Stop and paint the dahlias

It is time to leave again, back home to the states.  Dr. Geeta says she hopes I return for a visit, and by visit she means just to play, not for treatment. She wants me to spend a year living my life and free from the Lyme centered one I have lived in these past years.  I do believe I am getting better and have seen vast improvements but I still have a ways to go.  I read with ease, I am able to write and remember.  I have my short-term memory back. My speech is back and I say exactly what I want to say and more.  I have more energy and am getting my independence back too.  It is true though that, much of my further recovery is up to me, continuing physical therapy and doing things that exercise my brain as well getting out in the world.  There is still that little part of me that says not just yet.  It hasn’t even been a year that I have felt this well, let alone six months and I was sick for so long, seven years.  That part of me knows healing takes time.

I see don’t speak too soon written all over my mom’s face when she hears Dr. Geeta say visit with such confidence.  My mom too is unsure.  I am her baby and she wants to be sure, absolutely sure.  Lyme has so many ups and downs with lots of trick up its sleeve.  And she knows as well as I that the ultimate test is if I can return to school and stay healthy.  School has been where I crash the hardest.  I over do it, I am learning not to.   But I push myself, and when I push my body stresses and my health declines.  It is a cycle I have dealt with since I started getting sick.  There is just something inside that drives me and it took my doctor telling me that I would only keep getting sicker if I didn’t stop school for me to see.  With clearance I have tried several times to attend school over the years but I just didn’t have the health.  Now I do, and that is where I will see just how healthy, well, and truly recovered I really am.

I am on the road though, the road to recovery this much I know.   As I leave India I am as equally divided, as I was when this third trip began.  I miss my family and friends, and pets back home.  But I have an Indian family and friends here too.  A piece of my heart always stays here in India when I leave.  India is the place of my rebirth of sorts.  I feel I have been given such a gift, there are no words to describe, just look at me, the smile on my face says it all.  I gave a present to Dr. Geeta and the hospital too.  Nothing is as great a gift as the one I received here, though my present is what the stem cells restored to me, my heart and my soul, and my freedom of expression.

My very first trip I made a promise to Dr. Geeta.  She had heard I had a passion for art and had enjoyed painting, though I hadn’t been able to paint in some time. Dr. Geeta told me she wanted me to paint something for the hospital during my visit and she would hang it up on the wall.  I used to feel an ease with painting that had gone as the Lyme crept into my brain.  Mixing colors was so hard.  I would spend so much time mixing that the paint would dry before I could use it.  And then there were the tremors in my hands, I couldn’t make straight lines and it was so hard to even hold the brush.  I was too sick to paint that first visit.  In fact I couldn’t paint my second visit either.  This third trip though was the difference. One day, when I was out at a market with my mom, we found an art shop.  I got brushes, paints, and a big canvas.  In between physio sessions or in the afternoon when it was too hot to go out, I would sit in bed and paint.  For the first time in years it came with ease and felt like the brush was an extension of me.  I kept my painting a secret.  The sisters saw it only after my last procedure when I worked on it while lying in bed, that was it.  I showed Dr. Geeta my unfinished painting this last day. I wanted to see her face when she saw it.  Shock, surprise and a big smile ran across her face. I think she thought I had forgotten. I did well, Dr. Geeta had not heard any rumblings of my painting, a pleasant surprise.  After that I went right back to my room to paint, I had only a few hours before the flight.  I was determined. I was not leaving without finishing this painting!  I did finish and left it on Dr. Geeta’s desk. I said my goodbyes.  Before we rushed off to the airport, one of the doctors took a picture of me holding my painting.  A red dahlia, from a picture I took on a walk with my dog, one day back in California.  The bright color made me smile.  My promise I kept.