Friday, August 17, 2007

my fever-addled brain

Friday, August 17, 2007


massacre of the innocents by giovanni pisano

that's the sort of visions a saw last nite (thursday), whenever i closed my eyes, in the throes a surreal, fever-driven panic. fever + panic attack = bad night. its weird, how one moment you feel only as though 'coming down with something' ... and then the next, you feel as though someone has dragged you into the 5th circle of hell. one has awareness of one's illness ... however, when the full impact of sickness strikes, we cannot feel prepared. and ... what a wonder of physiology - pyrexia. a simple matter of a few degrees hotter delineates the line that separates sanity from insanity. feeling simultaneously hot and cold. feeling abject terror and sadness ~ at once. but those visions ... and accompanying voices ... nothing worse. each time i grasped sleep, the visions, voices and then the panic elephant awoke me. i felt like i had an elephant sitting on my chest. it took me at least an hour, and every pillow in the house, to build a pillow tower on the sofa so i could sleep sitting up. alas, i only wanted to put my head down. but the panic made my soul wanna jump out of my body. i fell asleep with the rosary in my grip. i can't remember having a worse night. really. talk about the dark night .... grrrr. me hates being sick.

yeah. so ... roxanne has some weird pneumonia.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Mantissa, sorry to hear you got so sick.

I developed half a goatee of purple pain on the left side of my chin. I have residual muscle pain on my neck muscles and a decreasing headache.

I send my best wishes for a speedy recovery from your bad health spell.

Anonymous said...

I wish you a speedy recovery. I need to send you a poem I wrote based on the death of the innocents from the NT. I posted it on Bloodlessness ages ago. It's called Ramah.

Anonymous said...

piktor ~ poor you! my pain pales in comparison to the sound of yours. and thanx ~ after that horrible fever-horror nitemare and the aftermath the next day ... i am starting to feel better. as long as i keep the fever away ... i can function.

susan - please do. its weird, about the pic for this post. i googled "fever" for images and scrolled thru the choices until i came to this one ... this is what i saw and heard in my fever-fuelled visions. tho, when i was seeing it i didn't know that.

the head congestion isn't that bothersome ... just the chesty cough is ... i walked a few blocks down hastings and then pender, to my favourite used bookstore ... just a tiny walk and i was winded (ok there was a hill i had to climb) - pathetic, huh?

i think books must have some healing properties (indirectly, even) ... that visit to the store regenerated me a great deal - don't feel so tired as i did earlier in the day. i found a cheap copy of st. augustine's confessions and also sylvia path's the bell jar ...not bad for a convalescing, is it?

Anonymous said...

Mantissa, actually I've had a fever similar to yours and this purple misshap of mine does not compare. It sounds bad but actually it looks bad but I don't feel bad.

A sleepless overnight fever, that's really bad. I've never forgotten that whopper. Rest as much as possible.

Anonymous said...

I had something very similar happen to me once when I had a Migraine. I couldn't get out of bed all day and I was very nauseated. Finally, I went to the hospital and they gave me sone kind of drug. I don't know what it was, they gave it to me through an IV and it was a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory. But I don't think it had anything to do with the drug, it probably had to do with pressure on my brain, but it was awful! I started crying. I saw the world like some sort of a giant grave yard with aeons of dead people inside of it, making up the soil, in the water in the plants. And the worst thing of all is that no-one remembered who they were. I felt very insignificant as as though life didn't really matter. Very strange. It lingered for several days. Probably the worst feeling I have ever had before.

Anonymous said...

Before this post, the word 'pyrexia' wasn't in my vocabulary, so I looked it up. Poor dear. I hope you feel better soon. That's gotta be a pain in more way than the several you mentioned.

Can we cheer you up? Sing you a song? Tell you a joke?

Anonymous said...

x-dell ~ you know, at that time, what i wished for? my mummy to sing to me. silly, huh? a grown woman, and the first thing i wish for when i'm sick is my mummy. the fever's gone now ... the nasty cough remains.