Blank Verse

Shakespeare has long been one of my favorite writers in the English language. Shakespearian verse, blank verse, is poetry, dance, and song all unified into one exquisite expression of the human experience. I love to read it. I love to hear it read. I love to see a good production of one of Shakespeare's plays.

In this context, "blank verse" has such an elegant connotation.

What I have been experiencing in the past few weeks is something quite different: not "blank verse" but "blank mind." With the lessening of each's day light, I have found myself slipping into an incrementally worse depression and fatigue. Part of it may still be residual weakness from two and a half weeks of whatever it was that produced a fever and an asthmatic cough.

However, I am also in the middle of changing doctors, and this experience has felt like a huge weight on my soul. I have had to procure the 700 plus pages of my medical records from my former doctor to take to my new doctor. They said they didn't want to pay to mail them, as it would have been too expensive. So, even though I do not have a car, I had to find a time when my daughter could pick them up for me.

This has been a blessing in disguise, though it seemed like a curse. This is my one opportunity in 25 years to make copies of my own medical records. If I request copies from their office, they will charge me 75 cents a page, which is totally prohibitive to me.

In looking through these records, I have been clobbered with depression and shock. They are downright inaccurate. There are reports from other doctors hired by my disability insurance company that don't even sound as if they ever spoke with me at all. It reads like someone else's story.

So I am tired down to the depths of my soul. After nineteen years of medical and psychiatric disability, I feel abandoned, completely alone. I feel hopeless, as these little books of false information keep being passed on from doctor to doctor.

Instead of rage or loud anger, which would require some energy, I feel a quiet despair. I am so damn tired of being sick, misunderstood, poorly treated, and lied about. I hope this terrible fatigue of the mind and heart will ease.

Tonight, when I think of "blank verse", I do not think of the beauty of Shakespearian language. Instead, I think of my inability to write anything on my blog for the past weeks. My mind is so blank, so hurt. My blank verse comes from an emptiness of the heart and a loneliness too aching for words.