Reading my Book in the Sun

My book is here! So is Spring! Finally!

To capitalize on the happy arrival of both, I set up a lawn chair in the back yard, loaded my book onto a Kindle and read the whole thing, sitting in the sunshine.

As a writer, I got to tell you, it was a good feeling. Especially the sunshine part, the good weather has been a long time coming!

Reading my whole book from beginning to end was an interesting experience. Writing is necessarily a slower process than reading. A writer can spend fifteen minutes constructing a paragraph that a reader eats up in seconds.

Experiencing my book like a reader was so different. The thing I was most struck by was the following duality:

So much happened! So much changed!

And

Nothing happened. I can’t believe how many years it took to get well.

I think that sums up mercury detox. It’s one of the longest treatments for any condition I’ve heard of. Longest, of course, besides conditions that last forever and need a lifetime of care.

Is there any other disease out there like this, where you could expect to implement a two- or three-year treatment plan? A plan that eventually results in a full recovery?

If there is one like this, I want to hear about it. I want to know how people with these conditions keep themselves going, how they manage their lives through the long years of illness. How they keep the faith that their normal life will be returned to them.

Because that was what struck me in this reading of my book. How tenaciously I stuck to the program, how strongly I believed that it would work.

Progress was extremely slow. Mercury chelation is the longest, slowest, most drawn-out miracle cure in the world. But I stuck with it and in the end I was rewarded.

The years of mercury winter ended and I got my miraculous Spring. I can enjoy my days sitting out in the long-awaited sun.