Follow up to Year End.
I cycle home after a swim at the lake and for the briefest of moment my heart swells and I gurgle on my own breath, utterly taken aback by the stray thought that I am okay. I am okay.
It seems impossible after a year of pain, of endless tiredness, of unpredictable bouts of dizziness. A couple of months ago I was on the phone with a GP who tentatively pushed me to research ME. I was constantly about to cry, forcing myself to be okay with not being okay. I was mapping a new layout of my life, one in which my body did not have the fitness and health I used to cherish. But here I am, here I have been, for weeks now, okay.
My chest pulses from the cold of the lake, my lungs expand as they should. I momentarily forget about the knife of asthma so familiar in the winter months, and I spin my legs faster. Effortlessly.
I laugh. Over the motorway and about to join the unsafe flow of traffic on the ring road, I laugh. The sound is drowned by motors but I feel it in every muscle of my body. I am okay.
I grow dizzy on the thought. Not the dizziness that caused my head to swirl in fog and my body to ache, no, this is a dizziness of joy and clarity. It was not ME that pooled in my body, it was a simple deficiency in iron. I am surprised that something so simple took so long to diagnose but then we were all so focused on my hormones and their spreading deregulations that we forgot the basics.
I swerve away from the ring road, hop on the pavement that will lead me home and consider the audacity of a walk to the supermarket. My partner is up for it so I park the bicycle and we set out for the shops. We meander in the aisles, picking what we need, and decide to leave via the long way home.
My legs are still supple and fit, the pack on my back easy and familiar. I recall nine months prior hiking with my brother and the never ending fatigue that grew and grew and grew until I could not take it anymore and we had to go home. How different the walk would have been if I had known, if the doctors had known, if it hadn't been the start of my body changing.
But all of that are ifs and buts and I cannot do anything about it. Instead I delight in the spring in my step, I marvel at the birds in the scrubland between motorway and houses, at the eucalyptus, ginormous and utterly incongruous in my neighbourhood.
Rain sputters over us and I delight in this too. Everything is easy today and for the first time in months I do not expect to pay a price the following day. The following day, I will be okay because I have iron tablets building me back up, because my body is still fit and healthy. A simple miracle.