The stress of the move and having spent a number of very late nights working recently pushed me back into mono land. Our old friend Epstein-Barr has apparently awakened and is back for his fourth round in three years of making me feel weak, miserable, headachy, and having to take four-hour naps in the middle of the day.

My advice to you is never to get immunosuppressed. It’s not fun.

On the up side, I’m in a much better position now to resist this stuff than I was before — and that is thanks to having read Dante, and been through therapy, and prayer. Still, it’s awfully discouraging to wake up in the morning and feel so fatigued that you’d just as soon go back to bed. The only sensible way I can think of to respond to this is to open myself to whatever lessons God is trying to teach me by allowing this disease to recur like this. That might sound like pious claptrap to some of you, but I mean it literally. I go back to Dante, again, who learned on his pilgrimage through the afterlife that his exile, as painful as it was to bear, was for his own salvation. His struggle opened him to discerning spiritual lessons he needed to heal his soul. This is absolutely what happened to me upon moving back to Louisiana and getting so sick with mono and depression. I mean it when I say that as miserable as all that was, I give thanks for it because it forced me to deal with some serious issues that I had been fighting my entire life. Here’s why I will always consider Theophany the day that I celebrate my healing of a lot more than mono.

But the Epstein-Barr virus never goes away. In almost everybody who has it (and if you are over 30, there’s a 90-95 percent chance that you carry it), you fight it off once and you never have to deal with it again. I’m one of the lucky few who has it recurringly, reactivated by intense stress. The good thing, again, is that in this outbreak, I am in a much stronger position to resist, and to limit its effects. Anyway, there are people struggling every day with far more serious medical conditions.