Tag Archives: poem about illness

Polite Conversation

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Polite Conversation

If you’re looking for activities that are sure to excite us,
best not to show the cat scans of your diverticulitis.
Discussion of this topic is sure to bring unease,
for most folks are oblivious to other folks’ disease.

Illness carries no cachet and should not be repeated.
When bringing up such maladies, you’re sure to feel defeated.
So keep incisions covered and try not to share your woe,
for if you’re hypochondria’s showing, you’ll be labelled as a schmo.

 

Prompt words today are diverticulitis, oblivious, schmo, cachet and defeated.

Feeling Poorly

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Shades of pumpkin face. What I look like!!!

I’ll do you the favor of not taking a selfie of my grotesquely swollen face. A 1 a.m. mad dash to hospital emergency last night did not seem to do anything to solve the problem so I need to be off again to try to find a solution after zero sleep last night. Poor, poor Pearl. What am I doing blogging? Just passing the hours until the lab and dentist office open up. Then another trip to a doctor to get results of blood tests. 

Feeling Poorly

The solution to my problem may be labeled as arcane,
for all attempts to solve it have been, alas, in vain.
I’ve visited three dentists but the jagged pain persists,
driven to emergency, gripping the wheel with fists
at 1 am, hoping that I’d soon be on the mend,
but alas is seems as though my pains aren’t going to end.

New antibiotics that have not as yet kicked in,
my pain pills ineffective, I cannot resort to gin.
Two teeth pulsing, face swollen from jaw to cheek to eye.
Skin pulled to the bursting point. I’m barely getting by.
With not one hour of sleep last night, I’d better catch a cab
to take me back to Ajijic for blood tests at the lab.

I’ve got to ask my dentist to try to fit me in,
but all-in-all my patience is wearing rather thin.
Once I’d grown accustomed to all my regular ills,
clear on how to treat them with my handy stash of pills,
it seems that Mother Nature is up to newer tricks.
Is messing with us humans the way she gets her kicks?

If she wants to pay us back for ills that we have done,
could she pick a guiltier target with whom to have her fun?
I’m trying to do right by her by cutting down on trash,
recycling all my plastics, my cardboard and my glass.
And I can give directions to Washington D.C.
so she can plague the guilty guys and lay off li’l ole me!

This is a poor excuse for a poem. Just can’t think of anything else at the moment as I wait for the medical world to awaken. I’ve had a miserable night.

Signs of a sad Halloween

Prompt words today are mend, regular, jagged, arcane and drive.

Why Me? NaPoWriMo 2019 Day 2

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Why Me?

Today I have the doldrums. My smile is upside down.
I cannot go to meet my cronies in the town.
My misery is absolute, I’m coughing and I’m sneezing,
and all this blowing of the nose is definitely unpleasing.

My bones could use some stretching, but I fear this will not be,
and Sandy, Harriet and Glen today I will not see.
I’ll try to talk to Gloria on the telephone
explaining why it’s best today that I am alone.

Why in fifteen minutes, as they shoot the  breeze.
will I be forced to lie abed, to blow my nose and sneeze?
Almond croissants and coffee and congeniality
are theirs while I am sentenced to echinacea tea!

The world just isn’t fair, my friend. I’m such a sorrowful wretch.
The only pleasure left in life to lie here and to kvetch!
It is life’s  idiosyncrasy that nine times out of ten
when I most want to paint the town, instead I must stay in.

What master of the universe sees that such a function
turns out to be a flop as a method of conjunction
with busy friends  that for two months I haven’t seen together
and in the one time we can meet, keeps me on such short tether?

 

The prompt words today are stretch, idiosyncrasy, absolute and upside. In addition, the NaPoWriMo prompt for today is to write a poem that ends in a question. Here are links to all:
https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/rdp-tuesday-stretch/
FOWC with Fandango — Idiosyncrasy
https://onedailyprompt.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/your-daily-word-prompt-absolute-april-2-
2019/
https://wordofthedaychallenge.wordpress.com/2019/04/02/upside/
NaPoWriMo 

Some Little Bug Inside Me

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I am too sick to write a blog, I am a party hangout
for some amoeba who moved in and promptly called his gang out.
They’re having quite a time in there, yet keep wanting to leave.
Each time I have to see them out, I stumble and I weave.
My stomach feels like shattered glass, my head is slightly pounding.
I think they’re doing Zumba—flip-flopping and rebounding
against my corridors of gut. I wish that they would stop.
I can’t make it to the clinic to consult a microbe cop.
Is it a parasite or fluke ( contracted from my cat?)
When she strokes and kisses them, what cat owner thinks of that?
For now, I’m resting in my bed with electrolytes and Flagyl.
I’ve cancelled my appointments, for I’m feeling sort of fragile.
The world will demonstrate without me, and friends go out to dine
while I hang out with tiny guests, miserable and supine.

 

I had this same bug a year ago, when I had to call off my 70th birthday celebration, much-planned for, because I was so miserable. So, these pesky amoebas seem to be maintaining a schedule.  Unfortunately, I had a full day of activities planned today, as well—first of all a demonstration against Trump’s immigration policies, then a visit to my doctor, a visit to an ill friend, and dinner with another friend.  All cancelled.  Ironic that I’m too ill to go see my doctor.  Here’s another little ode to amoebas I wrote during an earlier bout named “Once Upon a Lime in Mexico.”

 

https://ragtagcommunity.wordpress.com/2018/06/30/rdp-30-fluke/

 

Ragtag’s prompt today is fluke .

Disappearing Act

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SheSleeps

Generally, I have no desire to disappear.  Given my choice, you’d have me around forever.  The only exception is when I am ill.  In that case, I just want to draw into my shell and disappear.  This poem written three years ago chronicles such a time:

Skedaddle!

Bring me vitamins and soup,
but please don’t camp upon my stoop.
For when I have the ague or flu,
I’d rather not commune with you!
I’d rather sink into my gloom
sealed up lonely in my room.
Sleep as much as I am able,
use my stomach as a table.

Leave liquids here beside my bed,
but please don’t hover overhead.
An angel is appreciated
if, once immediate needs are sated,
they disappear and leave me to
my soggy Kleenex and the loo!

 

The prompt word today is disappear.

Upright Midnight

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Upright Midnight

Our night’s rest should meander, releasing us to dreams,
but my sleep took me on a trip down other sorts of streams
with rapids, eddies, waterfalls that jarred me rough awake.
I think that just one night like it is all that I could take.
Whenever I lay prone, I had another bout of coughing—
with one hack executed, another in the offing. 
I could not lay my head down to soothe myself to sleep.
Instead I slept bolt upright, my covers in a heap
around me on the sofa as a cough jarred me awake.
Sleeping upright on the sofa does not sweet dreaming make. 
I longed for my soft bed and former slumbering meanders
through crisp rows of wheat stalks and banks of oleanders
in search of something still unknown, a peaceful all-night search
for those soulful comforts I never found at church.
My mother’s laughter once again, my father’s joking ways
waiting just around the bend of this nightly maze.
Instead, I’ve barely three hours sleep in between my wheezes—
my dreams propelled by cyclones instead of gentle breezes.
The cold germ is not neighborly. It visits when it pleases
and brings unwanted hostess gifts of drips and coughs and sneezes.

As you may have guessed, I’ve come down with a miserable cold. Two poems in one night, one while I was still trying to stay in bed, then another after I moved to sit upright on the couch which at least furnished a half hour of sleep now and then between the coughing bouts.  The prompt today is meander.