Sheila Luna is a writer from Arizona whose essays have appeared in Kaleidoscope, PILGRIM: A Journal of Catholic Experience, Longridge Review, Spry Literary Journal and DINE: An Anthology (Hippocampus Books).
“Listening to Lyme” by Merissa Nathan Gerson (Intima, Fall 2018) is a musical lament on Lyme disease. The rhythmic flow of the prose and repetition of words produce visual, emotional and physical responses—almost like watching an opera with ticks and spirochetes and doctors with evil elixirs. It’s a cry from someone trapped in her body, alone on an island, battling an out-of-control disease.
In “A Crippled Piano” (Intima, Spring 2022), I write about rheumatoid arthritis and how it absconded with my hands. While RA is not Lyme, it manifests many of the same symptoms—swollen joints, flattening fatigue, pain, depression—and witnesses the same runarounds with doctors, the same helplessness and desperation for alternative cures in order to ditch conventional medicine. Who wants to be a medical subject for the rest of his or her life, taking big gun drugs that may cause more harm than the disease?
Friends like to offer advice. Avoid dairy. Try a grapefruit diet. Meditate. Get stung by lots of bees. Are they experts because they read an article? Nevertheless, shards of guilt start to stab. We wonder is it in all our heads? Did we cause it by eating too many cookies? In reality, no two bodies are alike. No two treatments for two bodies with the same disease are alike. We don’t have control. As miraculous as the human body is, we are fragile beings. In the essay, Gerson states, “You don’t need to be knee deep in tall grasses while skinning and de-feathering a once alive chicken in order to catch this disease.”
Whether Lyme or RA, an alien creature burrows into the body and sets up shop. Gerson says she’s “at the whim of the Lyme,” unable to conquer it. With RA, it feels like little men with hammers are inside my joints, pounding aimlessly. It makes me think of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis where the main character wakes up as a giant insect and must adjust to his new condition, alone. The end of “Listening to Lyme” made me shiver—how she calls out for her mother. In my essay, I also want to be with my mom—the one person who could ever make things better.
Both essays reveal how the body can become “colonized” by a disease. The person and the disease become forever linked in combat, loss and ultimately in acceptance.
Sheila Luna is a writer from Arizona whose essays have appeared in Kaleidoscope, PILGRIM: A Journal of Catholic Experience, Longridge Review, Spry Literary Journal and DINE: An Anthology (Hippocampus Books). Lately, she has been writing about illness, ability, and disability, including her own challenges living with rheumatoid arthritis. Luna loves baking, road trips and Bach. www.sheilaluna.net.