The elevator broke down in the office today, which, ordinarily, I might not even notice. I always take the stairs unless I absolutely can’t. And you know, with me absolutely means “really, no kidding, I can’t make it”. But today I didn’t have any choice, except to stay upstairs, which would have resulted in me not getting any lunch.

You know, I tend to buy in heavily to the idea of personal responsibility. I tend to say that we always have choices, that when most people say they “can’t” they mean they won’t or they find the other choice unreasonable. Or they can’t think of a solution. Such as, I could have asked one of my co-workers to bring me back something….if they happened to be going out, if I happened to catch them before they left, if they were willing to stop. And missing lunch wouldn’t be an earth stopper. After all, I’m still working on losing that weight from that previous medication – I could look at a missed meal as a gift, right? I wasn’t even all that hungry. All I wound up eating was one of those yogurt parfaits from McDonalds….and some French fries. So sue me....

You guessed: I made it down the stairs and back up them again. So why was I thinking about the meaning of “can’t” when it turned it I could? Well…

Rewind back to the night before last. It’s 4:00 a.m. I snapped awake at about 3:30 and have been sitting up in bed for half an hour trying to massage some feeling into the part of my left leg that is numb and ignore the pain in the part of the same leg that is not. My nightshirt was wet, drenched with sweat, my hair was stuck to the side of my face. I was trying not to make any noise so I didn’t wake up The Hub or the K-Bird. The dog was already awake, faithful dog that he is, sitting up with his nose pressed mournfully against the bottom of the mattress, waiting to see if he could lick it and make it better. Eventually, he decided I was beyond his help and lay back down. He still kept an eye on me though. “It’s okay, Goober, go back to sleep” I said quietly, “No reason for both of us to be up all night”

The massage wasn’t working. Come on, get it together! You’ve got to get up and go to work in a few hours and your sick time isn’t as much as you think it is! If you miss work this’ll be the 2nd week in a row you miss a day, and what will people think?

And then, I couldn’t even massage my own leg any more, because my hands were shaking too much. This is a new problem for me, and I admit it’s scaring me. It started last week, and at first I just assumed that it was a side effect of the general lack of sleep. I called Dr. A. about it and he agreed, so he called in a prescription for Lunesta for me. It kind of sort of works…but the trembling has gotten worse, not better. I can still type, and I can print, but I can’t write in cursive anything that anybody else could read. At times, my arms feel very weak. Most unsettling to me though, is that I can’t keep my hands still. If I lay them in my lap or fold them on the desk they twitch…not so as that a casual observer would notice, but they do.

And so I began to worry. What if they can’t find out what’s causing that? What if it’s another one of those weird, transient symptoms that have been plaguing me all my life…another one like the vertigo and nerve pain that I just have to ignore, or deal with as best I can, because things like “vertigo” and “transient pain” are like code for “mental illness” to the medical community. What if it gets worse? How will I do my job? How, even would I do my job the next day? I was already exhausted.

Everybody is fighting something. You’re not the only person in the world up at night, and lots of people have worse pain than you. Severely disabled people go to work every day. You can’t give up. You absolutely cannot give up. Other people don’t see this, they don’t know what you’re talking about, they’d just see you giving up. Other people will say, “oh she’s just lazy. She just gave up.”

And then it dawned on me: Who? Who are these people? Who, specifically, among all the people that I know in the world, if they could see me in the condition I was in, would insist that I get up and go to work the next day? Who would make that kind of judgment?

Not my family, not The Hub, certainly not my friends. I don’t know anybody that unkind. I don’t know anybody that arrogant. Except me, judging myself.

The thing is that, having these kinds of problems seem to defy any “rules”. For instance, if you have a fever, you can say “I’m staying home because I don’t want to give this to everybody at work.” But what are the rules for such crushing insomnia and nerve pain? What do I think, that there’s someone with a clip board somewhere saying “well, she slept 3.75 hours today so that makes it okay for her to be absent, but if she sleeps 4.5 hours she should just have an extra cup of tea and get over it.”?

I realize I’ve been waiting for someone to tell me, “Well you can’t do everything you’re trying to do.” Some outside authority. Some doctor to sit down and explain it to The Hub. But there is a good authority telling me what can and can’t do, what I ought and ought not do: my own body is telling me. Nobody else is EVER going to know how I feel, and I can’t think of a living soul that I’d ever want to have this kind of experience.

But other people with problems go to work…And other people with problems stay home, I told myself. Sure, people with health problems work, but how many do you see? Every day, how many people do you see dragging themselves around the office with some kind of assistive device? Walking down the street catching the bus? In the parking lot of the grocery store? On a day to day basis? Every once in awhile, yes, I see someone in the market with their cane hooked on to the edge of their cart…but I’m the only one I’ve ever seen alone. In my office? There’s 500 people who work here, and I have no way of knowing how many of them feel like shit on any given day, but I’m not aware of anyone else to whom it might be physically dangerous to use the stairs. There’s a guy in a wheelchair who sits out with a poster board advertising a sign company, waving at passing traffic. And I always wave back at him and say a prayer for him and think More power to him. But that’s his JOB – to wave at people. I don’t have a job waving at people, and I don’t think I’d take one if you offered it to me. I’d be embarrassed. Humiliated. In front of People.

Yet, I think well of the poster board dude. I think he’s brave.

I took the day off from work on Wednesday. I’m going home to talk to The Hub tonight. I always want to do the best I can – the very most and best I can. But doing everything until I collapse was a crappy strategy in my 20’s and 30’s and by now I’m supposed to have developed some wisdom. Or at least some common sense. There’s got to be a middle way, between insisting that “I’m just having a bad day” and turning into a Hairnet Honey sitting home watching The Jerry Springer Show.

There’s got to be. And I’ve got to find it. And to hell with People – whoever they may be.