Nausea and Fossilization

Afternoons of anger, and something unnamed, bordering on
self-pity. A few days ago under anaesthesia, etherized on the table,
for the removal of three large calculi, accretional soma-made stones,
from the bladder. They go up the dick with a tube, a camera and a laser,
suck out the small ones, break up the big one and suck that out too.
The proper word is aspirate. As though breathing in, breathing out,
ice fragments up a straw. The urologist saying it all went very well,
nonetheless, you pee blood for a few days, then the painkiller
specific to the urinary tract makes you pee orange for a few more days.
Back home, outpatient surgery although you spent most of the day
wearing a backless smock and a wristband with name and allergies listed,
the worst headache in years, probably from drug and anaesthesia
interactions, mind fogged by the general painkillers, antibiotics,
and loopy with logorrhea. Called a friend to tell him all went well,
entertained him for an hour with being wacky from the drugs.
Days later, still feel like crap. Hurts less. No more narcotics, those make
you nauseous at the best of times. The stress of the day stacked up
against the ongoing chronic illness making that worse, making the recovery
that much slower. Lose another week to this, when all instinct is to
resist and work to get better. Brain foggy, body restless, too tired
to actually do anything, tried working in the garden, fruitless, frustrated
and ready for nothing. So it goes.
Now the storm outside reflects the storm that was within, that passed out
with the expelling of stones, moving out of the flesh into air,
hard wind rain and tornadoes down south feeling just what you felt
a couple of days ago, acting out on the grand scale. If only psychology
was so refractive. Traces of bones in the ground. Deer ate the tops off
the newly sprouted tulips. Stigma of snow against wind-riven spruce.
How long does it take to get your life back? Seems longer every day,
every time you look at it. Endless regression of endpoint, Zeno's receding
goal. Now its going to take even longer to recover, to get your life back.
This surgery only a foretaste of what's to come. Some part wishes you'd
been able to keep the removed bladderstones in a lucite tube, little stones
made in your body, like concretions and geodes. Your bladder a flexing geode.
Chances are, there will be other stones. Never going to be able to drink
enough water to prevent it. So they'll monitor. Every so often another scan
just to check where you're geologically active. Kidneys or elsewhere,
your own body a sedimentary shore where laminae are being laid down.
If you bend and fold in the right directions, the yoga of orogeny,
the laminae will soundlessly crack and be spat out, burning only somewhat.
Like a lost tooth kept in a jar. Little handmade boxes, filled with tiny models
of what could be called art. Puzzle-boxes to open and marvel over. Small traps
for the eyes of the unwilling. Cemented self-stones set inside like lotus jewels
of enlightenment. Or at least a box for forgetting.
A crystal growing inside the skin. Flesh becoming stone, calcifying,
limestone, dolomite, pillars of salt, we all turn into salt plumes
when the sun raids. Becoming stone inside. Legs ache from this running on.
When the calcification encounters epidermis you being to marbleize, statued,
someday rediscovered as cave-bacon within your own earth,
your permanent shelter underhill.