I’ve had the oddest feeling all day that I’m in a muffling eggshell. It’s not that I feel disconnected but that all my senses are diminished, as if my “ears” all have “plugs” that cut off all but about 20% of the “sound.” It’s odd.

And tell the truth, I have no idea why, all though I have my suspicions. What I think is that all this concentration on “self” is a nightmare come to daylight. The world is just so much more interesting.

I accept the fact that I have to learn better self-support, to take more time away from my duties to life, to learn to moderate my stop-or-fast speed setting, but this sense of sensual diminishment is for the dead and not the living, at least in my opinion.

What makes me feel alive, what makes me feel the best I have ever felt, is that sense of continuity between the movements of my day and the movements of the air, the murder of crows that live just east of my house, the way in which the skunk across the alley moves unhurriedly regardless of whatever shares the road. Not to feel that is, as they say, for the birds, although I am quite sure they wouldn’t want it either.

I will have to find another way to remove myself from the stress and wrongness that has (apparently) caused all this bodily distress of mine.

On the good side, I have no pain and no nausea and am having a sunny weekend not spent in hospital. A wonderful improvement over the last few weeks.

It’s a bit windy and cold today but I went to the park with the dog anyway. I didn’t stay long, but it was enough to see the willows whipping and the ducks stirring the lake, feet going to keep them together against the wind.

I can’t seem to do much, or go far, and I’m not really wanting to be around people at the moment, so the coffee shop is out, as is tootling around town on the bus. I think I’ll repot a plant and make some kasha. Nice, comforting, domestic type activities.

I do feel better though despite the weakness and it is nice to contemplate a weekend not spent in the hospital.

If things continue to go well today, I may be getting out of the hospital tomorrow, and while I still need the surgery, I feel lucky that I avoided it this time. My risk factors are still too high.

I have work to do before the cutting begins, all of it to do with minimizing my risks of complications. The next six months or so will require me to be at my obsessive best. The thing is that it will require that I be obsessive about myself, my happiness and my health rather than thoughts, ideas, family or work. Should be an interesting experience.

I have no idea how I’m going to manage, just that my continued mobility, even life requires that I do. It might be a challenge because I find myself bored with the notion already. Maybe I’ll try to tie it into a more general philosophy?

See you tomorrow.

I’m significantly older at 54 than I would have been at my point-of-death had I been born much earlier and so are my children. Apart from all the general horrors of pre-medical North America, when (for example) the flu could kill thousands in a small city, there’s the existence of oddities like blood type. I’ve been thinking about blood, mine in particular, because I’ve been giving quite a bit of it for testing of late.

But there’s another reason. I met a woman, older than me by about 40 years, who couldn’t have children because she had O negative blood. I have O negative blood and I have two children. The difference is time. Each time I was pregnant, I got the post-partum shot which suppressed by own adverse reaction to the presence of a foreign blood-body (otherwise known as a type-positive baby). And since my first child was born in 1979 and that shot only became available in 1968, my son’s life was saved by a period of 11 years and an intense amount of research. And of course all the devastated mothers and dead babies that generated the need for the medical investigation.

Odd enough, but there’s also the fact that O negative is the universal donor. I can give to, but not tolerate, others. I am sure my intolerance of pregnancy and ability to donate blood to anyone are connected but I don’t know enough blood science to know how. Yet if I had to guess, I would say that the “negative” part of my blood type means an absence of something on my red blood cells, and it is that absence that allows my blood to wander through other people’s veins unnoticed, but that the presence of that thing in others’ blood makes it an “enemy” of mine. So now my blood could save my children, whereas whilst they were still in-utero, it would have killed them. Bizarre, don’t you think?

Still here, still reading, still writing. A victory in the small things!

It’s odd watching the world from my 8th story hospital window. The black dog racing over and over again after its toy in the park across the street; the melting snow and the street puddles being blown apart by every car that races by—none of it has flavour, no texture, no sound. It seems to me that there is no real life in vision alone.

The sense of disconnection I currently feel is at heart a discordance between my eye and the rest of my sensory army. My ears and skin tell me I am in a still, calm place and my eye says something quite different. What meaning I get from this disagreement tries to force the “story” to be about some impending battle, some essential disharmony between the various world my senses have organized.

Now if I were at an outdoor cafe, sitting with sweetened espresso, dogs would leap with mouths open and a bark would be heard; the wet breeze would stir the trees and move coldly over my arm. I would be fine: the sensory worlds colliding, meshing, turning out little stories about the way things are.

Imagine you are in a flat Kansas field and all around you, horizon to horizon the heavy clouds roil and writhe, yet where you stand everything is stopped, held in a static stillness. Your skin would be jumping with warning. That’s one thing sensory discordance means—warning, warning, warning, a storm is coming.

I hope it is not an accurate metaphor for my next few days, unless of course I am the lightning.

It makes me wonder how much of our cultural torpor is due to environments that ply only the eye, forgetting that the ear, nose, tongue and skin also touch the world and create.