Narwhal

My lungs hungry for air, my eyes sticky and heavy, laden with sleepless restlessness and a pain so bone deep it feels like my marrow is aching.  I peer through the blurry constellation of floaters that whisp across my vision in the dark night room where the curtains hold back the midday heat and glare of newly sharpened knives, desperately trying to reach their target of my vision, like a knife thrower finding the balloon.

This is the way I wake every day. It is why seventeen years have passed and still I feel like I am the girl who just fell ill and believed confidently she would recover quickly.  Instead my life rolled slowly down a hill with little peaks, until it found the massive decline and sped recklessly towards every more endangering moments. When suddenly days were filled with such intense suffering my body began to accept that adapting to the new and life threatening addition of symptoms was the path of least resistence.  

Doctors were useless, except those who braved the special subset of uncharted or at the least secretly charted treatment of this confounding curiosity - like the long believed extinct Narwhal - passing newly discovered research and anecdotal information amongst a network of explorers. The rest, those outside the network live in a state of cognitiive dissonance believeing the impossibility of the existence of such a combination of curious symptoms were nothing more than a psychological failing of the patient and the treating doctors.  While the doctors who knew better, risked reputation, invested fully in unmasking the reality of us, their curiosities.

It became tiring gambling constantly on the hopes that some new specialist may have access to the network of explorers quietly accumulating knowledge and occasionally sneaking research papers out into the public, placed in the revered Lancet. Yet still ignored by pathologists and the medical profession at large who sought to cage the Narwhal, like patients with inaccurate classifications, easing their own egos, for they dare not imagine a beast of fable when they could instead more easily concern themselves with easy to treat classifications, however ill fitting.

So today I sit here, my gray matter aged some ten to fifteen years past my bioloical age, my youth stolen, and I wonder have I lived in denial for this long.  Patiently waiting for some explorer to find me befrore I became extinct? Although truth be told there was not chance of extinction for there are too many of us and we're nearing pandemic levels.

The realisation was and is earth shattering.  I am on a ledge psychologically dealing with an age that befits someone who has a history of life, of moments filled with love, joy, loss, happiness, sadnes, grief, choices in career, partners, children, buying homes and cars, instead I'm dealing with the most intense heart ache I have ever felt.  This time stolen from me, this life of memories and connections, the alientation that taunts me and the bravery it took to get here feels like a rising tide full of flotsam and jetsam.  When the ledge slides into the sea I hang on perilously to the pieces of who I used to be and yet imagine letting go and just drifting to find myself.

Who am I?  I am not illness. And despite knowing my classificaiton by the explorers as being a Narwhal, which is scientifically astounding, I don't want to hear that anymore.  Simply put I wish to be normal.  Not some curiosity that fits nowhere comfortably. 

My body betrays my understanding of who I am.  If I look in the mirror I find myself wondering what happened to me.  Who loves me?  Can I love that reflection of a person some seventeen years older than my inner voice knows me to be? How did I earn all these lines and suddenly gain weight, despite eating so well?  It is like in the night someone slipped on prosthetics, a suit if you may of what I would look like if I aged while ill.  I find myself reflected back a portrait of someone who looks like they've lived nearly two decades when really I spend every moment trying to breathe my way through another undulating wave of pain and exhaustion.

The assault on my system has been too much.  Without access to appropriate care my body has misfired and no longer functions normally. The comounding of one failure of a function upon another, has led it to become this curiosity.  And daily I am left wondering if I alone have to find the answer to my own riddle. 

When I finally move on the bed, a thirst so all encompassing overwhelms me.  It is as though I have been in the desert for days without water. My legs refuse to do as they're told, my face is red and burns with chronic sinus infection, my hair greasy as my hormones surge unhealthily, my weight would suggest my once athletic body had taken to snorting sugar when the opposite is true.  Pain is an octopus of tendrils starting with an intense migraine and working through my nervous system, so that every nerve is on fire, my teeth and jaw aches. I fear the accidental contact of neurotoxins (wrapped so alluringly in advertisers brainwashing packaging of 'lasting fresh smells' of body sprays and products) lest I stop breathing, after seizing, getting paralysed, convulsing and eventually my airways closing in an ever increasing beat of bronchial spasms.

Yet I get up every day and find my way to the lounge/day bed where I sit and half zombie, half Narwhal.  I imagine life in colour, the giggles of children running around my house as my partner mows the lawn, the windows thrown open and sunlight making patterns through the greenery that thrives in the light.  Where I am worrying if I have all the ingredients for the dinner we planned and if the kids are too hyperactive, then basking in the moment, before realising it was all a delusion. I am still on my day bed unable to move, burning up, yet suffering through the heat as my back aches from moving in a slightly different way to the way I normally move. I can't concentrate on which sensation is most pressing because there's too many.  But I feel the tears as they stream down my face soothing my burning cheeks and yet failing to lighten my heart's load.

I am Amara aka Marzi and I have ME, MCS, TVBD and so on and so forth. I can't breathe properly, tend to myself, shower myself, feed or shop for myself. My treatment is sporadic and dependant on the love of my fellow travelers. We are the watchers, the voyeurs of life and we hold each other up. I am a warrior and my light burns bright because despite it all, I am not defeated, nor will I drown but I have fallen deeply into a ditch.  So I need you to help me get out of here.  

Please weave a ladder of love by donating a strand of healing light, through donations, sharing my story, my writing, my spirit, by being another beacon in our network of watchers readying the charge to break free of the cages we were never meant to be placed in.  I am what life carved of me, an ethereal beautiful statue whose spirit is trapped inside.  Come bring your chisels and get me out of here.  If I am going to survive this, I need you to help me.  Love me and see me joyous, glowing and well.   And so it will be.  For the Narwhal thrives despite it's hunters and ignorant disbelievers.  I am a Narwhal.

"Our hope now is to help her have a life.  If you want to help please go to:

https://www.facebook.com/Aid4Amara/ or https://www.gofundme.com/a-life-for-marzi and help us get her there.

Please share widely and donate as much or as little as you can. We thank you for following her journey and supporting us and The Amara Campbell Foundation  :)

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