IF YOU’RE READING THIS I DIED LAST WEEK

My husband and I have a hard case of the flu. High fever, nausea, violent night sweats, heart palpitations, ear aches, this flu has it all. I have lost 11 pounds in 6 days, he has lost 22. Keeping up with the base level farm chores is difficult, and trying to keep one another hydrated challenging. The house is a wreck, the chickens are out feed, the garden I’d worked so hard to maintain in the heat has withered and the mortgage is late. 

Jeff regained an appetite first, starting solids slowly with small meals and snacks. Now I was going to nibble at the breakfast table, mainly oats and berries. A first sip of coffee felt like a sword slicing down my throat. Porridge made it worse. Blood sugar began dropping, I asked for orange juice.

“Something’s wrong.”

Dragged upside down by a ship racing in darkness, battered by nightmare waves of confusion and simmering pain. Layers of nauseating blackness upon blackness with dull edges, unceasing. Disassociation with no survival instinct nor hope, only chaos. Yet presence enough to sense this eternal hell was all that existed.

“Bea where are you!” cried out my love as he helped me struggle to sit up. Apart from a soreness in my chest I felt normal flu crappy. 

I lost time.

“How’d I get on the floor?” 

He had set me down as my eyes rolled back into my head and I was going over.

“You stopped breathing – there was no heartbeat – I did compressions – you went stiff as a board, arms straight out, neck arched back – my life flashed before my eyes – what was I going to do?”

All I could do was return to bed, refusing the Emergency Room. Jeff called a Dr. friend who said it sounded like my heart skipped a beat or 2, keeping fresh blood from the brain for a few seconds, causing me to seize up. Fever is the bodies natural way to burn waste but try to keep it from getting so high again.

I felt delicate and did not have an easy day. By evening Jeff called a couple friends in distress and the amazing Larson’s packed up some supplies and ran over, bringing such a positive healing feeling into the house with their loving care – making hydrating drinks, rubbing my tense spots, cooking and calmly eating dinner with Jeff. 

The fever yo-yo-ed but stabilized the next day. And the weeping begins over the shock Jeff went through, over the generous care of friends, over the color of late summer through the window, over lemon tea, over a birdsong, over abandoned kittens in the orchard, over having extra towels as I sweat through them nightly, over so many memories, and not being worthy of any of it. And how hiding out from a sick and crazy world on a funky farm in the middle of nowhere God still found me to share so much. Everything.

Dr Rich also said emotionally a flu means we’ve resolved something, whether we realize or it or not. And in the rebuilding and healing we are a new creature, and to celebrate that.

In this time of burning up and physical weakness I am changed. The old me has “died” with release from coffee addiction, a wine habit, eating from boredom, running to the computer throughout the day to expose myself to other peoples programming. I more clearly see how I often try to control that which is beyond my control. I notice how negative thinking (ours or via media) instantly brings our home down into the pits. Our nightly habit of watching a show or movie as an excuse to unwind and rub on one another is actually an excuse to not focus fully on one another. There’s so much about my life that I have actually hated. And I don’t have to do or include those things any more. Whew!