The limits of elasticity

It’s funny—she’s so used, in a way, to the feel­ings of sad­ness, depres­sion, lone­li­ness– all the other emo­tions that go along with her manic depres­sion that all of the— the bleak­ness —some­times despair and siren, clichéd thoughts of that final dark­ness. Most days she doesn’t think of them much, at least when the meds are mostly work­ing and she’s doing her yoga, keep­ing her diary, keep­ing up with her appoint­ments, telling the truth to her­self and her hus­band and fam­ily and doc­tors and giv­ing up on the lying, because crazy peo­ple? Experts in denial, the next thing to lying.

That kind of pain she’s well used to—almost– except for those moments of break­down, the ones she tries to for­get when most days she gets out of bed and func­tions, god­damnit, and even when she doesn’t quite feel like func­tion­ing, well, she puts on her com­pe­tent mask and smiles like she means it. Some­times, by the end of the day and enough laughs with her favorite cus­tomers and col­leagues, she actu­ally does.

But the weight loss, the effect on her body, the way that she shrinks and bones and lines re-emerge, curves dis­ap­pear? All that Depakote and emotional-eating weight—though of course she hadn’t noted it as it came on, only noticed when it began to melt off—it was padding under which she didn’t real­ize she’d been hid­ing until it was gone and oh—shit—now peo­ple could see just how fucked up she was?

The xylo­phone ribs at the top of her chest, the even-spaced ridges of spine that once hid under flesh, ilia that once were padded by ass but now hurt on long bus rides when she sits and jut out on the oppo­site side over skirts and pants that now are too big. She feels less­ened some­how, even as oth­ers flirt with her more, com­pli­ment her on her weight loss, and some in the know of the source—it’s the meds, it’s always the meds, because she’s start­ing to learn the Seren­ity Prayer in her mar­row pray­ing that some­day, some­day, she’ll accept all the things she just can’t fuck­ing change.

She doesn’t mind being a healthy weight—but she’d just like it to be under some kind of con­trol. She has con­trol of so very little.

And still, she keeps losing.

She’s already got stretch marks from prior weight loss and gain, mark­ing her legs—hips—the under­sides of her arms– scars and reminders of her body’s stretch­ing then shrink­ing again. She was a fat kid in school, lost it through con­trolled bulimia cut short by Lyme dis­ease that made her lose the rest of the weight and left lin­ger­ing aches in knees, hips and shoul­ders when the weather is rough. But hey—she’s thin when she starts high school, and isn’t that the thing that mat­ters the most?

The first time she shops for new clothes—the few tran­si­tional ones that she’s bought are all hang­ing by belt­loops and her friends and bosses at work tug at them gen­tly and tease her—the lean sil­hou­ette in the mirror—it just isn’t her because it’s the twenty-five year old body again– but the eyes, the face, they’re tired and haunted and all of it is just wrong because she’s still los­ing and she knows, these four­teens that she’s buy­ing? They’ll be loose in a week.

Still. She needs pants. She buys one pair and a sweater and dri­ves home, hands gripped hard on the wheel and thin fin­gers knob-knuckled and bony so they won’t shake.

In the late win­ter, she has a cold she can’t shake for a month, one that lingers and leaves her cough­ing and rasp­ing so badly the cus­tomers at her store who are doc­tors chide her and tell her to get in to see some­one for a Z-Pak—or they’ll write it them­selves. She does it, even­tu­ally, sees a cal­low young doc­tor who assumes her mood stabilizer’s been pre­scribed to her for overeat­ing (because off-label, some­times it is) and pays no atten­tion to the manic depres­sion diag­no­sis right at the top of her chart and doesn’t have a word to say about the weight she reports she’s still losing—but the antibi­otic he gives her does clear up her cur­rent phys­i­cal ill­ness, and she feels more like her­self for a while.

Still, though, she’s tired. She chalks it up to depression—she always is in the spring, and after all, wasn’t it just May last year that she really went off her rocker? They add an anti-depressant and it works for a while, an uptick of mood, but soon she’s tired again. It’s hard to notice it, really, because she’s used to ignor­ing all kinds of dis­com­fort and push­ing through things and get­ting out of bed every day.

Her dad has this say­ing about airplanes—she likes to think about it when it comes to her life. He says—it’s not a won­der they don’t fall out of the air. It’s a won­der they get off the ground in the first place.

Get­ting off the ground every day is her goal. She focuses on tan­gi­ble things, tries not to think too hard about all the larger goals in her life that sit by the wayside—except in the con­fines of her ther­apy ses­sions, when she’s free to rail and cry and think dif­fi­cult thoughts, then crawl in to bed in the after and sleep off the anti­cli­max of the feel­ings of fail­ure all over again.

And then her mom comes to visit.

Now, don’t get her wrong. She loves her mom—or tries to. But mom’s crazy, in her own spe­cial way, and dis­abled, too, and she rep­re­sents all the poten­tial decline for the future, and not just because she’s enor­mously fat. She rep­re­sents all sorts of things—reminds, too, of all sorts of things—and she pushes her over the edge—just pushes, really—and that and other things at work and at home make all those clichéd thoughts of bleak­ness come rag­ing out to the front of her mind (they’re never that far away to begin with, the meds just push them to the back, behind the gro­cery lists and clean­ing the house and going to work every day) and wishes that it would just stop and reminds her that there is some­thing in the bot­tles behind that door in the bath­room that can make all of that happen.

