Exhausted. Sharp pains at the lower left base of my skull. They come and go. I Google it, of course, since that’s what we all do even though we are told not to and not to believe all the various ways Google tells us we will die from whatever it is we are suffering from. Well, life. Growing older. Sudden head pains. Perhaps I’m having a small stroke.
Occipital Neuralgia, the page reads. Intermittent shooting or shocking pain in the upper neck, back of the head or behind the ears. Bingo. There it is. Will it kill me? The causes vary and almost all of them can apply, each with their own story. My past concussions, two while in grad school, one in Seattle. Arthritis of the upper cervical spine. So I have RA and the scariest moment of that disease was when it started affecting my neck. Wearing down the fluid in the joints that could not be replaced. I used to imagine my head falling off.
The list goes on. Alcohol, not eating enough, eating too much, stress, wearing glasses too long. So it’s like a strange collection of writing prompts. “Tell us your life in ten words of less with each topic:”. A kaleidoscope of past maladies coming home to roost in my final demise which turns out, of course, to be a stroke that takes away all movement in one side of my body rather than humanely killing me outright. No, I tell myself. This literally is exhaustion and stress. Work has been stressful. And I ran myself ragged in Paris. Too much good food and wine. Also, I have not slept well in a few days. Battling insomnia as always, as always. It never stops. Last night, I probably slept maybe 2 or 3 hrs. I gave up at six am and read until the sun decided to join me.
Naturally, Covid is surging, the flu is surging. There is a 900 person wait for a hospital bed in Dublin alone. I am still inexperienced with the health system, but I wonder if this isn’t just in the public hospital? Is the private hospital at normal capacity? One odd thing about the private hospitals is that they close at night. I once fell while in Sligo and injured my knee. It swelled up so much that I thought it might explode and produce strange children. Like a pregnant knee. I was with J. and we went, after hours, to an urgent care. The guy who I saw after a short wait did not inspire confidence. He said, “I’ll give you a shot. Painkillers.” Mind you, I was excited to receive that if it was some of the good stuff. “Are you allergic to aspirin,” he asked. “Aspirin?! Is that what the shot is?” Yes, it was a shot of aspirin.
We left there with a note clearing me to go to the hospital. Since I had the private insurance, we asked the cab to take us there. “No it’s closed until the marning.” said the cabbie with the usual Irish resignation mixed with the lilt of a joke buried in there somewhere if we wanted it. It did not open until 9am. So we drove through the Sligo dark to the public one. The cold was just coming in for the fall. We could smell the heavy earth smell of peat fires coming out of the chimneys.
At the public one, they told me it would be a ten hour wait. Covid, he said, had overwhelmed them. There was a waiting room with the ability to hold about 5 people. We looked in at everyone through the wire mesh window and there were coughing people stacked on top of one another. So we went back to our little rented house and used frozen peas and watched a movie designed against any thinking. Some wretched thing that made me laugh in horror. When I woke the next day, the knee was no longer swollen. And I could walk again just fine.
There is no moral to my story.