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.

'walled in'

click photo:

'walled in'





On January 1, 2010 (by the calendar that rules where I live on this planet)--I am beginning Round 3 of anti-malarial medications.



I'm in late stages of three tick-borne diseases which went undiagnosed and untreated for more than 30 years: Lyme, Bartonella and Babesiosis (sometimes characterized as the malaria of the Northeast United States. because the organism is so similar and the treatment is the same).



For me, treatment is a challenge. As the tick-borne diseases went undiagnosed, I was prescribed so many antibiotics and other powerful pharmaceuticals to fight off life-threatening secondary infections and medical conditions that now it's hard for me to tolerate those medications, at a time when I need them.




I had to stop the first two rounds of anti-malarial medications because of excruciating permanent damage to my ears and hearing. I am beginning a more aggressive pharmaceutical treatment now, shortly after winter Solstice (where I live on this planet).




I'm just at the very beginning of this battle. The diseases, symptoms and treatments keep me at home and impact greatly on my ability to communicate. I still have many, many unread messages since I was finally felled by illness in October 2007. But reading and writing has become increasingly more difficult.




However, over the course of my lifetime I've developed skills to care for my self and to struggle to stay alive in a violently hostile, profit-driven economic system, or else I would not have survived this long.




Most of my work now is through photographic labor, using an area of my brain that is a less painful work space. You can view my photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/transgenderwarrior/sets/




Thanks to Torry Mendoza [http://www.torrymendoza.com/about.html] I now also have the ability to blog directly with you. If I can get my sea legs in anti-malarial treatment, my goal is to blog a photo every day. I follow flickr community guidelines, which means that photos re-posted online include a link back to their site on flickr: All of my photos are my personal gift to you via Creative Commons copyright: attribution, non-commercial, non-derivative.




I hope my photographs will bridge distance and language--spoken and signed--and build connection.




Check back here for updates or click on the "follow" button in the right-hand column. I look forward to connecting with your thinking on your blog, as well!