It has become unbearable again.  I track everything - at least I think I do - but then I find blank charts and graphs, days gone missing, I don't remember.  Usually I have to ask the people around me how I'm doing because I won't remember, especially in the throes of this kind of pain, the nausea, can barely see.  But now I'm alone.  Everyone has gone away.  No one wants to hang around This. Except for my awesome sisters.  But they are in Washington.  I am here. 

 I want to unzip myself and step out.  But I don't think there is anything left of "me".  My entire right side is all gimped up from the year at David's hoarding house.  But that kind of pain is real.... I mean it's "normal" pain.  A strained muscle, a sore shoulder from leaning on that side for a year.  Or a decade.  Or three decades.  I don't know anymore. I never know what day it is.  I miss appointments because I lost a whole month.  And somehow I keep breathing.  What's ironic is that it is my breathing that could be the whole problem.  I've always said, felt, that I'm not supposed to be here.  It's like living in another dimension where you can see what's going on in that other dimension where everyone seems to be living their lives, but you can't find a way in.  Or a way out.  Trapped inside my body.  That's dualistic. Am I my body?  Yes.  The gods are gone.  I could invent one, like most of the world has done.  But I'd still know better.  Sometimes I miss that feeling - I called it "Divine", knowing it wasn't some "God" with a capital "G", but Something, with a capital "S". It bothers me that I don't know what "It" is - also a capital "I". I dream that I can just fly around the universe, float through nebulae, alight on the makings of a tiny planet, then off to watch the Big Bang happen, also capital "B"s.  Everything is in quotation marks now.  The "Universe", capital "U", "Reality", "You", "Me", "The"...  I miss meditating and feeling the rush of the moment when you join that "Divine" even though I know it's just the pineal gland, my brain, neurons, trillions of synapses, electricity.  

Dr. Bev tells me she has some bad news and I immediately think she's going to tell me I'm a lost cause, "past the point of no return" as she wrote in her portion of my application for AISH.  But she writes things like that because she's had this, she still does, but she knows now how to fix it, she knows her own limits.  And she knows that this is the worst dis-ease, partly because of its invisibility, and partly because those of us who have it, are bed bound.  Nobody sees us.  But it's not that.  She's not sending me away because I'm the one patient out of two thousand who hasn't progressed, in fact, has gotten so much worse.  No, it's not that. In fact, to me this is good news - that my sleep study data are so bad that she and the doctor at RANA, the respiratory clinic here in Calgary, are trying to get me in on an emergency basis at the Foothills Hospital.  This is no emergency.  I'm 52 years old.  I should have died of crib death.  In 1963 it would have been an emergency. But I didn't.  I kept breathing and stopping and breathing and stopping.  I thought I'd overcome the survival instinct as my favorite friend once said.  But I guess not.  So I'll fight this one last time.  Dr. Bev tells me I'll need a Bi-PAP, which breathes for you, rather than the C-PAP - positive air pressure, which just blows air at your nostrils till you can't help but take a breath.  Am I dead?  Is this Deanna's ladder?  Is the intense pressure I feel just the earth pressed in around me because I've been dead and buried, because I did die of SIDS?  Or the train.  I need to write that story.  It would be a fun one to tell.  Ten years old, riding the bus home, hopping off the bus and waiting for the four o'clock train so I could wave at the man in the caboose.  But that day, when I heard the whistle, instead of raising my arms and waving them in the air as the man in the caboose pulled the whistle again, that day I panicked and ran.  I ran through the three rows of trees where I'd made paths, built forts, hung upside down from tree branches, I ran all the way to the house, shaking.  I ran up the narrow winding staircase and laid on my bed.  I didn't know how to tell my mother.  I didn't know what to tell her because I didn't know what was wrong, just that it was wrong.  So I told her my stomach hurt.  That was the beginning.  Forty-two years later I still don't know how to describe it, other than a bombardment of horrible, endless, physical sensation.  So I like to think I died that day, that I was hit by the train and ever since, I've been walking around, lying around, dazed, confused, still feeling the impact of the train.  Sometimes I have to think that way.  It's romantic.  Right?

I feel like a jack hammer right now, the vibrations jolting this biologic machine that I am.  I'll be back.  I have to knock myself out for awhile.  If I don't, I know I'll just swallow all these pills, every last one of them and then go for a walk, lie down and go to sleep forever.  I've heard there's a grizzly around.  It killed the neighbor's watch donkey.  And cougars, always those beautiful, black, giant cats.  Coyotes too. And when they've had their fill of me, the ravens, hawks, carnivorous birds, can finish me off.  One day someone might stumble over my skull, but not for a long time. So, I need to knock myself out now.  I'll feel better when I wake.... I think, I hope....  

Signing off for now....