Whatever Held

The treatment gave me flu-like symptoms that lived in my whole body, that deep, systemic ache where there’s nowhere to put yourself and nothing to press against. Warm water helped. That was it. That was the whole medicine that actually worked.

So, I constantly took baths. I’d fill the tub, get in and wait, and after a few minutes there’d be this moment where the aching settled, not gone, but
lowered, like something loosening its grip a notch. I’d stay in there a long time chasing that. Refilling it when it cooled. Some stretches of that year, the tub is where I spent most of my good minutes. It was the one place I got relief. It held me when nothing else did.

And then treatment ended, and I never took a bath again. Not a taper or a decision. A hard stop. I don’t remember a last one. I didn’t know it was the last one. I just came out the other side of that year and discovered that I was a person who takes only showers now.

It’s been years. I still don’t get in. I’ve thought about why, and here’s what I’ve landed on. A bathtub is a trapping situation. You’re submerged. Contained. Slow to get out of. You have to climb, wet, out of a thing you’re lying down inside of. And trapping situations are exactly what I can’t do anymore. No planes, no high mountain roads or bridges, no high-rise buildings, no small spaces, no bathtubs… That’s the remains of me now. Hyper aware. Checking things and checking them again. Extremely risk-avoidant, in a way I’d have found ridiculous in my twenties. Steering, constantly and mostly invisibly, around anything I can’t get out of quickly.

So the tub isn’t ruined because something bad happened in it. Nothing bad happened in it. The tub was good and merciful. It’s ruined because it was there. It soaked up that whole year, held every hour of it, and now it carries all of it on its back. And because the position it asks of me, still, submerged, contained, unable to leave fast is the exact posture I spent over a year unable to escape. The thing that held me and the thing I can’t tolerate turn out to be the same.

Doctors went the same way, in their own fashion.
At first I over-corrected, appointments constantly, checking everything, chasing every signal my body sent. Then I swung hard the other direction and couldn’t make myself go at all. I eventually hired a concierge doctor. Not for luxury. For a door I could actually walk through. Someone I could ease back toward medicine with, on terms where I wasn’t waiting in a crowded room full of strangers to be told something. I had to build myself a ramp back to ordinary care, because the ordinary way in had closed.
That’s the part nobody tells you about surviving something. The surviving isn’t the end of it. You come out the other side, and you’re alive, and everyone is relieved for a little while, and you quietly spend the next decades renegotiating with rooms and chairs and waiting and
water.

People sometimes suggest I should take a bath again. They mean it kindly as though the tub is a small, fixable thing, a nice idea I’ve simply overlooked. Wouldn’t that be relaxing.

I don’t want to.

That’s it. That’s the whole answer. Not I’m not ready yet. Not maybe someday, when I’ve worked through it. I don’t want to, and I’ve stopped treating that as a problem to be solved. For one terrible year I was held by something, and then I couldn’t be held by it anymore, and both of those came from the same place. I don’t need to go back and prove I can.
There’s nothing in that water for me now.