Every Twelve Hours

A short reflection on "body prayer," stillness, and counting hope one drip at a time.

In one of the classes for the spiritual direction certification program I am undertaking this year and next, we explore a different mode of prayer each week. This week was “body prayer” wherein we were to “consider the many ways you can pray with an awareness of being physically in your body. Try to pray in a way that is different than you have prayed in the past.”

I followed the instructions and then, as requested, wrote about the experience. I thought I’d share it with you, too.

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Today, I am 41 days into a 60-day intensive treatment to hopefully put the chronic disease the doctors believe I've had most of my life, the one that presently has no known cure, into permanent remission. I take extremely high-dose antibiotics through a PICC line inserted through my right bicep that runs to the ante-chamber of the right ventricle of my heart, by IV and push-syringe, twice a day.

Once every 12 hours. 

During this treatment, I am not allowed to sweat or exercise or lift anything heavier than a half-gallon of milk or do any repetitive motion for any extended period of time with my right arm. And I am right handed.

So, rather than hiking and working out, doing Pilates or stretching or even picking the last fruit from our fig tree, or packing boxes of books and clothes to give away, or stacking firewood or vigorously folding laundry, I am sitting still.

I've been sitting still for 41 days. For three or four hours of each of those days, I have prepared and administered the IV treatments. I’ve watched for bubbles in the line and flicked at them to make them go away. And the time has passed, and continues to pass, in literal drips. 

This is the last step in a protocol of treatment that began in the summer of 2021. After this, It is complete and I should be well.

And all shall be well

And all shall be well

And all manner of thing

Shall be well …

As I sit still, yearning to stroll and do all the normal things my body is used to doing, I am keenly conscious of what's happening to my physical person — what the medicine is meant to do and that we hope (and pray) it is actually doing, what the treatments before this for two-and-a-half years have done to rebuild my immune system from nonfunctioning to something approximating robust.

Dozens of immunoglobulin infusions and countless fistfuls of supplements, a radical change of diet and lifestyle, careful attention paid to everything that goes into, onto, and around my body and even my mind, as stress and anxiety exacerbate the disease more than almost anything else.

Each adjustment, small and large, is an act of defiant, stubborn hope that the supposedly incurable is perhaps not. Nearly all of the debilitating pain I’d had on and off for 15 years is gone. When I'm not taking Napalm-levels of antibiotics, I have loads more energy in my 50s than I had in my 40s, my mood is largely stable, and I feel ... something more than optimistic.

Sanguine. That’s the word.

I'm tired a lot these days, but that's just the medicine. It's doing its job, they tell me. I believe it is. 

In a few minutes, as the last drips have dropped from the IV bag into the tubing that runs into my arm toward the narthex of my heart, I will disconnect and disinfect, wiping down the tubes, flushing the line, coiling up the tail of the PICC line and tucking it under a special cotton sleeve that makes it look like I'm in perpetual mourning. 

But I'm not. I am alive. And champing at the bit to get back to kicking and living at high volume.

For now and the next 19 days, every alcohol swab, each drip, every hour spent in stillness with medicine making its way through my system, is a prayer. Of thanksgiving and hope, fierce grace and a strange kind of joy. Soon I won't be still, and life will continue with my body carrying me on the journey where every breath and every step is a shout of Hallelujah followed by a whisper —

Selah.