fall

Everything is about returning to the earth. 

Leaves, grass, sticks, stones. They're all drifting closer and closer, gravity pulling and tugging insistently. And people are the same. We struggle in the net: boarding planes, driving cars, riding bicycles. Hot air balloons, trapeze acts, sledding down steep hills. You name it, we're skimming over dirt, until whenever it is that we give in to gravity. 

I've been on a pile of medication for years now. It started out small: lisinopril, for high blood pressure that is apparently genetic, a small round peach colored tablet. Then for a time I added Lexapro and Wellbutrin to the pile; that was a hard time, to be frank. But with therapy for both me and Dan separately, and together, it was the best thing that could have happened. It was a reset button. 

Eventually I stopped taking both Lexapro and Wellbutrin. Why? Because I thought I was fine without them. (Note to self: Don't just stop taking stuff like that because you think it's a good idea. Remember the dizziness? Ugh.) 

Then it was just lisinopril and birth control, another peachy-pink tablet. Which was awesome, as it turns out, because with my PMDD, taking birth control round the clock means you have no menstrual cycle. Late 1990s Kim would have lost her shit over this - it goes against nature, etc - but late 2010s Kim was ELATED. 

We bought our house. I got sick. Really sick. Couldn't stay out of the bathroom sick, blood where it shouldn't be, kind of sick. Eventually after a colonoscopy and CT scan, I was diagnosed with Crohn's, an auto-immune disease in which your body thinks that your intestines are Alan Rickman in a Bruce Willis Christmas movie, and kicks your insides with steel-toed boots. 

Inflammation: it gets the job done.

That was painful; I remember cuddling with heating pads for days on end, hoping for it to just stop. There was more medication: little blue anti-spasmodics, bitter steroids. Those tapered off and I ended up with two new all the time medications: turquoise Imodium tablets and giant flesh-colored Balsalzide caplets. (Think Mike and Ike size.) 

So back up to 4 medications again. 

Last fall, when I had my blood clot, the birth control was nixed, and I started taking Xarelto: tiny, red, triangle shaped. Because of the inflammatory disease, I have to stay on it for life. Yay. New pill. 

And after that, my thyroid got all malignant, and now I'm on levothyroxione, the replacement hormone for what my thyroid no longer kicks out. Another small peach pill. 

I also take colorful gummy multivitamins, and extra vitamin D in small clear gels. And yellow sertraline, for anxiety. 

Needless to say, when we travel anywhere, I have a small backpack of rattling medications. The Balsalzide in particular is a hefty pill that I'm fairly certain is made using Rubbermaid technology, and I'm cut back to 6 a day from 9 a day previously. They have their own little container, since they won't fit in a standard pill box. 

I just refilled my two-weeks' worth of medications this morning. It takes about 20 minutes, and I have two bins of medication, since the Balsalzide caplets are so large. There are so many colors that it could be kind of pretty, in a modern-art kind of way, if they were just hues and tints and not small pieces of machinery. 

I'm forty-two. I have more medications than my parents combined. 

Sometimes I get tired of taking everything, of parsing out my days and weeks into little plastic partitions. Once, when I was seeing a new doctor, I griped about the number of pills I have to take. He replied with a chuckle: "What happens if you don't take the pills?" 

I know what happens. I don't leave the house. I lie down. I give up. I fall, the way October leaves are drifting now, and I become earth again. In their own way, they're keeping me from giving in to gravity and just laying down on the ground, these little stacks and piles of tablets and capsules. I lay on them the way others leap onto motorcycles or horses, and away I go.