2026-04-17

Six months ago, I had night fevers that lasted for more than a week. Breathing became difficult. The cough was constant, present at every inhale, and with it came the inability to eat, to stand without effort, to move through the day as anything other than a body in the process of failing. The diagnosis came after: Pulmonary Tuberculosis, contracted somewhere unknown, despite working from home, despite rarely leaving. The medications were aggressive and the side effects made daily life harder than the illness itself. I ate soup. That was the range of what was possible. Bobbi was sick in the same period. The first diagnosis was liver disease. We borrowed money, brought her in, treated the wrong thing. The second vet found four blood parasites; the liver was a symptom, not the cause. Fatima managed everything during this time: the finances, the fear, the care that ordinarily belongs to two people. I was in my first week of treatment and largely absent from what was happening around me. Bobbi died a week later. We were both, by then, emptied out, financially, emotionally, mentally, physically, and spiritually in ways that didn't have clean names yet.

Two weeks ago, I was cleared. Everything between the diagnosis and the clearance has already softened into blur, which is what time does when it wants to be merciful, or when it doesn't care either way. I am here now. That is the only legible fact. But something remains that the clearance couldn't name, an unwellness that isn't the body this time, or isn't only the body, something that arrived without symptoms and without a second opinion available, settling in the way things settle when they intend to stay.