precarious

If I really think about it, I've only truly felt healthy for maybe a dozen days since my birthday in October.

It's unlike me... well, unlike how I grew up. I was always super healthy. The year after college I got a lot of colds, but I blame that on working with kids and an extra rainy and depressing winter season. And then in the past year and a half or more my colds have lasted too long. Then last May I had to go on antibiotics to get over a 6 week weird cold-turned-chest congestion thing. Same in the beginning of December. And then a few days later, before the antibiotics were over and I'd been able to enjoy more than 5 days of feeling better, I got sick all over again. So at the end of December, another ten day round of antibiotics. These were stronger, made my mouth taste like poison, and generally made me feel strange. As January came to a close and after a few nights of little sleep, my throat started warning me again with a familiar dull ache, and then all of the sudden, last Thursday, my head and chest were exploding with congestion. And then followed days of the most debilitating cold or flu or sinusitis or whatever I've experienced since I can remember.

When I've talked about it in the past few days, I start to tear up. So it was all I could do to keep my tears from spilling down when I sat in the office of a soft spoken Belgian homeopathic doctor yesterday. I sat there thinking about how I didn't really have a choice besides him, since I knew I shouldn't go back to urgent care and be on antibiotics again, but he was going to cost me so much money. His questions turned from details about my symptoms and history to... my feelings. "How does it feel to have been sick so often?"

"Well I'm used to getting to do whatever I want since I'm a healthy person with a pretty healthy lifestyle. I am not used to having to be careful, to say no to things, to be balancing precariously on the edge of health."

"So...how do you feel?"

He kept returning to that, to ask me to explain it precisely, what I've been and am thinking and feeling. I felt silly almost, to say that it frustrated me, made me upset, made me feel weak. It felt weak to even say all this, like I shouldn't be making it a big deal. I didn't feel like myself saying those things, trying to verbalize thoughts and feelings that I was slowly realizing had been affecting me negatively the past two months especially. I'm not used to being emotionally affected by my health, though it comes as second nature to know how I'm affected emotionally by everything else.

He diagrammed for me on a piece of paper how my emotional, mental, and physical elements are not in sync, and how my physical health issues are causing the other two elements to get off kilter. His questions were all a fine-tuned attempt to figure out how my body is functioning and predict what will help it to function best.

I recognized his analytical method, could compare it to how I analyze people and personality functions. I have to believe, since he is an expert and I am not, that he is more accurate than I am and that this cocktail of supplements I am on now will lead to an end to all of this.