Half of my left leg is numb. That happened today. Or was it last night? I am grateful for the numbness and weakness in my left leg because it is not the searing, liquid-glass pain of Saturday and Sunday, which cascaded from my glutes to my calves in waves. That pain made it almost impossible for me to walk. If I walked, I cried.
On Saturday, when I woke up with the pain, I did the human thing, which is to follow the pain to its source. What caused the pain? I traced back two days, to my rheumatologist visit. A new rheumatologist who, unlike my other one, expressed curiosity about how much pain was centered in my hips, pelvis, and lower back. We need to order an MRI, but we cannot order an MRI without doing an x-ray first.
My x-ray was clean. Healthy hips. I am grateful for that. Now, I wait on my insurance to approve my MRI. I will call them tomorrow. The next day I will finally go to the doctor, where maybe we can figure out what’s going on, or I can get a referral to a specialist.
I would like to walk the way I was walking last week, but I have realized, upon reflection, that I have not been walking without pain for a very long time. So, maybe this is the culmination of something. I guess everything is the culmination of something.
Today I told my therapist I needed to make a list of what I am grateful for. Since being diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in September, I have reflected on how much I took for granted. All those years without needing medication. All those days and weeks without chronic pain.
I am grateful for my skin. My sight. My bed and blankets. Showers. Baths. My refrigerator. My hearing and tasting and smelling. The robin that wakes first and sings before the light does. Grateful for friends to call and text and people on Twitter I haven’t met in person and the neighbor who left a cane on my porch for me. Grateful for my car, my cat, my pillows. Grateful for my pain because it means I’m alive, and wouldn’t I rather be alive?
I paused just now to close my eyes and grit my teeth because although much of my leg is numb it still throbs with pain which emanates from an unknown source, and the muscles of my leg, all of them, twitch. Like those Christmas lights where sections turn on and off in random order.
Before this started, five days ago now, I was on a roll. Walking every day. Listening to audiobooks and stopping to rub my face in the tender cherry blossoms whose petals have mostly fallen and dissolved into the grass and concrete. I am grateful that I was grateful, in those moments.
In one of the books I was reading, Time Management For Mortals, the author asks his reader: why do we go through life waiting for that time when our problems will be over? When it will all be solved? It would be more realistic, he argues, if we saw our lives as a succession of problems.
I think this is comforting. A succession of problems, which also means a succession of non-problems stuck in the middle of the problems like pauses. And if we acknowledge that another problem will inevitably arise, we can live with presence in those non-problem pauses instead of taking them for granted, letting out our breath and assuming that maybe this is the end of our problems. Maybe from here on out things will be easier.
They won’t.
But no matter what our situation is, we can rely on it changing.
I am grateful for that.