Expecto Patronum!

Well, I ended up in the emergency room last night because I had a UTI and my kidneys were throbbing with pain. Now I am on a long course of Ciprofloxacin, the powerful antibiotic often criticized by my friends and colleagues in the world of natural medicine for being like a bomb that wipes out all of the good intestinal and vaginal flora along with the "bad". Each time I get a UTI it progresses faster and faster.

Being sick is always so utterly shocking, because it makes me think about death. Last night, walking home from town, I thought about the people who died from e-coli in their spinach. What if I have some sort of antibiotic resistant infection, I thought, and it spreads into my bloodstream, and they put me on an IV but it doesn't work and my kidneys fail and I die? Well, Lenya, you'll just have to be at peace with the life you have lived. Don't ask for anything more. "When the doors of perception are cleansed, everything appears to Lenya as it is - infinite." William Blake said that. Its good to reflect on death.

Yes, its good to reflect on death. I even had a dream last night in which Death came to me in the form of a person. He was skinny and blonde, quite polite and a pleasure to be around. I was given the task of showing him around Montreal. We went to the theater. Thank goodness for dreams.