The great-painful part of frostbite—when the bends and limbs start coming back to life.  

The side effects are very very close to being over, if they are not already gone completely. On my walk from the bus to my work building in the mornings I can feel myself actually reacting to things and sounds around me, including the music coming through the headphones, the air, the people, the crosswalks. Pardon the obvious oddity to this sentence, but I am feeling the most that I’ve felt in a very very long time.  

I’m thankful to not be hunched over the toilet in the mornings anymore, and my stomach pains are pretty much gone. The itchy skin, the vertigo—both are gone. I’m done. The nagging little feeling of forgetting something nightly is gone too. When a nightmare is over the waking up begins. I can’t believe I did it, but I did it. Anti-depressants deserve their own level of hell in Dante’s Inferno. 

My sister and I had an interesting phone conversation last night. We talked a lot about mom, and we talked about how far gone she is now—as in removed from our daily lives and whatnot. I guess I never gave much thought to how much her stroke impacted her mental state(my mom had a stroke in her early thirties, when I was in fifth grade). I guess I only thought about the physical things that happened—her weight gain, the loss of feeling on one side of the body, how she had to learn to walk again and eat again via mouth instead of tube. I never thought of the mental toll, never “took it into consideration.”  Now I am. It doesn’t change much about anything, but it does tie some things together that perhaps needed connecting. I’m sure to be chewing on it for a few days, at the very least, and writing about it. 

Speaking of writing, my sister offered to do the artwork for the book I’m working on. I wish I could rightly express to her how honored I am to have her be a part of it. She is an amazing artist. Hearing her say that made my night.