Ouch! My fingers are so stiff, my wrists and ankles are hot and painful, I've had a fever for more than a week that doesn't respond to Tylenol or anything else. My head hurts and spins when I move, and I wake up most nights in a puddle of cold sweat. I feel worn out and worn thin from all of the above.
Who knows how long this flare will last? I don't know and from what I've been reading and reading this week no one else will either.
But this evening a nice thought comes. I can still do just as much as I was recently wanting to do. I will have to adjust and do it differently. And who knows? Its an unplanned, unsought change, but maybe it will be the thing that in hindsight was a freaking gift. Its hurts a little to type: I become less wordy, always a comment I get in anything of mine that gets edited. I quibble less and become more decisive. I make better choices in content and subject because it hurts and I'm not very comfortable and if I'm going to make the effort I'm going to get to the point and its going to have to be worthwhile. No dithering. Better judgment.
That might not be such a bad thing. Also, fevers can make you kind of floaty and dreamy. Aren't we always reading about some incredible work done at a fever pitch, in a feverish state, with great heat? That doesn't sound like a bad precondition for poetry and prose alike.
At least it has such a nice name. Lupus, Latin for wolf, for the malar rash that in the first observed cases some theorized looked like a wolf-bite to the face.
At least I don't have a wolf-bite to the face. That would be worse.
People with lupus call themselves loopies. That works for me too.
Lupus! Welcome to BSD. Let's make friends, and have a really good time.
