The Two Kinds of Decay

The Price

Prednisone’s long-term side effects include depression and mania, weakness and fatigue, blurred vision, abdominal pain, infections, painful hips and shoulders, porous bones, acne, insomnia, weight gain, stretch marks, facial swelling, and nervousness. There are others. Those are just the ones I have.

Textbooks refer to the side effects as premature aging of the body.

The sore spots below my cheekbones make it hard to lie down without a soft pillow. I can’t lie on my side on a flat surface. I lie on my belly and rest my skull on the tip of my nose and lift my head for periodic breaks.

When I hold a long melismatic vowel, my facial muscles tire. That is, if I sing Ahhhh for a few seconds, all the little muscles around my mouth start to twitch.

I gobble calcium supplements to keep my osteopenia from turning into osteoporosis, but someday it will. I’ll break a hip and it won’t heal, and I’ll become bedridden and develop pneumonia and suffocate.

In San Francisco I met a man who was missing a big chunk of his jaw. The conversation turned to a certain type of hospital visitor. Have you considered herbal remedies? this visitor asks. Both the man and I had entertained this visitor.

Herbal remedies! They’re less toxic to me and to the earth. If I don’t live long enough to break a hip, it will be because I get cancer, an ironic side effect of Western cancer drugs.

Western medicine saved my ass, the man said. He wasn’t smiling. That’s all he or I needed to say.