Robot

It's not a usual for me to wake up about 4 AM, panicky and agitated.  So, I did what I do.  I rolled over and grabbed the three herbal sleeping pills already positioned on my bedside table.  Shouldn't take long.  This stuff, largely dependent on the pharmaceutical action of chamomile, works mildly.  Of course, that's generally all I need.  A little chamomile, a little slow breathing, steady lung action, and the night terrors subside and sleep returns.  There is often a nightmare during this unpleasant phase of sleep and non-sleep.  But not to worry.  At least I return to slumber.

But not this night.  No discernible effect from the herbal pills.  Just anxiety and anxiety and anxiety.  For which there is a simple remedy.  Sit up, perch on the edge of the bed.  And take it from there.  Bed pounding is often a wise outlet in the wee hours.  So, I dropped my legs to the carpet, pulled on my abdominals...and fell backward.  I pulled again, feeling strangely weak.  More than weak, I also felt a bit woozy, as though if I did make it to the edge of the bed in a sedentary posture, the whole thing might keep right on going, me rolling on the carpet.  

For the first time I felt more than the night anxiety.  I felt real fear, fear for my safety.  Another try.  Another wavering at the bed's edge, then falling backwards.  I had no option, for I knew I had to get into the sedentary.  Finally, I gave things a last pull, yanking hard on abdominals, pulling me into the vertical.  When a new reality took over.  Something feverish.  I began making retching sounds, turning to the only available vomitorium, the bedside urinals.  But nothing happened.  Still, there was this queasiness down below.  A sense that all was not right abdominally.  The wheelchair.  I wasn't clear I could make it there.  I was feeling very feeble, unsure of my balance.  But once you're up and wobbling, you are up...and now it was down, sitting in the wheelchair.  But just barely.  I bent my head forward, feeling my solar plexus drain.  It seemed possible, entirely possible that I could tumble straight out of this wheelchair and onto the Marlou Memorial Carpet.  

And all this had been her experience, hadn't it?  Day after day, hour after hour.  Sometimes throwing up her stomach contents every 90 minutes.  I was experiencing some small part of what she had gone through.  And this made us closer, at this moment, in some not very pleasant ways.  Except for one distinctive difference.  

I am the one with the survivor guilt.  For although it might feel as though my current sickness would never end, the odds were unlikely.  Tomorrow would probably be not only another day, but a better one.  A healthy one.  Guilt, gratitude....

Even the finger effort at controlling the joystick took will.  A maneuver to the front door, the slow unlocking, turning the button, grabbing the door knob and opening...Lorna, morning helper, should turn up at the usual hour.  Still queasiness in the abdominal sector.  I parked the chair at the bathroom door.  Yes, someday, there will be much to be said for a wheelchair-accessible toilet and shower.  It's a good thing, I tell myself, that at least a few times a day I have to stand up and walk into the bathroom.  Good basic physiotherapy.  But not now.  It feels as though I will never stand again.  Still, there's that abdominal queasiness.  Perhaps not much of anything, but enough to have me parked here at the bathroom door...OK, up and actually standing and, now grabbing the railings so wisely installed last year and now sitting down.  And just in time.

Something I ate.  Perhaps my own spaghetti sauce from the previous night, the stuff so proudly made from my own actual tomatoes.  I consider this in the shower, how my own food could have gotten contaminated.  It doesn't make sense.  I remembered the film.  The DVD of WALL-E, the one I had just watched with a friend the previous evening...and in many ways it could have been the culprit.

I made it back to bed, continent, showered and awaiting Lorna.  I fell asleep.  I woke up when she arrived.  She got me dressed.  I had that great restorative, tea and sat in my recliner chair.  

WALL-E tells the tale of a waste-packing robot, a sort of a mobile garbage compactor who roams about a post-environmental-apocalypse city in America.  While the film degenerates into the ordinary, these first scenes of dystopic urban-scape New York, or wherever it is, grabbed at my gut.  The world of WALL-E is straight out of Samuel Beckett, the zero landscape, the meaningless and inexplicable work routine.  But it's when WALL-E returns to his robot's home, a trailer full of favorite scrounged objects that the gears shift into something more effectively poignant.  At least, this is how the film hit me Sunday evening.  The creature living alone.  Amusing himself in solitary ways.

And then, of course, WALL-E meets another robot.  Her appearance in this wasteland and his sighting her and approaching her and losing her and finding her again and again...while she follows 'directive,' mindless of him, it all got to me.  Human loneliness.  The desperation to connect.  And all so heart wrenchingly hopeless.  I didn't laugh very much at WALL-E.  It was far too poignant.  Gut wrenching.  Enough to make someone sick.