Mother-in-law's tongue (Saint George’s sword)

I am home, in my living room. Women in the 1800s, laced at the waist, silk dresses. Longing for breath. Mother-in-law's tongue on the window sill. Bars for insight and view. Bored. BORED.

Maybe you have not accepted the disease, he says, she says. As a mantra, the word is used in health care, implying: you have not accepted the realities.

 The doctor sees. The nurses see. They see models. Different phases to go through, and then come out at the other end and recite: I accept. Then you are admitted as a member of an agreed sect.

 I have not been ashamed to sit in a sauna without a breast, that I did not managed get up from a bathtub, that my face has changed or that it smelled of inflamed wounds. The only time I felt ashamed of illness was after confrontation with the word ACCEPT.

 You said I wanted too much. Worked too much. I sat on the other side of the table. Small. Steps in linoleum-covered hallways. Mine. Resonated. Heavy thoughts. Red-yellow oak leaves. Autumn for comfort.

 Tell me what you do to master it all, the nurse could ask, there are many like you, she might continue, I'm curious how you fix it. Illness is boring, I would answer. I'm inventive about how to get things done, despite it all. She did not ask. No one else did either. There is not much interest in the individual experience of how disease is experienced and mastered.

 To maintain a kind of meaning, I write in my diary, on notes after I go to bed, sentences in the waiting room of the heart ward. I do not quite know why I write, or why it helps. To maintain my own self-understanding perhaps?

 I see an elf from the other side of the Atlantic, in the window sill, halfway behind a mother-in-law's tongue. Hey, he says. Hi, I say. It is more important to know which person has the disease than what disease the person has.

That was fine, I answer. Not I who invented it, but Hippocrates. Maybe you can remind doctors of that?