I woke up on the floor. I hadn’t fallen. I just couldn’t stay upright anymore. The dizziness had been building for days, and then one morning my body was done.
The kidney disease has been part of my story for a while now, and if you’ve read this blog you already know that. What I didn’t expect was the anemia coming back this hard. Before my heart attack last year, my hemoglobin had dropped low enough that I needed blood transfusions and iron supplements. They brought me back. I thought it was handled. About six months later, the numbers were almost as bad as before. I was passing out just trying to sit up. Standing was ambitious. Leaving the house was out of the question.
And then the medication problem started. My nephrologist prescribed something to address it, and what should have been a simple pickup turned into a month-long wait. My pharmacy and my insurance couldn’t get their communication straight. One said it was covered, the other said it wasn’t, and neither seemed particularly motivated to figure it out. I finally switched pharmacies, and the new one had it sorted within days. A month of being sicker than I needed to be because two corporations couldn’t talk to each other. If you’ve dealt with the American healthcare system, you already know this story. The whole thing is built for process, not for the person standing at the counter wondering why they can’t get their prescription filled.
So I took a month off. Medical leave. I didn’t have much choice.
Most of it was rest. The kind where you don’t check your phone because lifting your arm feels like too much. But even when your body shuts down, your mind doesn’t. I couldn’t work, couldn’t move around much, couldn’t show up anywhere. And while I was lying there, the world kept going. People I know were getting laid off. I watched it happen through my phone, from a horizontal position, unable to do anything about it. I couldn’t reach out, couldn’t help, couldn’t even process it properly because I was too tired to think straight. It made me realize how much of my sense of self is tied to being present, being available, being in it.
When you can’t participate, you start seeing things differently. I looked at everything I’ve been doing, all the projects, all the commitments, and I could finally tell which ones actually mattered to me. Some old projects I’d shelved years ago came back to mind. Things that made me feel useful and happy when I was working on them. I want to restart those. I won’t say what they are yet. I’ll announce them when they’re actually back up and running. And some things I’ve been spending time on turned out to be exactly what I suspected they were. Those are getting cut.
A month of forced stillness isn’t a vacation. It isn’t a retreat. I didn’t come out of it feeling renewed or clear-headed or any of that. I came out of it knowing which things I’d been doing because they mattered and which ones I’d been doing because I hadn’t stopped to ask. My body made me stop. The rest was just what happened while I was lying there.