Crohn’s patients, I have come to learn, frequently experience what are known as “flare ups”: sudden spikes in the severity of their symptoms, often requiring agressive medicinal intervention to combat. I had a flare up yesterday, and it had me–during my more lucid moments–reflecting again that “flare up” is a far less evocative phrase for the experience than I think it deserves. I would prefer something like “perpetual stomach stomp,” or, perhaps, “gutsplosion.” (How great a world would this be if students across the nation had to do PubMed database searches for gutsplosion references to write their papers?)
Anyway. I spent nearly all of yesterday in a drug induced stupor, sleeping when I could and downing pain meds and reading when I couldn’t. After about 20 hours of this things began to improve slightly, and I decided to get out my computer and see if it would be possible to get any work done. Despite the end of the month deadline, working on the story I’m writing for the Genomics Forum competition, for which I am still figuring out the characters, seemed too hard. So I opened up the file for another story I’ve been arduously revising for the past month.
Words started falling out of me like grains from a split sack of rice.
I have no explanation for this. Up until yesterday, revising this story had been like pulling teeth. But last night I could suddenly see through the haze of the story as I had written it once clearly through to the end of the story as it should be written. I think I will be able to finish the revision today.
No deep thoughts here. Other than perhaps that it is surprising how far ending on a bright note can go toward changing one’s perceptions of a miserable experience.