I am writing this now because I am approaching the limits of my capacity for writing. I’m 36. I’ve lived with fibromyalgia for over a decade. For six years, I lived with the medical PTSD and physical aftermath of a nightmarish appendectomy that makes it impossible to get a deep breath, or to cough or sneeze without pain like a fingernail in an open wound.
Today, my social media feeds are fingernails in all my open wounds. I am flanked by academic CFPs about a pandemic that I fear could kill me and by social, political, and academic commentary about allowing the disease to run its course. I am watching the fury of disability activists I follow closely online. I am watching many of them develop COVID-19 symptoms because a roommate or neighbor felt invincible enough to socialize in large groups. I’m watching relatives and friends currently working in the biomedical complex, exposed to COVID-19 without adequate protections or ability to continue best practices. I’m worried about my friends and colleagues, many of whom are high-risk (like me), or have an impaired immune system (like me), or exist under intersecting oppressions that make them second-class citizens in the biomedical complex (like me).
In 2014 when my appendix perforated, it took months to receive appropriate care. By the time I reached the ER, six to seven months later with a pelvis that looks like a bomb went off, I was triaged as unimportant and made to wait an additional day. And a ruptured appendix is indisputably a medical emergency, with no social or political rhetoric suggesting otherwise.
Today, being chronically ill in New York City during COVID-19 means having to triage my routine health care appointments because clinics are filling with the sick and dying—a.k.a. cancel my maintenance visits altogether.
I hear NYC is like a ghost town, the subway tensely populated by essential workers only, but I wouldn’t know firsthand. I’ve left my apartment twice in four weeks. I don’t mind. Isolation isn’t new or troubling to me; pain often demands it. Chronic pain and fatigue compel me to turn down happy hours, back out of dinner plans to avoid getting dressed and getting on the subway. Mine is homelife and bedlife: heating pads, support harnesses, posture wedges, cervical pillows, and tears. I am making a career out of challenging the perception of pain as subjective, interior, inherently unshareable and unknowable to others, even while my horizon shrinks to the isolating qualities of its din.
Today is my third week without massage and physical therapy. Colleagues proudly broadcast increased productivity, whether it’s writing projects, chores, DIY projects, the exhausting activist work of fighting to prove your life has worth. My pain, she howls. I delete every CFP email and resent each click. I am remembering years ago, before I started treatment, when the pressure of computer key to fingertip felt like tiny nail scissors, inserted into the flesh, and opened, the way a morning glory unravels into full bloom. I am trying to cram pain back down into the crevices of myself, so I don’t look like a complete and utter asshole in interminable Zoom meetings.
I try, anyway.
Today I have the kind of headache I describe as heat, a grip, and a nervous thrill, like a hyena gently mouthing the back of my head before the pulverizing bite. I have oceanic muscle aches. I have unfathomable fatigue. I have pangs in my abdomen when I breathe deep. All of this is ordinary daily survival. If disease cultured itself in me, I really wouldn’t know, and it wouldn’t matter, because the federal response is abysmal, my city is overwhelmed, and if we have to debate whether to save the economy or the high-risk among us, then if I do go to a hospital, I’m reasonably certain I’ll be numbered, someday, among the dead.
Three weeks without treatment for pain, and the mirror increasingly reflects the promise of annihilation. My infrequent rituals of daily survival—foremost among them, stillness, as in if you are still, the ghost will pass—are beginning to fail. I do what I can with the equipment I have, but it’s not enough. Pain, the ghost, is always hungry. Amma would call me a pisaasu pey, a hungry ghost, when I ate too fast, when I was nuisance, and she wasn’t wrong, I am the ghost in all the ghost stories I know. Body-less, socially expelled, frantic for and repulsed by touch.
As soon as COVID-19 cases began appearing in New York, I self-isolated. I canceled conference trips. I canceled the weekly physical therapy I have depended on for 13 years, because it was deemed safer for my health. I am spent with anger at witnessing what I already knew to be true, that lives like mine are so expendable, we are already, have always been, ghosts.
Maybe it was a week ago that I said, to no one in particular and also everyone on social media, that soon I’d arrive at pain-induced impatience and irritability. I said it humorously, because after all, few people in my professional circles know what I am like without treatment. No one wants to know, or knows what to do with, the real meaning, which is to say I am the click of a landmine, I am the ball of the foot that triggered it, I am the knowledge of what happens when the toes lift, I am the aftermath, I am waiting.
It could be so much worse. I have a full-time NTT job. My salary hasn’t changed. I can rally enough to do the job I am paid to do. But beyond pain’s horizons, I see less and less. I have to write my dissertation, the other job I must do, and writing is a parasitic vine binding my arm, wrenching my shoulder, and creeping up the side of my face. I am approaching the limits of my capacity for writing. It has been a long time since I have asked myself if I have the capacity to imagine what comes next, unimaginable even back then.