It all hap­pens quickly, in the astro­nom­i­cal sense—a week of mom’s visit, two really bad days—three really bad hours—twenty really bad min­utes of look­ing up on the ‘net to see what com­bi­na­tion of meds would be most effective—because she’s so tired and it hurts, not just in her head but with a phys­i­cal pain, her whole body aches, and not just with the cry­ing that she’s been doing.

But instead she con­fesses that she might need the hospital—confesses that those bot­tles seem awfully tempting—and instead of tak­ing all of the pills, she just takes two small yel­low ones, enough to make her finally—finally—sleep and give up her grief and her anger and rage at the world, at her mom, at her fam­ily, herself.

It’s only four hours, but it brings a sem­blance of calm, and in the morn­ing, she talks with her hus­band, enough to restore another bit of esteem, and she makes some calls to her doc­tors to report the past night’s events—and then she goes to work, puts on a smile and pre­tends like she means it.

The scale in the bath­room says she’s lost another two pounds. By the end of that week it’ll be five. And she’s tired—aching—exhausted, in bed by nine every night, and her head hurts and she’s increas­ingly woozy and dizzy, until one night at work, she feels so ill that it shows on her face and her gal­lant young man­ager (he’s twelve years younger than her and the light glints of his vir­tual armor so brightly she calls him Gala­had in her mind) feels the need to check in with her every half hour.

The next morn­ing she falls on her way in to the doctor’s—not los­ing con­scious­ness, so far as she can tell—it’s just that one minute she’s stand­ing, the next she’s on hands and knees and peo­ple are ask­ing if she’d okay.

Clearly not—she’s had that headache and light­headed feel­ing for days. After a nurse makes her eat a banana and drink some Gatorade, she sees her to the suite of her doctor—it shows that her blood pres­sure and pulse are dan­ger­ously low, lower than they’ve ever been in her life, and she tells the nurse—no, it isn’t the heat, she’s felt tired for weeks, felt like this for days, even inside the A.C. at work.

Her doc­tor thinks it’s maybe one of her meds—of course, one of the ones that helped her sleep that night when she thought—anything would be bet­ter than wak­ing up in the morn­ing. That or exhaus­tion and stress. Or blood sugar, maybe, because she’s lost all this weight, sixty-one pounds since this time last year, forty one of it since Novem­ber, twelve in just the last month. Except, well, she had a very good break­fast that morn­ing, and then that nurse-pressed banana and drink. And yes, well, it’s true, the new meds have short-circuited her stom­ach and brain, such that she can go eight hours and more with­out know­ing she’s hun­gry and sweet things taste like sweet, dis­gust­ing wax in her mouth and rich fatty things that were once her delight make her gag after a cou­ple of bites—but the fact still remains. She really has been good about eat­ing lately, she’s got the proof in her diary that she keeps of her meds and her moods and her food and her sleep, and it isn’t the heat.

Maybe she’s just stretched too far—the stretch marks on the out­side of her body now mov­ing inward. She takes her doctor’s advice and her note, pushes flu­ids and salty snacks at work the next day, and by lunch she feels ready to faint. That half hour sit­ting was barely enough, and by a half hour before her next break, she’s bro­ken out in a sweat. Still, they get a rush and there’s no one to call for relief—so she grits her teeth, pushes through the dis­com­fort, and when her relief comes at three, she heads down and sits for a blessed fif­teen min­utes before doing the last forty-five of her shift.

She lies in the ham­mock on the back porch for five straight hours after work, then goes to bed right at nine.

By 11 a.m. the next morn­ing, she’s clocked out sick and gone home sick from work. The home blood pres­sure cuff that her father has brought her has told her that it’s a mir­a­cle she hasn’t fallen out of the sky, because her vitals are still really low, even though she’s by now cut her dose on the advice of her docs and is eat­ing salt and drink­ing elec­trolytes like they will save her.

Maybe they will. She’s got a follow-up in a week when they’ll run some tests and see what there is to be seen. But like the Seren­ity prayer says– Wis­dom to know the difference.

She hopes there’s an answer, that it’s maybe the meds—though the thought of switch­ing off the blessed yel­low pills makes her want to vomit, they bring her such blessed relief from all of the panic that fires her blood and short­ens her breath until she’s all prick­les and fire, sweat­ing with noth­ing but ner­vous dis­or­der– or at least this is some­thing she’s just got to wait through before she—hah—bounces back—and hopes that the inside of her body heals and the stretch marks fade like they have on the outside.

She hopes she hasn’t learned the lim­its of elas­tic­ity, that no-return at which you point a rub­ber band at some­one and instead of it sail­ing in a slow-motion beau­ti­ful arc over the room and sting­ing them in the arm—so hah-hah it’s funny and every­one laughs at the mild pain even as your tar­get shoots you a look of annoy­ance– it flicks back and blinds you, leav­ing you gasp­ing and clutch­ing and wondering—

What hap­pened?