King of Hearts… no, Jack of Hearts… King of Hearts. The cards seemed to blur into one another as I contemplated my next move. Relieved that I realized that it was a King, and not a Jack before I made my play. I threw down the six of Hearts against the Queen of Hearts my father had played. I stared at the cards left in my hand. They glared back at me mockingly as they morphed into each other. My heart sank as I realized that something was not right.
I woke up the next morning unable to see the Christmas tree that just the day before had been surrounded by presents. The day progressed and slowly my world blurred. My head felt like someone was pushing at hot poker through my left eye. As I sat in the darkness of my bedroom with an icepack pressed to my forehead, I begged God for the pain to lessen and my vision to return. When I lost 100% of my vision in my left eye in the early evening, I knew that I had to go to the ER. The pain was unbearable. Even worse, the fear that something was wrong had become overwhelming. The ER doctor was as brusque as he was efficient. He swept into the room, threw around words like Cancer and Multiple Sclerosis. He referred me to a specialist, wrote me off as not his problem, and returned from whence he came: The land of insensitive medical professionals who often forget they are dealing with people’s lives, I can only assume. I was left alone in a cold whitewashed room to contemplate the fragility of my life, as all around me everyone else’s life remained unchanged. I was poked and prodded, medicated, re-medicated, and re-re-medicated. The ugly positive for one of those tests would come a few years later. But for now, all the big bad diagnostic tests came back negative. The final diagnosis of Optic Neuritis was given. My hospitalization for intravenous steroid treatment to treat the illness began the same day as what would have been my final semester of college. The doctor recommended that I take a two month break from school and any other visually strenuous activities. I had no other choice but to do nothing.
The treatment threw me for a loop, and what I mean by for a loop, it made me completely loopy. It got to the point that I could not listen to the radio when I was driving. I found myself screaming/crying/laughing so manically that I would have to pull over. Luckily, it only took about 30 seconds for the emotion that I had so passionately felt only moments ago to pass. After it took me an hour to drive to a location that was normally only ten minutes, I made it a rule that the radio would stay off. Sleep offered no solace. I would wake up in the middle of the night so drenched in sweat that I would have to change the sheets before I could go back to bed. The worst part of this whole situation was that this was not the illness that was making me crazy. It was the drugs and their side effects that were making me go completely off the bend. To help counteract these side effects, I was given assorted pain killers and anti-anxiety medication. I am not so pleased to tell you that these gave me an attention span of a small child and a vocal filter of a drunken sailor.
With no school to go to and no serious job to work, I was fortunate enough to have my older sister take me in a vain attempt to better my situation. Waking up at noon, watching TV from the time I woke up until I went to bed, and doing little else in between. My life was as stagnant as my academic career. All that I was began to spiral out of control. I have always been a religious person, never doubting that there was something more to this life. Depression, boredom, and anger are a destructive emotional trifecta. I found myself angry at God while simultaneously doubting that he/she/it existed. I desperately wanted to save myself from myself; but I had no idea where to begin. Not feeling sure that there was a God, I could not look above. Not having faith in myself, I could not look internally. Everyone else around me had lives to live, so I could not look externally. I was searching for answers, never expecting one would fall into my lap the second I stopped looking.
It is the modern fairy tale of drunken-messed-up-in-the-head girl meets sober-has-it-all-together-boy. We talked of nothing important and I made him smile. I lost my glasses and he went with me on a journey to try to find them. We stayed up all night to watch a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles marathon and talked of cartoons past. He waited until 6AM to kiss me, so that our first kiss would not be a drunken one.
When every part of my life was standing still, his was running at a pace that would win any race. I knew that there was a real connection between the two of us. I just did not see how messed up me could possibly fit into his disciplined life. I would only bring chaos to order, drama to stillness, storm to quiet. I liked him, maybe even loved him that early, but I did not want to be the person that stood in his way. My life was being held together by a string whose tensile strength was weak at best. He did not need to drag me along as he tried to do all things that he needed to do. I knew that once he realized I was just dead weight with nothing to offer, he would cut me lose more quickly than a man jumps from a sinking ship. If I gave him my heart, and he decided my life was too much for him to handle, I knew that would push me over the precipice that I was already dangerously toeing. That was our life; him valiantly trying to get me to open myself up to him, me selfishly guarding myself with all that I had. An uncomfortable dance of two people that loved each other but were caught up in a dramatic whirlwind of a girl that was completely lost within herself.
One night we were driving back from dinner when a particular song came on the radio. Before I could stop myself gut-wrenching sobs were pouring from me like a river that had been held back for too long. The only words that I could muster were, “I am just so angry.” I watched him look forward, grip the steering wheel tightly, and sigh deeply. Here I was sitting next to this beautiful 21 year-old man who wanted to be with me and I was nothing but a big ball of crazy. I kept waiting to hear the words that he was done with me. The thought of which only made me cry even harder. I knew that I had lost him, not because of my craziness, but because of my unwillingness to let him know me. We pulled up to my house. He put the car in park and uttered words that I will never forget, “This is not who you are. I can see who you really are in your eyes. You are destined to be more than this. I want to be the person that helps you find it. But babe, you have got to let me in. I am not going anywhere.”
Two years late I married Andrew in a small chapel in Colorado Springs. Standing at the end of the aisle on my father’s arm; I saw a statue on the wall that truly took my breath away. The Patron Saint of the chapel was Clare of Assisi, also known as one of the Patron Saints of Eye Diseases. The tiny remaining silvers of the questioning and anger that had been ever present in my soul melted. My illness was not an ending. It was a beautiful beginning to the life that I was always meant to live. To this day, I do not truly understand how to love. Trying to understand how to perfectly love another is one of the greatest quests that life has to offer, and is a skill that is never truly mastered. Love is never completely defined, always dynamic, as it ebbs and flows. We should always strive to learn how to love others better. What I do understand, is what it feels like to allow someone to love me. I feel that every morning when I wake up beside… not the person that saved me…. but the person that believed that I could save myself.
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