Serum Sickness, Good News and Bad News, When to Close the Screen

So, the last few days have been a bit of a daze, as I had a reaction – specifically, a kind of reaction called “serum sickness,” to the Xolair shot, which sounds wonderfully poetic, but you know, comes with things like a high fever, prickly rashes on your face that make you look like you dived head-first into poison ivy and some serious stomach aches and weird faint-yness. I was a little upset, seeing as how this shot was supposed to help the autoimmune problems, that I had an autoimmune type reaction to it, you know, sort of an ironic, terrible joke.

But then I thought about the things we let into our lives, our bodies, and the things we keep out. While I was woozy with antibiotics and steroids, I noticed the news being even more terrible than usual – terrorism and ebola and etc – and I thought – why is this always in our faces, this bad news, this terribly frightening and depressing set of things. But we can shut it off – we can turn the channel, close the internet explorer window, turn the radio off.

I mean, health care is sort of the same – it can be very frightening, like, weird reactions to weird shots, doctors want to run tests all of the time. But while we don’t necessarily have control over everything about our own bodies – I certainly find mine hilarious on occasion – we can take risks, but we can also shut down things we don’t want, add in things we do want. Even when I was in a wheelchair for a while a couple of years ago, we’d still go the zoo, go through the park, find the bluebirds hiding in the trees. Even when my diet shrank to about four foods, my husband Glenn tried to make the most of out of the limited ingredients. If we get sick – and I just got over a six week respiratory illness – we can stay in bed, and see it as a trial, or we can stay in bed, and see it as an opportunity to catch up on classic movies and novels. This is not Pollyanna-ing – it’s just that I’m frustrated with the bad news taking over the screen, including my own. I remember thinking while my fever was going up and up yesterday, that I felt resentful of the demands of the screen, the angry and resentful Facebook posts, e-mail, news stories.  I thought – I have the power to turn these things off. This is one of those things you realize during high fevers – epiphanies like “Hey, I don’t have to respond to every e-mail or twitter the minute it comes in.” We can embrace the things we love, the people that make us happy, open the windows and let in fresh air, the changing seasons.

This is a set of sunflowers about five minutes from my doctor’s office.