as earth tilts towards sun, where I live

Tomorrow morning I begin a new stage of chemical treatments. I'd hoped to postpone beginning the long road of antibiotic and aggressive pharmaceuticals to give me a fighting chance against entrenched Lyme spirochetes.

After decades of illness and massive pharmacological interventions, eating food and drinking liquids is already a constant challenge, dawn-to-dark. So my doctor has guided me through early treatment using powerful herbal-based medicines to see if I could tolerate them. I could not.

After many years of being treated so arrogantly and cruelly by medical authority, I had demanded a moratorium on invasive diagnostic testing and pharmaceutical rule-outs. I was searching for science--not psychologizing drawn from the polluted well of prejudice.

Now that I have a doctor who respects me as a member of my own health team, and am proceeding along the path of evidence-based care, I can appreciate the art she also brings to my struggle for quality of life.

I've spent the last weeks before treatment archiving all the photographs from the last year at the Community Darkrooms here in Syracuse. For just the cost of milliliters of ink, I was able to work in the comfort of darkness with mentors and use my own rolls of paper to print on large-scale Epson equipment.

I've used my flickr photostream albums in cyberspace to organize my printed photographs and to facilitate labeling and archiving. I have at least 30 photos I didn't upload last year.

So as I begin pharmaceutical hibernation, in which treatments will escalate by the week, my goal is to post one of the photos each morning (U.S. Eastern Standard Time), in a non-narrative order on my blog and flickr it up at the same time. I will only post one photo a week to facebook , myspace and twitter.

It's a good time to just post photos because I've temporarily lost my typography tools for type line breaks; rags, skews.

If you'd like to find your way back to see the new photos, you'll find the button to follow this blog on the sidebar.