Suddenly, my finger turned blue, and with a momentary sting, a shock of color, my whole life changed. The pain was over in a flash. The fingers back to their normal pink within 2 days. But the Drs visit, and the subsequent lab work, uncovered abnormalities –markers of autoimmune disease — with a lingering effect. I was referred to a rheumatologist, and as I waited for my appointment with the specialist, I started down the google-rabbit-hole to try and self diagnose what may be going on.

Endless hours of research later, I was laying in bed, arms aching from the effort of my Googling, and I started thinking about a dhamma topic that I had taken-on as self assigned homework: Find daily examples of my suffering an trace it back to a cause.  Arms throbbing, I thought about the suffering of my physical pain , and as I considered the cause, the most obvious thing popped into my head. The cause of pain is having a body. If you have a body, you will always be subject to pain, you will inevitably encounter it. This was part of the fine print, the agreement I made: I so deeply desired a birth, a body, to play in the rupa world, and with that body I got the pain that goes with it.

I thought more about it, the pain, and I realized it was a symptom. The arm pain. The finger pain. The elevated autoimmune antibodies in my blood work. The itchy spots on my nose. The recent knee sprain. The old nagging hip injury. The suffocation of an asthma attack. The fatigue and wooziness of an allergic reaction. All these are just symptoms. So what was the disease? Birth is the disease, having a body is the cause.

After days of research on lupus and connective tissue disorder (which is what elevated autoantibodies, like what my labs showed, often indicate) I started thinking about birth, having a body –about my own body — in the same dry terms as all the medical journals I had been slogging through used:

Significant morbidity. Mortality – fatal 100% of the time.

Prognosis varies by patient, with symptoms often waxing and waning, with brief remission possible, relapse inevitable. Some have a relatively stable course of illness while others have sudden ,severe, outcomes and death.

Symptomology highly individualized. With the possibility of systemic illness and organ involvement.

Muscle atrophy . Dental involvement. Weakening eyesight. Decreased lung capacity and breathing difficulty.  Excessive weight gain. Skin discoloration. High urinary frequency. Susceptible to both bacterial and viral infection.

I just kept thinking about all the issues I, and others, experience and realized that being in this body is a disease. It is, in and of itself, a state that leads to what the medical establishment calls morbidity and mortality, aka. suffering and death.

Here I am, so anxious over the imaginary future of lupus: A future of decrepitude, where I can’t enjoy life and do all that I want. Of kidney and heart involvement, early death, painful medical tests and  high healthcare costs. Morbidity and mortality. So why wasn’t I this scared of birth? When this is exactly the same prognosis of being alive and in a body. What on earth made me sign that agreement, ok the the fine print  that inevitably insured  this outcome?

I remembered something I read in one of LP Thoon’s books — that we think all this is normal. I got to wondering how exactly we all normalize death and disease and pain and considered some of the blogs I had been reading of folks who had an autoimmune disease. One woman didn’t worry about tests, or blood markers, anymore, she just cared about symptoms. Another had positive labs for years before her diagnosis — with each passing day, she worried less and less about the labs, letting them sink to the back of her mind. Till , of course one day when got sick.  In retrospect, she said she was so happy to have ‘lived a normal life’, ignoring the sings of impending trouble, while she still could.

I am sure once upon a time, these women, like me now, were in the early phases. Just getting initial labs. Just figuring out what was going on. Freaking-out, trying to imagine a new diseased life, mourning he loss of the healthy life they imagined their future selves would have.  But they adjusted, adapted, integrated this new information into a new imagined identity and future. And voilà — the true terror of their own morbidity and motility — got dulled, eventually normalized by the new routines of their life, new limitations, new imagined future.

I suppose that is it. It is the same way I ignored the disease of life when I sought out birth. I focused on the good parts. I figured I could worry about the disease later, letting it sink to the back of my thoughts till boom — a blue finger. I had factored morbidity and mortality into the equation, but only abstractly, it was a future problem (though actually it is an every moment problem). Everyone faces it. Its inevitable. With each new pain, new symptom, I adjust. I normalize. I accept he disease. But should I? Mae Neecha once said to wait, I will see, that all there is in this life is suffering. Periods of more suffering and periods of less. now I am waiting, waiting around to break and die. Seeing that life looks pretty much like a text book disease, and I am beginning to see her point.