So what is my illness trying to tell me when a tiny little tick that bit me behind my knee, actually brought me to my knees for a good three days? When I was convulsing with fever, chills, nausea, aches and pains, was there a lesson behind them all?
On the back porch of the little log cabin on the lake, even as I was peacefully reading a story from "Owning it", a Zen real-life storybook written by Perle Besserman - one was a story about a woman who had Lyme disease but was misdiagnosed as anything but, I had no idea that I myself had a tick biting through my skin. As I read in shock and horror the crippling lifetime implications of what a missed diagnosis could mean, I had no knowledge of what was happening to my own body at that time. A couple of days later, when I returned home, I found a tiny tick on my skin, didn't think much of it even then (after all, most ticks are benign), I pulled it out, and that was that. Or so I thought.
Exactly two weeks after my return from that retreat, I suddenly fell severely ill, I wondered if it had something to do with the little tick that bit me. I mean, what are the odds that the story I was reading in a Zen book (not a medical text) was actually preparing me for this moment? I hurriedly called my sister, and she agreed I couldn't afford to curl up in bed and go to sleep, but to call the doctor right away. I did. After a series of tests, the doctor concluded it was most certainly Lyme. She was happy that I had come in right away, and to have connected it to the tick bite, otherwise who knows what the rest of my story would have been. It was an amazing coming together of reading, remembering and recognition that probably saved my life. Much as I'd like to resist being melodramatic, it is true that I'm still in treatment for Lyme, but the fever has cooled, the chills have calmed, and the aches are soothed.
But what had they come to teach me? To be aware at all times? To never take my life or health for granted? To realize that I'm being protected and babied by an unknown hand? That even as I felt alone in my illness, I was never abandoned? That synchronicity is something real? They're all big lessons for me, which are also comforting at the same time. All I can say for them is a prayer of gratitude.
