Category: Illness
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It’s complicated
A complicated time. The Book, the one I had all those bizarre death dreams about, arrived in my office TODAY. And yet I breathe. Too much to do in the past weeks, some of it distinctly though not disastrously late… Merrie and I performed duets on my students' musicals night. We made blunders but it…
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To Züri
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by
A busy, rapidly moving ten days or so, resulting in numerous things done – patients, classes, editing, emails – and also at some points just stopping, almost startled that I didn't want to work on the next thing. My new version of procrastination, I think: something barer, simpler – with far less anxiety. Perhaps this…
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relatively quiet – continuing developments
A calm day – mild rain since last night, Zürich is cooling off after a sunny week. The hourly church bells – they have seemed remarkably reassuring for the past few days; perhaps I am getting accustomed to them. After, of course, several years – have I really been coming here, however irregularly, since 2009?…
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Miseries
Yesterday I went to Leicester for psychoanalysis… unfortunately started to feel a bit off while getting to the train; suggesting IBS, or something very like it. By the time I arrived, three hours later… My analyst is fortunately a psychiatrist, so can write prescriptions; he kindly wrote a prescription and drove me around until we…
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The experience of fragments
I seem to be functioning in a very, as it were, multi-leveled way lately. Things that must be done – working as an analyst, teaching classes, observing classes, editing a volume, meetings, being in analysis, planning, conferences, Jung-Institut homework – even: vacuuming the apartment, buying groceries – are functioning in often brisk and sharpy outlined…
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Blurs
As teaching ended last Friday, I am putting myself back together, after what felt like three months of scrambling to keep up. And yes, I know that there are many people in the world – more energetic, harder-working – who would have been easily able to keep up with what felt like a heavy teaching…
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Hard
Sunday afternoon in Newcastle. Sunny and clear, shops and restaurants open, people walking along. A young guy, shaved head, talks on his phone, walking up and down. He goes to the corner of a granite building near the bus stop, leans over, retches – vomits, not much, some chunks of food in what is probably…
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Biochem IIa
[PREREQUISITE: BIOCHEM I; or permission of instructor] I am noticing some other aspects of changing body chemistry, after the new HIV medications…. For several years, I have tended to get frequent bleeding, and clotting, in my sinuses. This has been worse since my 2009 stroke, and a subsequent three months of the dreadful medication Warfarin…
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Hiccups
This evening, for some reason, I had the hiccups for a while – too much salt on the salmon for dinner, I don't know; something. A bit bothersome; they took a while to go away – and while I had them I flashed back on a strange, affectionate but excruciating memory. Ted used to have…
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Responsorial
Intermittently, over the past couple of years, I hear of the severe illness, loss of mental control, or death of a contemporary – not from HIV or related problems, but from, well, anything else, as it happens. As I am now in my mid-50s, this is becoming more and more a normal occurrence. Unfortunately, at…
Paul Attinello 