Lifesavers

After the bonfire I started to get sick, first a sore throat, a slight cough.  Then a deeper cough, sitting on my chest like a ton of bricks.  

I got some antibiotics, the cough turned to croup, worse at night, waking me every fifteen minutes with paroxysmal coughing fits that I feared might kill me as I fought for breath.  

I remembered vividly my father dying of pneumonia, fighting right to his last breath, his whole body in spasm with the effort for days on end; my mother drowning from emphysema and lung cancer, too weak to even bother to breath; my father’s three teenage sisters dying of TB just because they were born before antibiotics had been invented.  

Feeling how this would have been the end of my life but for the ampicillin that really struggled to clear the infection.  I returned viscerally to the time when my throat closed up from a resistant strain of Scarlet Fever when I was eighteen months old.  The tracheostomy that saved my life, revisiting the glass isolation unit that was my home for three months, that kept me separate and safe from the world, from contact with people. 

The body remembers everything, calling us back to more fully experience that which has been barely survived by ourselves and our ancestors.  Giving us the opportunity to heal the perceptions and beliefs held as trauma in the body.  I am more or less recovered and profoundly grateful once again to have been born in the age of antibiotics and the land of the NHS.  Blessed be.