Shaking the Family Tree

So I have this thing. It's called pleurisy. Basically, pleurisy is when you have an infection in the lining of your lungs, so that when you breathe, the pleura kind of pulls away from the rest of the lung. It results in a stabbing feeling every time you inhale. For reals. It's like getting stabbed with a knife, in your lung, every time you inhale. You can try to keep your breaths really shallow to avoid it, but you also can't sustain that for a long time, so sooner or later, you know, you're going to get stabbed.

It ain't so fun.

And I get this more often than I'd like. Every couple of years, sometimes every year, and it's always in the top of the left lung--never in the right. The first time I got it I was in college, and my boyfriend at the time had to drive me 20 miles to the nearest emergency room, the pain was so unbearable. The doctor took one little listen with the stethoscope and was like, "Yeah, it's pleurisy." Because I guess you can actually hear the lung tissues pulling and rubbing against each other. And while there are a ton of underlying causes for pleurisy, there's also the fact that some people just get it.

I thought there was something interesting about this, but now I'm not so sure. I wrote a whole narrative--you know, about how I've been so beat lately that I never stopped to think that maybe my body was trying to tell me something, that of course I assume it's just being lost; about how I can usually tell that it's coming on before it gets to the huge stabbing part, but how this time I didn't realize it until allowing a student to lead me, blinded, through a top-speed "assisted run" in class; about how I kept going throughout the exercise because physical pain is such a private thing that I'd rather keep going, getting stabbed over and over and over, rather than admit weakness in front of 22 people. But I erased it all. Because I don't know why it would be important.

But then I started thinking about my father. As legend has it, when he was a child, he got pneumonia, and it got so bad he had to be hospitalized and, some say "almost died". I'm sure some of that may be, you know, the embellishment that happens with time, but I guess after that pneumonia, every single time my dad got sick, it went straight to his chest. Almost every cold he gets settles in his chest for weeks, and really, a huge percentage of them turn into bronchitis.

I take after my father. We're both above-average in height, big, with a long torso and short legs. I have his little, Irish-y ski-slope nose and freckles that show up on my arms and legs. We both have what he calls the "O'Brien Gap" between our two front teeth, and I have yet to get a cavity. (My dad didn't get a cavity until he turned 50.) I'm Irish-y pink and pale, but with the smallest bit of un-sunscreened light exposure, I turn as brown as a baked potato. From his side of the family, I've also inherited Polymorphous Light Eruption--a sunlight allergy that is genetic among Native Americans that results in a rash that's like a bunch of little tiny blisters. Hey, you don't get to choose what you get handed. But I'm realizing that I got handed a lot.

So I wonder if I get pleurisy because of the pneumonia my father had as a child. You know, and if he had never gotten it, would that mean that I would not get pleurisy now? And I wonder if it could possibly be that direct, that obvious--my dad's lungs got jacked up by pneumonia, therefore his daughter's lungs are susceptible to infection.

Because when I spin it out, I take after my father in more ways than just the physical. He's stubborn, he's private, and he endures pain without complaining. If he were one to teach movement classes, he would totally keep doing the assisted run, despite feeling like he was being stabbed to death, rather than show weakness or complain about it. He's intensely opinionated. He is easily embarrassed, and he's shy.

And before I hear any howls of laughter at those last two, they're true. Or partly true. While Great Big Girl may not be those things, Lulu O'Brien is. Totally. But then again, maybe not. Maybe it's not really me; maybe it's my father. It's what he gave me, like the gap in my teeth.

And while the illness haze and steroid inhaler buzz are probably influencing my thoughts on this, I think that this means that most of me isn't really me at all--it's what I've been handed through my blood, through my family, through my training when I was far too young to resist. So maybe the only thing that is actually really us is the stuff that is born suddenly, out of circumstances or pressure or volcanic explosion or exposure to nuclear radiation. The SuperPowers. The SuperHero identity.

Maybe that's the only original part of your identity. Everything else is hand-me-downs.

So if Great Big Girl is born out of me, like Athena springing full-formed from the head of Zeus, then what do I really have that is mine and mine alone? A certain sense of style. A sense of justice. A soothing voice. A little charm. A smile. A set of hypnosis hips. A magical bra. A bit of a reckless panache. And a getaway car.

Is that it? Is that enough?