“Don’t Apologize When Asking For Your Meds.”

Due to the nature of being in the hospital last week, I had a lot cathartic writing to do and didn’t want to shorten or market or hustle my pain- in a sense- just for subscribers, and so this week is a rare completely-free week in an effort to feel I’m maintaining my integrity (and prevent myself from sitting and writing lengthy exclusive content while still recovering).

Hopefully, this is a scare occurrence, of course, but one that still allows for more full-time readers to join because being a supportive subscriber doesn’t just mean keeping this working memoirist… well, working. But it ALSO means that you’re effectively creating reader scholarships, as anyone who asks to be added on as a full-time reader will be given so, no questions asked.

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“You have to stop apologizing for asking for care,” a nurse said on a recent brief stay, not that I care to realize how oddly I care. “Don’t apologize when asking for your meds.”

She’s just doing her job, she’s quick to remind me… but it feels weird to think I’m just doing mine too.

Ever since this part of my sickness began (liver and pancreas problems are actually fairly hallmark for CF or related disorders), I’ve been dragging myself to labs for get evidence so that I create a paper-trail for the pain as if it WERE my job. Then I go home and suffer, satiated that I Sherlock’d good and plenty. But I know that even with all the data in the world (years’ worth, in fact), there aren’t salves for every wound, so some facts just aren’t worth fighting.

So much of it doesn’t feel worth fighting any more.

Not for a long time.

A team of doctors started talking so fast- in and through me - that I found myself agreeing to things I didn’t feel, purely because I was too weary and wheezy and whirlwind inside to track Where Was My Mind (cue The Pixies, or lesser known Trampled By Turtles cover).

I used to spend most of my time in hospitals bragging about my company to any one who’d listen as a way of saying: “You’re worth something in your world and I’m worth something in mine. Please see me as that while in this bed. Please?”

And right now, as my life is on pause but gaining secret traction behind the scenes - projects and purpose I want to share so badly - I feel like I look like what they see me as…

Someone who became more frail and weak and at risk than (almost ever) before…. Someone who’s in a bed.

And for the first time in a long time… that’s who I’ve been. And for the first time in a long time, I hate how much the world has no compassion for that (actually, I’ve always hated that? But I just liked the flow of that transition), and I hate how much I hate it (me), and I hate that it’s so much of what I’ve been writing about.

A person can take a few months off from their career or “productive life” and become completely irrelevant. That’s how the world works, like it or not. I don’t like it… but that doesn’t make it any less true. It doesn’t matter how hard you worked before or what you did or didn’t stand for - the ‘world of the stage’ doesn’t light up without a spot.

I’m gathering my specials (spotlights). I’m trying to live to see new stories, new scenes… but doctors just see a weak person in a bed, no life outside those walls (though they also wish you weren’t taking up a bed a lot of the time, too?)… and performers just see an empty stage you’re not illuminating for them….

And that makes an empty person.

“Don’t apologize,” the nurse assured me…

But I still feel sorry. I still feel so so sorry.

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