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“I have another scan this week," I say lightly, hoping to reassure my loved ones that it is safe to rejoin my orbit. There is always another scan, because this is my reality. But the people I know are often busy contending with mildly painful ambition and the possibility of reward. I try to begrudge them nothing, except I'm not alongside them anymore.
In the meantime, I have been hunkering down with old medical supplies and swelling resentment. I tried� haven't I tried? � to avoid fights and remember birthdays. I showed up for dance recitals and listened to weight-loss dreams and kept the granularity of my medical treatments in soft focus. A person like that would be easier to love, I reasoned.
I try a small experiment and stop calling my regular rotation of friends and family, hoping that they will call me back on their own. _This is not a test. This is not a test._ The phone goes quiet, except for a handful of calls. I feel heavy with strange new grief. Is it bitter or unkind to want everyone to remember what I can't forget? Who wants to be confronted with the reality that we are all a breath away from a problem that could alter our lives completely? A friend with a very sick child said it best: I'm everyone's inspiration and and no one's friend.
I am asked all the time to say that, given what I've gained in perspective, I would never go back. Who would want to know the truth? Before was better.”
― Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear

“Sometimes the body is a weight pulling you the way down. And it's hard to love the stone that drowns you.”
― Kate Bowler, No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear

“as the doctor say, is the patient getting better or worse?”
― Monaristw

“Hell is not demons with horns and hot pans! It is a world without the God. Without meaning, without hope, without love and freedom. Only existential sickness. Complete spiritual destruction, which will sooner or later be followed by physical destruction. As a species, we have no value.”
― Andrew Orange, The Outside Intervention

“Pain and sickness and hunger and fighting—there's no need for any of it. It's as foolish as those little monkeys.”
― Robert Heinlein

“I have started to think of the sickness not as a single, contained catastrophe, but as part of a series of waves. We are still burning. What will be the wave that puts us out?”
― Laura van den Berg, Find Me

“More often than not, all that would be needed to complete the cure would be for the sick man to show a little imagination.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, Against Nature

“We all have been waiting for help a long time. But it never has been easy. The people must do it. You must do it." Betonie sounded as if he were explaining something simple but important to a small child. But Tayo's stomach clenched around the words like knives stuck into his guts. There was something large and terrifying in the old man's words. He wanted to yell at the medicine man, to yell the things the white doctors had yelled to him - that he had to think only of himself, and not about others, that he would never get well as long as he used words like "we" and "us." But he had known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn't work that way, because the world didn't work that way. His sickness was onnly part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

“For someone so unwell, he seemed preposterously healthy.”
― A.J.West, The Spirit Engineer

“And ye shall serve the Lord your God, and he shall bless thy bread, and thy water; and I will take sickness away from the midst of thee.”
― Moses

“Sometimes it grew so hot in my sheltered corner that I sweated. I would watch all the diamond beads forming in the shallow cross between my chest muscles; then when a sudden gust of wind caught them, I would see them dashed flat against my body, smeared and scattered. The ice of the wind suddenly striking my sweaty body made curious thrills of pleasure-pain, fear and exaltation pass through me. I thought of throwing myself from the roof and allowing the wind to carry me along, until I caught in the branches of a tree, where I would hang crucified, with my arms outstretched, until my pajamas rotted to tatters and rags, and my bones were cleaned of all flesh by the birds. I thought of them pecking out my eyes and enjoying tremendously these delicious morsels of glutinous hazel jelly. I wondered if a large bird would succeed in tearing out my tongue whole, or whether an army of tiny birds would just peck delicately at the tip and gradually work downwards until they reached the roots.”
― Denton Welch, The Stories of Denton Welch

“...had recommended pediatrics as the most honest specialization, because children become sick only when in fact they are sick, and they cannot communicate with the physician using conventional words but only with concrete symptoms of real disease. After a certain age, however, adults either had the symptoms without the diseases or, what was worse, serious diseases with the symptoms of minor ones.”
― Gabriel García Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

“Some of our diseases are worsened, or even caused, by some of our so-called medicines or healers.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If you are feeling crappy, it is probably because your body has gone toxic.”
― Steven Magee

“Now there was nothing left of her life, disease had consumed her, eaten up her body, leaving only shaking and fits. It was hard to believe when I saw her sitting there asleep with her mouth agape that her strong will, which couldn't even rule her body now, and her strict morality, which she was no longer able to express, could have left such a deep mark on her children. But it had.”
― Karl Ove Knausgaard, Min kamp 5

“...modernity is doing something to us at a deeply fundamental level, and the fact that we don't understand it is alarming.”
― Heather E. Heying, A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life

“He knew that he had been born in a sick country, a country now intent on spreading its disease to others through the social media channels and under the cover of night--its true gift of the moment.”
― Gary Shteyngart, Our Country Friends

“Keeping a human in a state of altitude induced central sleep apnea for many years should be expected to bring on a wide range of adverse health conditions.”
― Steven Magee

“After five years of visits to four different sleep doctors, I was eventually diagnosed with positional sleep apnea.”
― Steven Magee

“The sleep doctor was evaluating me for a BiPAP machine, as the CPAP machine was triggering altitude sickness, chronic fatigue, sleepiness and gastrointestinal problems.”
― Steven Magee

“I associate high altitudes with oxygen starvation, high radiation and ‘Summit Brainâ€�.”
― Steven Magee

“I have many pre-existing conditions.”
― Steven Magee

“The government is devouring the health of the masses for its own gain.”
― Steven Magee

“I am well on my way to being known as one of the world’s leading ‘Altitude Sicknessâ€� researchers.”
― Steven Magee

“Research facilities can be very toxic workplaces.”
― Steven Magee

“I am allergic to high altitude professional astronomy.”
― Steven Magee

“I am allergic to the altitude of Tucson, Arizona, USA.”
― Steven Magee

“Mauna Kea is in the process of revealing its dirty secrets.”
― Steven Magee

“Not descending to sea level after developing high altitude sickness is a mistake that may come to haunt you a decade later.”
― Steven Magee

“It was through researching my disabling sickness that I concluded professional astronomers are a toxic group of people.”
― Steven Magee