Testing my powers
How it is to feel well
I have been waking before my alarm for weeks now, before 6am, to birdsong and light. I’ve gotten up, driven to the beach to swim, gone on a run, or done a quiet weight class in our spare room.
I am shocked by my own energy. Usually I tell people that—left to its own devices—my body would sleep past 8am, maybe until 9am, nearly every day. Usually I wake groggy and hungry, weak.
There is a temperature signal that makes the fiddler crabs burrow up out of the sand in the marsh, where they have slept all winter. When the sea reaches 58°F, they appear in ranks, covering the sand at low tide as we walk through the dunes to swim in the harbor.
Our open water swimming group swells at this time too, welcoming back the members who wintered on dry land, in pools, or along warmer coastlines. One week we are just a small party, picking our way over empty sand, swimming over a vacant harbor bed. The next we are a dozen or more, walking through an ecosystem that is visibly alive. The crabs shift before us like dancers, parting to avoid our footfall. Horseshoe crabs couple in the shallows. Underwater, schools of minnows flash in the light as they turn. Almost out of sight, gurnards and stripers flick their fins, watching us.
I am used to rationing my energy, to coming home from work with my brain like a grapefruit squeezed to stringy pulp, restricting myself to making easy dinners on the nights when I cook. My body often tells me I’ve done too much, long before the rest of me is ready to quit. Chris heats me a deep mug of chicken broth and I retreat to the sofa.
I have Crohn’s disease, which is primarily a condition of inflammation. It can cause my intestines to self-destruct, to swell and scar, making it hard for food to pass through. My primary symptoms are stomach pain and fatigue.
On the day the fiddler crabs emerge we are swimming out of the harbor with the tide. The water is warming up, but the day is overcast and windy, so I am still wearing all of my winter gear. The inner harbor is choppy, small whitecaps splashing our faces as we breathe. By the time we reach the first turn I am overheating, fantasizing about peeling off all these layers, even though the swim is not even a quarter done. When we pause at the jetty that marks the harbor exit, my mittens go into a friend’s dry bag and I stir the water with newly-freed hands, exulting in the coolness.
People ask if I’m feeling well because I spent the winter cold plunging. Or maybe it’s the nourishing properties of fermented foods, my relatively new kombucha habit, all the loaves of sourdough I’ve baked and consumed.
I want to brightly agree. When I am feeling well, I experience a kind of optimistic amnesia. The memory of exhaustion fades.
But I’m also on a new medication, on top of a medication I’ve been on for five years, which replaced another I was on for seven years. All of these are classified as biologics, a class of medications for which pharmacies charge my insurance $10,000 to $20,000 for each injection or infusion. Because I have insurance, I pay $5. There are troubling comparisons of how much less these medications cost in other countries.
It would be nice if I just needed better gut microbes, accessible by my own fermentation practices. But I live in constant awareness that my remission is underpinned by a costly contingency.
After I stow my mittens, somebody suggests that the wind is right for swimming to a red bell buoy, off shore in Buzzard’s Bay. We’ve talked about swimming to it before, but in the winter we hug the coastline for safety and in the summer there is boat traffic actually using the buoy for navigation. We also have dominant southwest winds, which would make a return to shore difficult on most days.
Today we have a northerly wind, we are all feeling warm, and there are no boats in sight.
We launch from the rocky shallows beside the jetty, swimming in a tight pack, sighting on the buoy. Before long, I lose sight of the bottom, the water is opaque, aerated green. Away from shore the sea tastes fresher than it did in the harbor. We are only swimming a few hundred yards beyond our usual course but the swells are deeper and the bay feels vast and unpredictable.
We begin to spread out. I count my companions, waiting for a sight of their caps, as they dip in and out of view. A low fog blows across the surface of the water.
Then, I am alone, for all practical purposes. I can still see everyone, but it’s too far to shout. I begin to fear the depth.
It’s an old fear, this horror of the unknown. My body keeps moving forward, stroking, breathing, sighting, but another part of me wonders if I should just roll onto my back and scream. I imagine hyperventilating, crying, thrashing. The buoy doesn’t seem any closer than when we started out.
Because I know my energy may not last, because the last decade has been crossed with physical exhaustion and punctuated by grief, I am greedy to do everything. To write, this writing for myself, which is something that has seemed impossible for years. I stretch the weekends to their edges, making my days a constant succession of swimming, gardening, snacks and drinks with friends, long walks with the dogs, impromptu dinners out on the back patio.
I am the last one to reach the buoy. It is taller and wider than I expected, maybe seven feet above the water, high above all our heads as we surround it. It rolls up and down with the swells revealing a barnacled water line. The bell is clanging, at an interval set by wave, and I think of sailors navigating in fog, listening for this sound.
One friend tries to climb up onto the buoy itself, but cannot get his footing. Another turns to me and confesses that this is much deeper than she reckoned when we set out. “I’ve just been swimming to myself, thinking, this is fine, this is fine.”
I am so awake, in this early summer. It is like I am one of the plants in the garden, newly green, drinking up sunlight, stretching out my leaves, growing overnight.
Sometimes I stop, marveling at everything I’ve been able to do. But other times I feel like a child who played through nap time, and am suddenly unable to cope. I become irritable and snappish towards Chris, overwhelmed and resentful about the same plans I blithely made. I may feel strong, but I have to learn how to feed this new energy. What does it want? A chance to test its powers? A long nap in the hammock?
We turn towards shore, sighting on a tall house I’ve never noticed before, a little further north than our destination, expecting to be pushed south as we cross the wind. When I reach the familiar rocks near shore, and enter the long stretch of sand that marks the finish of our swim, my body floods with relief.
A few days later, I rinse my winter gear for good and hang it in the basement to dry. Chris and I open our outdoor shower. I meet friends at sunset to play in the surf. Terns dip into the waves around us, the sky glows red across the water.
I stop worrying I will get cold. I lie back and let my head rest in the water. It is warm enough now to float.
I cried because your newfound wellness gives me hope for mine
This is wonderful. And terrifying. My heart sped up.