First Published March 30, 2014
I haven’t written anything in my blog for a week/10 days, which at this end of the timeline has had me a little curious.
It has been a hard period with doctor’s visits, and other medical procedures and I found this made me very tired. There were so many things happening health/illness wise that it became too hard to find words for the roller coaster experience. My voice dried up, just like a drought affected lake bed.
Where I grew up we lived beside a lake, and the wind over the lake and through the surrounding trees would always tell Mum when it would be a good drying day, when rain was coming, when westerly storms were coming or hot weather was promised. The lake was very beautiful and it fed the surrounding wetlands. The Botanic Gardens incorporated the lake as one of its many features of natural beauty and it was changeable and restless all the years of my growing up. In the last couple of years of Mum’s life the lake bed, due to drought, dried up and was infested with fairy grass which clogged up everything it touched, the long verandahs of nearby houses were suffocated with the grass and it made its way, unwanted, into all sorts of spaces and places .
The lake was now a truly desolate place. Migratory birds had to find other sources of water and reeds, fish died and the long walks that ringed the lake became absent of evening strollers. The lake became all dry clay and wide cracks, nothing in it but weeds and rank smelling algae drying at the edges.
A bit bleak you say? Miserable actually and quite overwhelming of the local community my mother included.
So, you could reasonably ask, how come you’re writing now, how do we the reader make the leap from a dried up, drought blighted lake to you the writer having access to the flow of words again?
Well………
I have spent many days, a full year actually, being painfully aware of how my back hasn’t responded to the myriad treatments that it has been subjected to. These treatments have been engaged in with the best will in the world to try and identify the problem and find ways of relieving the pain, but more importantly for me, making plane and car travel a real possibility. I don’t do well when travel isn’t an option in my life, being locked into a tiny geographic space, no matter how pastoral and beautiful, does my head in.
Aaron rang a couple of days ago and in the conversation he asked how ‘solving the back pain project’ was doing. I named the current steps being taken and felt somewhat disheartened as I couldn’t report any real progress other than my continuing determination to stick with the project of finding some solutions. He said “well that’s good, this is real progress”. I thought I had misheard him, or he wasn’t taking my back troubles very seriously. As is my wont when I am taken aback I try not to take affront, and I asked him how come he made this comment. Aaron’s response went something like this “well when I think about all the problems with this disease and how it has affected your body, and now you have got all the other bits mostly working, this back issue seems to be the last hurdle to you getting moving again”. And I felt myself sag with relief.
Suddenly when Aaron made this comment what came into view were all the steps I’d taken over the last five years, the medication trials that worked and those that spectacularly and miserably hadn’t. My determination to find a specialist whose ways of working had a fit for me (not easy to do in regional Australia), the spending of many monies on alternative treatments to support the smallest of improvements, the care and support of so many people as I struggled through the days, weeks, months and years and then the breakthroughs when change and improvements had happened and been maintained.
This point of view that Aaron brought to our conversation, within narrative therapeutic conventions, would be described as a unique outcome, a subjagated preferred story, a sub plot that had disappeared under the weight and insistence of the problem saturated storyline. A storyline so focused on what wasn’t working that it had rendered invisible any improvements that had been hard won, a storyline that disappeared many of the steps I had taken and continue to take towards wellness and a preferred life.
I felt a weight lift off my shoulders, a grey pall lift off my life as I again engaged with what was working, and and a re-organising in my mind that this back problem was one more hurdle, a somewhat big one, but just a hurdle to the hopes I carry for further travel and roaming in places I have a yearning to visit.
What I was also noticing was how quickly the other hurdled hurdles slip into the background, as if travelling is just about fixing this back problem. All the other requirements and risks that go along with travel within the limits my bodily self is constrained by feel like known and manageable constraints.
Thanks Azz
Illness Narratives 