A Writer's Life Interrupted--Invisible Illness Week #invisibleillness

There's a week for everything, right? And this week/month is for invisible illness'. I have a couple of them myself. Let's see:

1. Crohn's Disease--An autoimmune inflammatory disease
2. Diabetes--My pancreas is a tad damaged from all the meds I take/took.  However, I must add that I no longer need medication as long as I stay away from carbs.
3. Crohn's Arthritis and other related autoimmune disorders that come with the disease.

I think everyone suffers from an invisible illness. Some people have anxiety, depression, panic attacks, or maybe MS or Lupus or UC or another autoimmune disease. Maybe we have PTSD from a difficult childhood, war, or witnessing something horrific. I think as human beings we all subscribe to something, don't you?

Which leads me to wonder why we're not a more compassionate species. 

I don't know about you, but I was raised to suck it up. You don't complain. Ever.

So I didn't. I guess that's why it took them twenty years to diagnose me. When I went to the docs everything was fine, even if I was up half the night vomiting. Even if I had lost 35 pounds in three months. It wasn't until I hardly had any blood left in me that I finally admitted I needed help. By that time, diagnosis was a piece of cake.

Because this is Invisible Illness Week/Month, I'm suppose to share something with you that you don't know. Since that is almost everything, I thought I'd pick a recent happening that surprised me and left me with a better outlook on life than I had a month ago.

---

Meet Boo. He moved in with us about four weeks ago. He's a full grown Mountain Blue Jay who thinks I'm his mother.

No, seriously.

I mean it, stop laughing.

He sits on my shoulder, on the top of my head, and perches on my finger, squawking at me while I dole out tiny pinches of white bread shaped like a ball into his opened mouth. I tried to get a picture of it, but I dropped the phone. Luckily, I didn't break it.

He takes the tiny bits of bread and stores them in his mouth. When he's filled up, he flies up to the wind chimes and drops the bread through the metal chimes. Sometimes he notices the food fall out the other end and sometimes he doesn't. When he does see it, he grabs the bread and hides it:

1. In the umbrella (the tiny pockets of folded material where the tines go in).
2. In my hanging planter (it's made of rushes so he has a great time pulling out the rushes and shoving the bread in).
3. Under my arm. (Yes, I said under my arm. Stupid bird.)
4. Between my fingers (did I mention he was dumb)?
5. Up in the trees. Why he will sometimes do what a bird is suppose to do baffles me. My husband thinks he is brain damaged.

If I am in the kitchen, Boo grabs the kitchen window screen and squawks at me until I go out onto the deck. If I'm in the bedroom he grabs the bedroom screen and squawks at me. I have to lower the blinds to change my clothes. And, we won't even talk about what he's doing to the screen door out to the deck from the kitchen where I spend most of my time.

Our deck is on the second story so I'm thinking maybe he thinks he's in a tree and we're just visiting. That said, he's quite specific about who he wants to feed him. I can leave whole slices of bread on the picnic table, but he'll just stand next to it and squawk until I feed him. He knows perfectly well how to eat on his own, but refuses to do so.

Then I was thinking that maybe someone raised him, which seems like the most logical conclusion, but as far as I know no one is looking for him. And while he is very affectionate with me, he isn't with anyone else. I've never been adopted by a bird before but it's rather nice.

He says good-bye to me in the morning, stops in to see my husband around lunch time though he won't eat, and is waiting for me when I get home. Boo is a Mountain Jay and shouldn't be in our area. He should be higher in the mountains. We have Scrub Jays which squawk just as loud, but don't have a dust mop on top of their heads.

I worry he won't find a girlfriend come spring, then worry some cat will get him. He or I guess it could even be a she, has no problem with our dogs. Of course they are both quite old and hardly able to get around. Maybe he senses it.

My husband says I worry too much.

Still, I do love the little critter and will miss him when he's gone. The other day I was feeding the baby deer (they still have their spots) when Boo drifted down from the treetops onto my shoulder. (I thought my next door neighbor was going to faint.) I swear I felt like Mother Nature.

It was a great feeling. So peaceful and beautiful to be with animals that harm no one. Unlike many human beings.

*sigh*

(((hugs)))

Louann

---