Singing bowl

• Hemoglobin 8.9 (normal 14.0-17.3)
• Absolute neutrophil count: 0.3 (normal 1.4-7.5)
• White blood cell count: 0.5 (normal 4-10)

Yesterday might have been the low point. Walked in the morning, for over an hour, but it completely wiped me out and I spent the entire afternoon in bed. Fatigue from this illness can't be easily described; tired but not sleepy, foggy-headed but lucid at the same time. If you've been wondering where I find energy to write this blog, well first, yesterday I didn't, and second it's somehow a thing I can do even though concentrating on other things seems completely impossible.

Hemoglobin's up slightly from Monday, though the white count is down a bit. All according to plan. They'd scheduled a transfusion for Friday, but now the nurse thinks there's no need. And I do have a bit more energy today.

Yesterday was also my 50th birthday. Not the celebration I'd hoped for. It would've been small and quiet anyway, but more joyful than I could muster in these circumstances. My beautiful Gabrielle gave me a lovely Tibetan singing bowl, deep-throated and intense, intricately decorated with Tibetan script and designs. I've got another one of these, given to me by friends 20 years ago on the occasion of another breakdown: arthroscopic surgery on my left knee — much less serious than this, but still a health crisis. There's a sweet symmetry in these two gifts.

These bowls make the purest sounds it's possible to hear. I don't play them often, because it's a sound you really need to be present to hear, to deserve.

One of my most intense dreams, ever, involved being pursued by shadowy figures through a whole series of scenes, ending in an enormous mansion where I ran from room to room evading them. At the end I came suddenly into an enormous hall filled with people, all talking loudly, a party or reception or something. On the floor in front of me lay the broken halves of a huge singing bowl, cracked down the middle as if by a lightning bolt.

I seized them in my hands and pressed them back together. Then I rang the bowl. The sound grew and grew, a titanic tone of awesome purity and power.

Everything stopped: the talking, the people, my shadowy pursuers. Time itself.

Everyone looked at me.

And then, into this immense stillness, I began to make the sound.

I could not get that dream out of my mind for months afterward. How I had healed what was broken, and with it stopped the world.