locker rooms.
Continue reading “Sticker Shock”Back in March, we knew it would be a little while. Night clubs shuttered along with gyms, studios, and all the rest of public life. No contra dancing at the Glen Echo Park Spanish Ballroom on Friday nights. No proximity to my absolutely favorite Zumba teacher at the rec center on Saturday mornings. We’d have to figure something out. For this old gal, keeping the spirit intact means movement. Dance is as much a necessity as toilet paper and reliable wifi.
The irony was clear from the beginning: the businesses keeping their doors open were not ones I wanted to support. A few of my more savvy Zumba instructors went virtual, offering Zoom workouts at no cost a couple days a week. It was oddly comforting to catch a glimpse into the kitchens and living rooms of people I’d only seen at the gym. I felt less alone in my own mess, swinging my hips in the tiny rectangle of space carved out in a condo which absorbed schoolroom, office, and the entire universe of entertainment options on two days notice last March.
That little while stretched into weeks. Then months.
I was definitely going to need new ways to dance.
Continue reading “Fan Dancer”
1. Here is your blank page.
A crease deepening in the fold of their neck.
A spiderweb alongside the eyes.
Knuckles nicked and gnarled
from every saw blade that has ever gone sideways.
Their hull with its jagged seams lashed back together
more times than even they can count,
Yet strength enough still to flip you like an egg
over easy, your wet yolk intact (but not for long).
Their silhouette against the moonlaced slats,
looming, flesh-wrapped,
lifting the crenulation of your ribs
smoothing the oil they somehow coax
from pockets
you forgot you’d sewn into the edges of your whispers.
Unfolding from a plank on a mat, I see his sneakers approaching.
“Are you done with your workout?”
“I’m not sure.” I pull back into a child’s pose and then flop over.
“You look like you’re done. Did you do your weights?” A dark heart of sweat blooms across his chest.
“A few. I just don’t like it here tonight.”
He looks around. Our gym. The place we come almost every free Tuesday evening after he picks me up from the metro. “You don’t like it here?”
“Not tonight,” I say.
“Okay,” he shrugs. “We can go home anytime. Let me know when you’re ready.”
25 push ups will not get you a promotion.
They won’t get you published
and they won’t get you laid.
25 push up do not walk the dog, stock the fridge, or keep the kid out of jail.
25 push ups do not set the record straight.
They do not cover the rent or replace the busted alternator.
25 push ups do not even give you defined biceps.
You’d need curls and rows and extensions, multiple sets,
and a gym membership.
Shannon E. Williams 