Shy Malaise

Your ovaries probably have a cyst. Or a couple of them. The shooting midnight jabs of pain you feel below the abdomen. Yeah, that. Cyst they say. Very common. Oh you would feel rather left out if you don't have one of those.

Or it could be the bloody appendix. All that oil and ajinomoto and refined flour is going to show up someday. Because sometimes that jab of pain is toward the right. Sometimes, the left. You can never be sure what is wrong with you. You can sit and brood. And get a few scans done. But nothing ever shows up.

No concrete sign of illness. But you know not all is well. There is something wrong with some organ. Something is unhinging somewhere. Somewhere the blood is choking. But you can't ever know what. You live in pain. Dreading a malaise, but too shy to confess.

Then there's the head. The brain. The channels and tubes that connect the eyes, the nose, the ears and throat. Something is definitely up with that. There is a casual pain in there somewhere always. There is migraine, the unforgiving friend of everywoman. Or spondylitis.

Enough of pills have been swallowed over months. Strips and boxes of them, yellow, red, white and off white, oval, circular, tubular, have been downed with tiny sips of water. Before and after meals. With neatly memorised instructions. Also blood drawn in syringes tested numerous times for lipids et al. And x-rays of heads, searches for the sinus. And so and forth.

But the pain always does come resurface. After a few days, as and when it feels like. Without warning. Without fear of retribution.

This malaise demands to be endured. And to top it all, one dreamed on a recent night that one was dead. Dreaming about one's own death. I wonder what that's called. And more than that, the realisation on waking up, That. Indeed. One. Is. Alive. What is that called?