Crashing waves...

I am the beach.
I am the whale.
I am the waves crashing against both.

Twenty-six hours this time.  Twenty-six hours of agony in my mid-section that I struggle to endure, during which I oft fall into despair here and there.  Usually, this is a much shorter period.  Usually it is at night.

At night, I long for the battle to be during the day.  During the day, I am convinced it would be easier at night.  Neither is.  Easier.

I oft hurt so much that I cannot read or watch television. I cannot really think. I just exist in the sea of pain.

Yet sometimes I do think. I think about the whys and wherefores of the pain.  If the writhing has begun because food has not left my stomach for far too long, I can at least take activated charcoal.  A heating pad helps the tiniest bit, but I have to be careful not to allow the heat to build up too much beneath the covers, lest the heat make me ill.  Mostly, there is little to be done and yet I try to think of something.  And that oft leads to trying to imagine what exactly is happening to cause the pain.

The swelling in my abdomen has increased at its highest amount, and yet the pain is not always worst when I am that beached whale. When my abdomen is so swollen I am left breathless even whilst lying still, I rarely find a position of even the slightest relief, though I try.  Oh, how I try.  At best, curling my knees up toward my chest, if I am lying on my side, or sticking them up in the air, if I am on my back, seems to be ... better ... somehow.  Or perhaps the willing for it to be so masks the pain for a while.  A part of me, in those dark moments, wonders why it is the pain is deepest, most intense, if I am lying on my back with my legs out straight.  Try keeping your knees toward your chest whilst not bending any part of a swollen abdomen and you will know some of the futility that washes over me at such times.  Why bother?  Why keep trying?

When I was a little girl, we would visit the beaches of Galveston.  I cannot, in my mind's eyes, see those beaches now.  I cannot remember a single moment of being upon them or in the waters, but there are things I know about them.  And there is this one feeling I have, throughout the years, tried to recapture.  Never more so than when the innards writhing had me in its cruel grasp.

Standing on the beach, you can see the waves come crashing in.  Building from a small swell into a great curl of water that spills forth upon the sand.  The interesting part is that the wave creates change upon the sand both coming and going.  Its forces are inexorable and unceasing.  For when one wave had drawn back into the ocean, another is already taking its place.

Far, far too young to be alone in the water, I would nevertheless swim out past the waves and swells into the ocean's deeps.  I would swim to where my feet would no longer touch the ocean floor even if I thrust my body downward until almost my last breath.  For it was in that place I found peace.  Lying on my back, I would revel in the stillness and float on a sea of nothingness.  For as long as I dared, I allowed the currents to carry my body down the beach.  Further.  Further.  And still further.  Eventually, the knowledge of being so far from my family would smite me and I would swim toward the shore, until finally the waves would spill my body upon the sand.  Often, I would walk down the beach back to where we had staked our claim, only to swim out to the stillness once again.

The pain in my abdomen builds like the waves crashing toward the beach.  And when the fullness of its force is spent upon the sand, the pain recedes, almost mocking me as it goes.  I will come again.

My abdomen is now mottled and rather ugly.  It is grotesque.  That it is so has to do with the heating pad and with the failure of my autonomic nervous system when it comes to vascularization processes.  This one area I understand not, but it has to do also with my cold spells, with my skin becoming icy to the touch and my body wracked with chills.  Chills that are their own waves of a most peculiar agony.

There are also the waves of that come when the weather changes and my arthritic joins scream in protest.  A pain that builds in intensity until it spills out in every part of my being and I am awash in a sea of agony, tumbling about in waves that leave no room for a respite.

And then there are the waves of migraine pain.  Those I cannot even adequately describe, save for there are the same moments. The moments of growing agony.  The moments of receding mockery.  And the same longing to return to that time and place of stillness and nothingness.

When I look—or rather feel since the sight is so disturbing—the swelling that extends from above my sternum to below my hips, I am the beached whale struggling to survive.  When the waves crash down upon the beach that is my body, I am the grains of sand, struggling to remain a part of the whole rather than be torn from my place.

Perhaps that makes no sense.  But I am the whale that knows it is dying for lack of breath, its immense size hindering hope for respite.  I am the beach under assault from a cruel and relentless foe.  When really all I want to be is that small girl cradled in the water, utterly peaceful.

I written that in such times, I have no words to speak to God.  My prayers or pleas or whatever word you would assign that which I cry out in silence are the groanings of both body and spirit, of heart and mind and soul.

It came to me tonight if, perhaps, my baptism was ... is ... God taking back to that stillness and nothingness, where no harm or even battle reaches.  If I can return to the ocean in my mind where I only to grasp the peace of my baptism.

I have been watching this show, "London Hospital," set in the first decade of the 1900s, a time when the average life expectancy was 45 and 1 in 7 children died before the age of 10.  A time when pain and suffering was oft without balm or remedy.

During one episode, a character state that love was really the only thing that heals.  No matter what the writers meant. I found myself struck by that Truth.  Love is the only thing that heals both body and spirit, heals heart and mind and soul.  The love of Christ.  Love that is Christ crucified for me.

I have been silent for far, far too long here in the place where I try to capture that which is slipping away from me.  I have been silent because my heart hurts.  My body is ravaged.  My mind is distressed.  And my spirit is overwhelmed.  In many and sundry ways, all of this boils down to my body in one way or another.  What is happening to it.  What has happened to it.  What I find grotesque far beyond what another's eye could see.

The Gospel has a physicality to it that is both comfort and distress to me.  While I could find any number of folk to talk with me about its comfort, I have no one with whom to talk about its distress. About spiritual distress.

I found it odd, tonight, to realize that in the end it all comes down to water and to the body. The water of peace and rest that was for me then and that I wish were for me now.  My body.  The body of Christ.  And the odd and utter juxtaposition between them, even as both are joined.  Or they could be were it not for the constant, wily, and effective assaults of my foe, dragging me further and further away from the altar.

And I found it odd that I hear someone speak of love and immediately Christ crucified is first in my mind.  My heart quickens with longing, weeps with despair, at the thought of His water and of His body.


I am Yours, Lord.  Save me!