Anne Mason | The Catasterism

Short nonfiction from the coalitionist mixed bag.

Seven sisters flee their oppressor, the mighty hunter, the predatory bear who pined to bind them in his corseted grip. They exist in the mythology of my bones, the score of my corporeal form. After hauling the globe on my shoulders, the Atlas-like burden of hustle and stress and strife and strain, an Olympian battalion of force and ferocity etch the stellar siblings into a celestial cluster of cells, there to remain in perpetuity.

An immune system run amok, revolting against its multidecadal home, charges a B-cell infantry of hungry, nerve-lusted soldiers to burrow and bore. To eat and erode. To disintegrate. Demyelinate.

Acting in an inflamed rage, the neuralogic interior is laid bare, a routed debasing, a cellular razing. As they advance from one battleground to the next, a devastation of hyperintensities are left in their stead, neuronal scarring that the doctors refer to as Black Holes.

One cannot witness the despoliation with the naked eye. I tell you, it is cruel to labor towards some semblance of perceived normalcy when moving through life under the hold of an invisible disease. Peer closer and you might observe the refugee survivors of fatigue and flushing and footdrop, but you will never lay eyes on the burning, blurring, pricking, tingling, slashing, sleeping, waking, chilling, vibrating frostburn pins and needles of constant chronic pain, of the medicalese hypersensitivity, of spasticity and ocular degeneration.

Encase me in a capsuled magnet. Glide me through the humming, clanging contraption, and the inner galaxy of a diseased central nervous system comes into view. A septenary string of lesions along the cervical spine, the internal evidence of early illness relapse, are joined by constellations of plaques, marring in the temporal lobe, parietal lobe, occipital and frontal lobes, medulla, brainstem, cervical spinal cord, middle cerebellar peduncle, posterior fossa, periventricular white matter, subcortical white matter, craniocervical junction – all peppered throughout, scattered across the brain and upper spine.

More scleroses than one can comprehend. More wreckage. More rubble. More ruin.

But the cosmos are within us. We are such things as dreams are made of. We are composed of stardust.
So I traverse the blasted neurological terrain, rebuilding neural networks, relaying pathways, reclaiming itinera, following the neuronic road to a newly formulated nexus; and I incorporate the scars, my seven sisters, my personal pleiades and their ever-expanding panoply of multiple sclerosis kin, all glittering outward, shimmering upward into a limitless universe, an Elysian Field vaster and more wondrous than we may ever humanly fathom.

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ANNE MASON is a life writer, theatre artist, and creative consultant who is passionate about transforming skills and lessons from within the theatre sphere into tools for all facets of community, industry, and humanity. She was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 2014 and strives to turn her experience into lessons of hope and resiliency. When Anne isn’t at the theatre, she can be found reading, enjoying the outdoors, communing at coffee shops, or solving (and creating!) crossword puzzles. Anne lives in Laramie with her cat, Orange Julius Caesar. Connect with Anne: @annecatharine89 – acmcreativeconsulting.com