NOTE: The illness I describe in this post was more serious than I thought. It was COVID that got rolling with my asthma and turned into pneumonia. Even though this post — which I never got around to posting — is now a month old, I’m sad to say that I think it’s still relevant. The past month has been worse than a coup. It has been the malicious deconstruction of our government and our democracy and the injection of rampant greed and corruption into our national soul. I love this country. I never thought Americans would just throw it away.
Mourning America: Reflections on Illness and Democracy’s Fall
The death of American democracy is new to me. I don’t have a game plan for how to celebrate its passing. I had originally planned to spend January 20 as a day of fasting and prayer. But, my old body has an endless variety of ways that it interferes with my best-laid plans, and it decided to provide a diversion of its own.
My sister has been horribly ill for weeks. She spent weeks in the ICU and then another couple of weeks in the medical ward. A few days ago, they transferred her to rehab to regain as much function as she could. I’ve been going almost every day to the hospital, which, needless to say, is a place crawling with germs.
A Nation in Crisis
The night before we handed America over to the dismantling crew, I woke up at about 4 am or so, and I was dizzy. This scared me because the stroke I had a year ago presented as dizziness. When someone suffers a stroke, they’ve got 3 hours from the beginning of symptoms to get to the hospital if they want to stop its destructive progress. That means I didn’t have a lot of time for dithering.
I don’t want a stroke to go untreated. But, if I’m not having a stroke, I would just as soon take a pass on spending a couple of days romping with the boys and girls at the stroke unit. These are fine people, and they do an excellent job. They took such good care of me when I was in the hospital with my stroke. But it was a traumatic experience, just the same.
When you walk in and tell them your primary care doc said to go to the ER because you’re having a stroke, everybody changes. They get super calm. I mean preternaturally calm. And they take you right back and begin working on you asap. In what seems like a moment, you have a cloud of neurologists, nurses and staff fluttering around you.
A Personal and Political Wake-Up Call
You get sucked straight into the medical world like a drink being sucked through a straw.
I’m not complaining about this, I’m grateful for it. But I’d just as soon not do it again if I don’t have to.
So … I studied my own dizziness. Did it feel like the dizziness I had with the stroke? No. It didn’t. I’m not — emphasis not — handing out medical advice. This may or may not be interesting reading. But don’t you go thou and do likewise. If you have a stroke, every minute you dither your brain cells are dying. Don’t dither, and don’t assume that your symptoms will feel like mine.
That said, I did dither. I just didn’t feel the same as I had with the stroke. This dizzy was the room-spinning kind. The stroke dizzy I experienced — and I would guess everybody is different, so don’t take this as a reason not to seek help — the stroke dizzy I experienced was … different.
God, Take Me Home
My stroke dizzy didn’t set the room spinning. I just didn’t have any knowledge of up or down, left or right. It was gone, like it had never been there. I was floating in space as if there was no gravity, no horizon, no nuthin’. It didn’t hurt. But it was very unpleasant.
But it didn’t feel like the head-spinning, I’m-gonna-upchuck dizziness I was experiencing in the wee hours of January 20. I ended up using a steroid spray on my nose and taking an antihistamine. After a while, I went back to bed, but before I did, I prayed and asked God to just take me home to Him if I was wrong about this.
I slept until three in the afternoon (which was unusual.) When I got up, it was clear I had some kind of flu-like crap. I was chilling and aching and blowing my nose and somewhat nauseous. You know, the full catastrophe.
I was quite happy to have whatever it is I’ve got because it is not a stroke. It’s just a few days of feeling bad and then I’ll be ok.
The Death of Democracy: Did We Take It for Granted?
But it did divert me from what I see as the appalling horror that has happened to my country. I was born a free person in a democracy. I have never been afraid of my government. I’ve never been afraid to say what I think, go where I want, and live as I please.
I didn’t think about what a wonderful thing that is until now. Now that we’ve thrown America away, I realize that I took it for granted. I never doubted that it would be here.
Prayer, Fasting, and the Fight for Hope
I was born a free person in a democracy, and I never doubted that I would hand over a democracy where they could live out their lives as free people to my children and grandchildren.
I’m old and ailing. I do not know the number of my days. But anyone with half a brain knows that I have pretty much lived my life. My grandchildren have their whole lives ahead of them. And we’ve destroyed their future.
I’ve been praying, asking God how I can best serve Him in this time of destruction and evil. What, when I go to Him for good, do I need to have learned from this? How can I be the Light of Christ in this darkness of greed, corruption, lies, sexual perversion, misogyny, race hatred, and abysmally failed whore political clergy?
I planned to spend January 20 in prayer and fasting. What happened instead is that I slept most of the day, then got up to aches, pains, fever, chills, coughing and blowing my nose. I offered the pains of illness and my sorrow and grief for America to the people I pray for in Purgatory and to this nation. I asked Our Lady to send Michael to bind the demons that have overwhelmed us. I prayed, as I often do, that God would send us better shepherds who stand up for the Cross instead of bowing down before the false gods of greed and power.
American democracy, dead by seppuku. How did you celebrate?
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