Saturday Night Ritual

I have a little black box that goes everywhere that I do. It gets tossed in my purse and jammed in my rucksack, hassled by the water bottle I hope does not leak, and buried under textbooks, lunch, and extra socks I take with my on rainy days. Gold writing sparkles on the top, while the bottom is covered in shinny teddy bears and ladybugs. It is my little black box, and it means nothing and everything to me. I need it, yet I hate it. Perhaps need and hate are not always separable.

Every Saturday night I refill my pillbox. Faithfully I put 42 pills into it, 14 chalky white, 28 foul smelling orange. The gold writing labeling the week days and times is peeling off. The stickers are out of place. I knew when I placed theme that they did not belong on a pill box, but I stuck them on anyways, glad for anything childish and innocent surrounding the pills I take in an attempt to kill my bone infection. When I chuck it in my rucksack I am glad that it's many lids are sealed shut not because I fear a leaking water bottle ruining some trinket, but because the water would ruin a weeks worth of medication. If I get better I will by a little black treasure chest with gold corners, and keep teddy bears and ladybugs in it, but until the day that I am 'cured' arrives, I will faithfully fill my little black box with 42 pills, 14 chalky white, 28 foul smelling.

I used to love my Saturday night ritual. I thought that every week I refilled my pill box meant one week closer to being better. Once a week, every weekend, for four weeks I would put three pills into each small compartment, all fourteen of them, on the fifth weekend I would go to the pharmacy to get a refill, and every two months I would ask my infectious disease specialist for a new prescription. I thought that every week marked a milestone. My ritual excited me, it gave me control over the thing that would kill the nasty inside me which I alone could not control. But then the second MRI results showed no healing, then the thirds MRI results showed only minimal healing, and then my doctors fought over whether they should remove the dead bone or not. The year the infectious disease specialist talked about started to turn into longer, possibly two years, possibly and unknown amount of time. One week no longer counted to an ultimate goal that fit into a neat time span, it just became one more in an already endless string of week after week. Every week I wait anxiously for those ten minutes in which I filled my little box, my ten minutes in control, and then I spend the rest of the week feeling helpless and held captive by the routine of my pills, agonizing, waiting for the next Saturday night. My ritual became a sadistic one.

Sometimes I am angry with my pills. Imagine that, me being angry at a little orange tablet! Enraged that I have to take it, that my friends and classmates don't. I do not like taking my pills at the start of a class or seminar, because school interferes with my medication schedule, with every staring at me. I do not like people asking why I need pills, or people who assume that because I walk around campus that bone infections are not serious or painful. Sometimes I think of forgetting my little box at home, forgetting to take the orange and the white, and just letting the nasty win. Sometimes I think that it would be easier to just give in to something that my doctors and I might not be able to cure. I hate refills, can't stand being told every time I get more pills how to take them, feel hassled when the pharmacy has given me to few pills and I have to go back. I am disgusted that I have had so many refills that by simply looking at the bottle I can tell if there are enough pills or not. I want the little bastards to cure my in seven days like they would a UTI.

How can I be angry at something that is in me? Something I so want to rip out of my body? Throughout my life I have heard many people say how important it is to embrace who you are... Is chronic osteomyelitis part of who I am? Will I be transform me into a stronger, kinder, more compassionate and patient person once this infection is gone, or are those things I become throughout the process, not just the end product? Would I learn all those things if I didn't have something wrong with me? Or was the basis for those traits already in me, and this nasty just let them grow? I don't understand how I can be so happy with myself yet so hateful of something inside of me.

On a side note, I still act naive sometimes. I have stuck teddy bear stickers to my pill box. I have pretend conversations with my pills to amuse my mother and friends e.g.,  Me: I'm going to eat you, oh yes I am, yes I am. Pill: No, No, please don't! Sulfatrim companions, save me! NOOO! (in a squeaky voice). I am making a castle out of all the pill bottles I have - *shockingly* you collect quite a lot of them after seven months of antibiotic treatment. Like a child would, I even attempt to skip doses...although common sense always sets in - I have yet to miss a dose. My little black box has become what a blanky or favorite toy or stuffed animal is to a child. I panic if I think I have forgotten it, roughly rummaging through my bag until I find it and then cherishing it (while also hating it) even more. And I have grown a wee bit sentimental. When, not if (I know that it could be an 'if' but for the sake of my sanity lets pretend that 'if' is not an options), I am better I will buy a little black treasure chest with gold corners, and keep teddy bears inside of it.