How my writing brain used alchemy research to make it through a hospital night – an unusual witching writing diary post!

Recently, I have been reading a lot about alchemy, and the knowledge came in more handy than I could have thought. This one is about an involuntarily adventure!

As some of my readers know, I have recently been travelling for a few weeks. I will write a post about that experience soon! After coming home, I felt motivated to clean and sort through old things. Clothes, books, all kinds of things. Mostly clothes, and my witch knows just how badly I usually have to cough when sorting through dusty clothes. This time it was no different, except for the dust to actually cloud the air around me.
I opened the window and tried to rest. When it did not get better, I took a walk, only to come back and cough even more. At around 10 pm, I was in the witching garden on all fours to relax my back, because breathing felt impossible.

What does this have to do with alchemy? At least in my head, a lot. As people who followed my early blog posts might remember, I have a lot of anxiety when it comes to dealing with doctors. So, although I was thankful for my partner to call them, I was terrified by the paramedic arriving and examining me … kneeling in the garden. I was also terrified by the ambulance ride I got shortly afterwards, and by being handed around at the emergency room on a Sunday night. The paramedics told the front desk nurse my backstory, she told it another nurse, who searched for the right doctor and told it again, while I was always waiting on another chair, not knowing what was about to happen next. Also, my story changed a little bit each time. “Probably asthma due to an allergy” changed to “30-year-old woman with asthma” (I never had asthma so far) and “sorting out clothes” became “reading old books”. Meanwhile, I asked myself what was gonna happen next. Would they take a blood sample? Scan my chest? Someone measured my oxygen levels, and to my biggest surprise told me they were still normal (how without breathing? Our bodies can be surprisingly strong).

In the end, I was lead into a small room and an inhaler mask was put on my face.
“What’s this?”, I ask the first nurse.
“Saline Solution. To defuse the mucus.”
And while I was inhaling salty, humid air through this strange machine, my thoughts could finally wander off.

I thought of all the fascinating alchemy practices I had to read about for, first of all, the second half of my witching novel, and, second of all, another short story I’m trying to get published. Plus, of course, me studying the history of science. Anyway, I thought of distillation systems to clean (in the 17th century understanding to “heal”) water, and even other substances, such as mercury, all in an attempt to heal the world from its fragility. Finding the philosopher’s stone, helping humanity to ascend to perfection! Overcoming plague, and wars, and death, and finding a better way to live! That is how I so far understood alchemists thinking, which I think makes their work relevant for today, even though as a science comparable to modern chemistry.

Respiratory diseases where a severe problem in late medieval times, and not just the ones we died from immediately. If a little more perfection means being able to breathe, I won’t say no. Remembering this while constructing old laboratories and little adventures in my head made it easier to breathe through the inhaler all on my own in the middle of the night, while still feeling like suffocating. It also made it easier to look for someone and ask if they had forgotten me, after they had left me there for an hour although had instructed me only inhale for 15 minutes. Hospitals at night are terrifying! So terrifying, I am even more thankful for my witch and my writing brain to be always with me.

Before anyone worries about me: The inhaling helped in the moment, and I will now figure the rest out with my doctors. It will most likely have to do with my dust allergy and be easy to handle.

And yes, I will write a more detailed post about why I love alchemy so much!