ad astra per aspera

He’s pretty tired today and was grumpy with me for persisting in getting him to get out of bed for his 11:30 appointment.
Newly prescribed anti-seizure med Levetiracetam:

What side effects can this medication cause?

• drowsiness
• weakness
• unsteady walking
• coordination problems
• headache
• pain
• forgetfulness
• anxiety
• agitation or hostility
• dizziness
• moodiness
• nervousness
• numbness, burning, or tingling in the hands or feet
• loss of appetite
• vomiting
• diarrhea
• constipation
• changes in skin color

The shaking of the bed translated to something in my dream until it pulled me awake, the abrupt transition to quick understanding that something very wrong was happening.  The events blurred together, a series of reactions.
Turn on the light call out to him, call his name and he’s shaking/thrashing/jerking so hard and his eyes are wide open with a desperate look focusing on nothing and his fists clenched so tight and he can’t respond to me.  Call 911 and rush out description of him, of hotel address, try to listen and understand to what the operator is telling me.  Make sure he is breathing, turn him on his side if he is not breathing.  During call he stops shaking and jerking and foam comes out of his mouth and then blood drips out the corner of his mouth but he is breathing and they are loud strange breaths I cry out his name and he can’t respond and I go closer so he can see me and tell him if he can understand me to blink his eyes once and he doesn’t blink.  His is still breathing ok and I don’t move him at all.  I quickly put on clothes while talking to him and wait.  I look out the door and down the hall waiting.  I cry.  5 EMT’s crowd into our small room and some gather by the bed and I answer questions and i go next to him and hold his hand, now he seems able to talk and answer questions and he is confused and scared.  
No he’s never had a seizure before.
They take vitals and check his blood and recommend a trip to the ER at MDA and he wants me to take him instead of taking the ambulance and I help him change his clothes, he lost his bladder during the seizure.  They walk with us down to the truck and I take him into the ER.  We stay there for 14 hours or so.  I’ve had less than 2 hours of sleep before he wakes and he thankfully sleeps a lot while we wait and wait and wait for someone to tell us what the fuck is going on.  




I’ve started thinking about his leukemia as a black hole we orbit.  It’s gravitational pull shapes the path of our celestial body, our lives.  It’s such a massive force it has changed the shape of our surface and we are slowly adjusting.  I don’t have a good enough grasp of astronomical concepts to fully articulate this correlation in my mind.  


But I also think of the concept of graviational lensing:
A gravitational lens refers to a distribution of matter (such as a cluster of galaxies) between a distant source (a background galaxy) and an observer, that is capable of bending (lensing) the light from the source, as it travels towards the observer. This effect is known as gravitational lensing and is one of the predictions of Albert Einstein‘s General Theory of Relativity. (copied from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravitational_lens)

This leukemia being the huge cluster of galaxies at position 2.  Position 1 was the life we saw planned out for ourselves, was the life we had.  We are here at position 3 and our view of the light from the young, star-forming blue galaxy near the edge of the universe (position 1) that used to be clear is now skewed from the sheer gravitation mass of the cluster of galaxies (leukemia) at position 2 and we are left with multiple, distorted images of the background galaxy.  Throw in the consideration that what is at position 1 in reality is a view of something that happened a long, long, long time ago in the past and that adds an interesting level of physics philosophy that I am not fully able to understand or articulate the little I do understand now.  The universe, holy fuck this giant massive universe is the most magical beautiful mystery.  The universe is my god and I worship it.  I think of it’s vastness and it goes on forever and we’ll never know most of the things about it.  I never wanted to live forever until I thought about the fact that if I did, that would mean I could be around for all the mysteries that we will unravel about it.  
Chris and I had a discussion awhile ago about what we’d want done with our ashes.  I said I really didn’t care because I’d be dead.  Then I thought wait, if it were feasible to release my ashes into space I’d take that.  


Recounting the horror of the seizure was hard but thinking and reading about gravitational lensing has calmed me and distracted me from this present.  We are at MDA in a room at a trans unit where Chris is getting his daily IV dose of his anti-fungal and he’s snoring loudly and I’ve been typing and listening to the Bill Callahan station I made on Pandora.  We’ll leave soon and I’ll tuck him back into bed to rest for the day, it’s a long week of tests and procedures and results and possible admission back into the hospital wing of MDA for chemo to get that fucking huge cluster of leukemia lymphocyte galaxies to shrink the fuck down and let the light thru without bending it.