Crates Full of Birds of Paradise

One of the most interesting things about meeting new people, and starting new parts of your life, is that you get to see yourself through new eyes. I imagine that some people don't like it, but I find it intriguing.

My most embarrassing--and perhaps most endearing--quality is that I have a seeming inability to pull shit together. I'm that girl--the one whose backpack falls open on the street, the one who always manages to forget something, the one who stands on the street in the rain while a car drives by, sending a 4 foot spray of water halfway up her torso. My friends Jacob and Joe take a good amount of pleasure just in watching my life; they don't hide their laughter, and--halfway up the lecture hall, dripping wet and late--I find myself laughing too.

On Friday, I was going through my morning ritual of rummaging through papers to find that day's lecture slides. I couldn't find my biochem notes, and searched for three or four minutes before I found them crumpled up at the bottom of my backpack. I did my best to flatten them out as Joe and I laughed. "You're a mess," he said. "A mess." And I am.

But I wasn't always this way. I remember, once, I was walking through the hallway with Katie, and she looked at me and said, "You smile, and you look like you have it all figured out."

And I thought I did. Preparing to go to the college of my choice, dating the most wonderful boy, making good grades with lots of friends: I did think I had it all figured out. But somewhere along the way, I lost that poise and perfectionism. I broke my back, I made some Bs, I slept through a Calc 3 test and finally allowed myself to skip a class or two. Along the way, I thought my mind had cracked, and when I was sad, all I wanted to do was sleep or get better, but when the sadness went away, I thought my life was back on track.

I remember visiting my therapist as a sophomore, on Swim At The River Day, and wondering why I was there. I was happy, wasn't I? I had things figured out again, didn't I? I thought I had come to terms with losing my job, and I thought things would be perfect again.

I can't pretend that I am much older, or even much wiser, than I was then. But two years up the road, I realized that things didn't have to be perfect, and that this is my life, and I love it. I don't mind being a mess--it's just what I do, but it works for me. As long as I have people laughing with me, I'm fine. It's when the laughter stops that it gets scary.

Yesterday was the sixth month anniversary of my first dose of Lamictal, the drug I take to control my bipolar disorder. It is the sixth month anniversary, also, of the day I hit my eye on Joey's bed during a tickle fight and he decided to stop saying "I don't know" and "Maybe" and take me back as his mess, his bipolar wreck of a girl. The day we started laughing again.

He's been visiting the last two days, and we have been doing our thing--lying together watching the B-52s on YouTube. Loading the dishwasher while singing to the Village People. Eating too much ice cream. Sleeping in a bed where we thrash around and steal each others' blanket space, and roll onto each others' pillows and turn in circles and talk incoherently all night.

Waking up, pulling the covers back to my side, I smiled knowing that this fitful oppositional sleep is the best sleep I get, and it's the sleep I want for the rest of my life.

Loving him is the best thing I've ever done, even if I do it as a mess, even if I fucked it up a million times. We cannot laugh about the past, and I am bipolar, and I will be medicated for the rest of my life, and I surely am a wreck, a shambles, a hilarious mess--but as long as we can keep laughing at the present, I'll be fine.

Meditation 3: My Lungs Are Fresh and Yours to Keep

This week, we finally managed to push past muscles, nerves and vessels, and we are having our first experience with organs. The terrible (and perhaps also great) thing about being a chemist is the tendency to break things into their very small parts. It is sometimes easy to denigrate anything in nature to its small pieces. When you look at it on a small enough level, all biology is chemistry [and all chemistry is physics, which is an existential problem I deal with every day]. Because the entire body is carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and a whole host of other elements, it is easy to forget just how amazing a human body is. Similarly, when you are crudded down in the actual facts of living--the actual mechanical aspects--it is easy to forget that the body before you was once an actual human being.

The best--and thus most-pride-inspiring--story I ever wrote was about a physicist and his son. The physicist was dying of lung cancer, and his estranged son had returned home--much against his will--to care for his dying father. I chose lung cancer because I had seen it firsthand: standing in an operating room at Emory, Dr. Halkos had pointed out the bilateral dense spots in the lungs. "Cancer in both lungs," he said. "You can't take them both out." In other words, cancer in both lungs is a death sentence. If you are old, and can't withstand the radiation, even more so.

"The cancer had invaded his lungs, and my life, slowly," I wrote. Make no mistake about it: disease is an invading army: it eats our stores of food, ravages our women, and burns our fields. In my time at Emory, I had seen it all first-hand. I had read scores of CT images, learned to point out cancer, or necrosis, or strictures in vessels. I had seen infections that had taken over bodies, palpated hernias, watched a woman die on a table because she had refused an aspect of her treatment because of her religion. All this, and more, I saw.

On Tuesday, we brutally cut into the thoracic cavity and saw lungs, the first organs we have seen in the body. With no small amount of wonder, we pressed into them and were surprised--if only a little--to find that one of them was twice the size of the other. The smaller one was much harder to the touch, and today we found that it had adhered to the mediastinum, the tissue that encloses the heart. It is our best guess that--perhaps ironically, perhaps appropriately--the cause of death was lung cancer.

I'm not really sure what my point is--except, maybe, for this: for one small blinding moment, I felt a certain sudden sadness for this woman who had suffered, died, and been so unselfish as to let a bunch of twenty somethings cut so amateurishly into her body, accidentally lopping through important nerves and vessels and tearing, unintentionally, her frail muscles.

Her physical heart is so small, compared to others we have seen, but I think there is no doubt that her metaphorical heart--the heart of kisses, tears, and compassion--was anything but.

Meditation Two: Anatomy of You and Me

Your heart is a river that flows from your chest, through every organ.
[Death Cab for Cutie]

On August 17th, I received my first [of many, I am sure] stethoscope. It is surely not the most expensive one, nor is it particularly special for any reason other than that it is mine. It has a small brass nameplate with my name on it. It is the stethoscope with which I will learn, next semester, how to do physical diagnosis, with which I will find, for the first time, the Triangle of Auscultation on a live human, and with which I will gain the basis of knowledge I will need for the rest of my life.

My dad called the other day, and I was wearing my stethoscope, taking the blood pressures of everyone in the room. He asked if I had listened to my own heartbeat yet, and I said "Of course. That's the first thing I did." Listening to one's own heartbeat is an amazing thing in itself. It is comforting to know that--somewhere under those layers of skin, muscle and all that fucking fascia--another muscle is keeping me alive, making the syncopated beats like jazz.

Joey came to visit this week and was immediately enamored with my stethoscope. He listened to my heartbeat, and I to his. I have listened to his heartbeat many times, with my ear to his chest, listening to the quickened pace after the frenzy of afternoon sex or the slowing cadence of sleep, but it is different with a stethoscope. All ambient noise turns to that ocean sound you hear in a seashell, and the beat is magnified until it surrounds you. You can hear the blood rushing in and out, being pumped everywhere at the speed that is almost incomprehensible, and returning to pick up more oxygen so our toes don't fall off. I contemplated the privilege of a stethoscope. Many--maybe even most--people will never hear the hearts of their lovers so clearly and definitively as I was able to hear Joey's.

In the end, the beauty of our anatomy is so much more than the sum of muscles, nerves, arteries, and veins. Our bodies are magestic and perfectly planned, showcasing a level of organization that spits in the face of entropy when all 39 muscles of Joey's back, shoulder, chest, and arm reach forward to scoop me into his body so tightly, so sweetly, so perfectly I start to cry.