“Three Windows Into Illness” by Amy DeBellis
Three Windows Into Illness
I get off the phone with my specialist and cry. It’s an ugly cry, with the mucus sticking thick in the back of my throat and my eyes growing red and small, turning into raisins stuck in the expanding bread-dough of my face. A swollen face — because nothing ever drains when you’re lying flat on your back most of the time — is just one component of what I call the Uglification Process of my being bed-bound. (There’s also the loose, crepe-y skin from drastic muscle loss. And my lower legs, once heavily-muscled, at this point nothing but hairy sticks.)
I’m crying because my specialist has told me she doesn’t see any hope for the treatments they’re trialing right now. It was my fault. I asked her. I shouldn’t have asked her.
People talk a lot about acceptance. I’m trying, but sometimes it feels like I am being asked, over and over again, to accept the sorts of things that most people wouldn’t dream of in their worst nightmares. Like, okay. I have already accepted that I will never be well again. I will never again smash out ten consecutive chin-ups on the bars at Central Park; I will never again rollerblade all the way around the six-mile bike loop. Soon after I turned twenty-five, that chapter of my life closed for good. I get it.
But it’s much harder to accept that I will be bed-bound for, probably, the rest of my life. A life that, judging by the prodigious lifespans of some of my family members, I’m not even a third of the way through. How does someone accept that? It’s like a riddle I can’t answer. The kind of riddle that someone asks you in a dream and you wake up not remembering the dream, let alone the riddle, but all day you go about as if caught in a thick mist, unable to disperse the feeling of panic at the back of your throat. Haunted by something you can’t put words to.
*
I must have tried dozens of supplements and vitamins and prescription medications over the last few years. The sheer number of them is staggering. Not just the cost and the wasted energy and the expectations but the physical weight of the pills themselves, all rattling around in their bottles like joints, like little bones, like phalanges and metacarpals, all cracking and snapping because what else is there to do in bed all day other than crack, crack, crack your various joints, like your neck and your back and your hipbones — I even learned how to crack my toe-knuckles, that’s a fun party trick for a party I’ll never be invited to —
I can’t even imagine parties. Only landfills. Because, when I imagine all those pills that never helped me, I picture all their containers in a landfill somewhere, towers of empty bottles reaching, reaching, collapsing towards the sky.
*
Day sevenhundredandsomething spent in a dark bedroom. It takes some effort, but I finally manage to crack open the window. Cold air seeps in, smelling of frost and fir and mountains. I lay back on my pillow and close my eyes and imagine frost settling over my face, freezing my skin, turning it into a glittering mass of crystals. My whole body encased in a rough diamond shell.
What would I do then? Perhaps I’d find some vulnerability in that hardness, a brittle fracture begging to break. I’d split my cold skin open, millimeter by millimeter, and step out of it. I picture my new self — whatever form it takes — emerging sunlit into a dusty room. My old body an empty carapace, falling apart behind me.
Amy DeBellis
Amy DeBellis is a writer from New York. Her writing has appeared in various publications, including X-R-A-Y, Pithead Chapel, HAD, Write or Die, Fractured, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and The Pinch. Her debut novel is forthcoming from CLASH Books (2025). Read more at amydebellis.com.
Headshot: Amy DeBellis
Photo Credit: Staff