Paradox

I have one.

A paradox, I mean. I think it's a paradox, at least. My brain is still a little fuzzy what with all the lesions.

I'm finding myself straddling a fence that is... what's a good metaphor here? Topped with barbed wire? No, I don't think it's that. It isn't that it's a scary, dangerous fence. It's that it doesn't exist.

I think it would be the equivalent of betting on a horse race where all the horses are dead. Or maybe just... that there isn't a race or you aren't sure if there is a race but you are putting money on it anyway?

Fuck. This is going to be fucking jibberish. I'm counting on all you fuckers (totally a term of endearment, by the way) who promised to read my grocery list to not immediately unfollow me.

Alright. Let me untangle this mess. Here it is:

This thing, MS. I don't know what to do with it.

On the one hand (fuck, why do I keep starting new paragraphs that only contain ONE sentence?), I can react in the expected way. I can be sad. I can cry and shit. And I did, just a little, when they first said they think I have it. But mostly I've been ignoring it. Even in the hospital, when you can't really deny that you are there for a pretty serious reason, I sort of just went about my business like usual.

The nurses were surprised how I was always moving around, walking the halls and playing with Caitlyn (who was the sweetest thing ever and I'm pretty sure she made at least a half dozen patient's days when she would walk by their rooms and say "HI!" with an enthusiastic little wave).

Nadine visited me daily and that really helped. She gave me a mani/pedi one day, despite my utterly nasty feet ("I didn't know white people could get ashy, Jaclyn"). She brought me the GOOD cupcakes (as opposed to my weirdo dad who showed up one day with a container of precut mangoes and grapes from a convenience store... for me to put in my hospital refrigerator, I guess?). It felt almost normal. We hung out and joked around and she would hover over me and say "WE WILL GET THROUGH THIS!" in a tone that clearly implied she was snarking all over my disease.

In other words, I did not get a pity party. Just lots of fun visits and delicious snacks. And it was better that way.

Now though. Now I am no longer in the hospital. No longer actively recovering from the holes in my brain. I'm still on steroids, and those fuckers are taking the wind out of me for sure, so I know I'll need a little time to recover from them. But I feel like I should be doing something already. Something to fight this shit. And I'm not even looking into it.

This is not like me. When I want to know about something, I want to know ALL about it. I Dr. Google my ass off on that shit. I write things down and make lists and ask questions. And the most I have done thus far is to ask my neurologist to see the pictures of my brain. Which is awesome when I have absolutely no frame of reference as to what those pictures even mean.

I guess my fear is that once I start looking into this, all the true horrors of it will come to light. I will realize I'm fucking doomed. I will have to deal with the fact that this isn't something you simply "cure". It's something you manage. At least when I thought I had a brain tumor, I figured I'd be fine once they cut it out.

So I'm straddling the fence. I'm somewhere between pretending like everything is normal, like I just had that stomach virus I was thinking of and missed a few days of work, and wanting to full-throttle attack this shit. But attacking means admitting. And I don't know if I'm ready for that.