The summer of 2001 had been miserable with strange all-over pain and exhaustion, with all sorts of tests to try to figure it out. The medical folks finally settled on fibromyalgia as my malady, with nothing they could offer for relief. (One did have me try an antidepressant, which made me feel worse, and getting off of it even caused troublesome side effects.)
I was on the computer the morning of September 11. Friend Jorja alerted me to turn on the TV, that something awful had happened.
Guy did go to work, just in case. The only plane in the air was Air Force One, north of Des Moines that afternoon, heading back to the US Capitol.
The doctor had diagnosed my shingles, even before the blisters appeared. I argued that I wasn’t old enough (I was 56), but he insisted he’d treated high schoolers with it. The meds didn’t help much.
I’d been accompanying Zlatka to her prenatal exams, mainly to corral her two older children. I learned that I shouldn’t be around her until the blisters dried up, that the virus that caused shingles could harm her baby, which was due within a month. I’d planned to go through labor and delivery with her (as I had for her first baby born in America two years earlier).
The blisters were gone in time, but those other miseries were part of the day Zlatka’s new baby was born. I can always figure out how old Denis is because of having shingles during the terrorist attacks right before he was born in 2001.
It’s still hard to fathom those heinous terrorist attacks, that Denis is already grown up, and that I still deal with a miserable mysterious malady all these years later.