windinthemaples

Coming out of the dark, I finally see the light now--it's shining on me.
Coming out of the dark, I know the love that saved me--you're sharing with me.

I am, after days of sliding from drugged sleep to pained stupor and back, finally coming out of the mental cobwebs of the past week. I am nowhere near done recuperating from surgery but today the pieces starting floating together and I could finally see what it was all about. This experience, as a whole, is the best thing that's ever happened to me. I haven't unpacked it all yet, and still I am filled with this great sense of becoming. This will be one of the events that shapes my life's course, one of the first of that life's challenges that I've met with a sense of my own heroic worth, and the basis for a new understanding of compassion that includes myself.

I was terrified at the idea of going into surgery. I cannot think of anything in life that felt scarier than checking myself into the hospital, half-informed on what would happen by some Google searching. My previous experiences with inadequate anesthesia and pain control gave my squirrely mind plenty of fodder for fueling that terror.

I would wake up in the middle of surgery with a tube down my throat.

I would die and be forced to leave my son.

I would be so out of my own brainpan that I'd say something embarrassing, hurtful, or ungrateful to a staff member.

Mostly, though, I was facing the amorphous dark monster of being completely, absolutely, without question, out of control of the situation.

I'd had a lot of insight, being in the midst of my Temple of the Twelve studies' Pink Month, that I needed to place myself into the care of others and trust that they would protect me, heal me, and help me through my fears. I started asking for what I needed. My family, my friends, my neighbors, random strangers I met in the days before my hospitalization--I was asking them to think good thoughts, pray, send light for me. At the hospital, I said, more than once, "I am so scared. Please help me get through this." And you know what happened when I did that? I experienced the cradling power of perfect love and compassion. I asked for what I needed, allowed myself to be both emotionally and physically vulnerable, and opened myself to receiving love.

My mom has this philosophy that everyone loves to hear their name and, as a sub-point to that idea, that everyone leaps at the chance to be needed. I've always believed that, at essence, but being in the hospital I got to experience it. Complete strangers transformed, at the admission of my terror, into glowing embodiments of the Divine. There was a palpable energy shift when they realized that their day-to-day work was intersecting, that moment, with my worst-case scenario. Everyone I met became a hero to my cause, a hand of the Goddess upon my hair.

Monday, the first procedure was to place a ultrasound-guided tube through my back, into my kidney, and from there down into my bladder. I was awake for the procedure. The anesthesia team had heard about my family history and took it seriously. The entire time I lay on the table in that darkened operating room, Kim, a nurse, held my hands and watched my eyes. When I cringed or flinched at the bleed-through sensations, she added more drugs. I was taken care of and the procedure, as scary as it had sounded, went perfectly and felt, at times, almost restful.

That night, I was distracted by having to pee and being effectively trapped in bed with IV poles, my kidney tube, and these blood-clot prevention cuffs that squeezed my calves and tied me to the footboard. Siobhan, Cheri, Delores, Jim, Ashley, and Cornet cheerfully answered my calls, disconnected everything, helped me to the bathroom, and then hooked me back up. With that tube in my bladder, I had the sensation of needing to pee no matter how many times I got up, so I can say that they were tirelessly accommodating.

Tuesday, my surgery was the first on the schedule. The place is a teaching hospital, associated with Northwestern University's medical school, so the room was packed. There were newly minted residents and students and observers and at least six urologists. Anesthesia took my fears seriously again and, while it took three or four times longer to get me to sleep than they expected, once they did, I didn't wake up until I was safely on the other side, hours later in recovery.

What I hadn't known, until that morning, was that there was at least a 50% chance that I'd need to have a follow-up surgery in *another* two days to make sure they'd retrieved all the pieces of the stone...and maybe even more in the days to come! My stone was too big to pull out intact and opening the kidney there was usually so much blood and swelling that it was hard to get a good "look" for all the pieces before needing to close up to prevent further blood loss. So the way this surgery goes, apparently, is that they go in and work as fast and thoroughly as they can before the bleeding gets too bad, close up, and send the patient for a CT scan to see where/how many pieces they missed that they'll have to try and get on a second surgical opening in a couple days' time. (HOLY CHIPOTLE! TERROR! TERROR! TERROR! TERROR! WHY DID I PICK THE MOST STUPID, INVASIVE OPTION?!)

Well, fortune smiled upon me. My kidney bled surprisingly little, allowing the doctors the time and vision necessary to neatly split the stone in half, take out the halves, and then suction up some leftover dust before closing up with a strong sense that they'd gotten everything. The CT scan later Tuesday night verified that good news. I was done!

After surgery, I had a tube draining my kidney's contents into a bag and a normal Foley catheter that ensured I didn't have to get up to pee anymore. I spent the time in a drugged sleep. Mom and my husband took turns visiting me. I was aware of them, hour by hour, sitting in the chair across the room. Daniel checked his email or read every little note on the bulletin board and my Mom read one of my books from home about homesteading or talked shop with her fellow nurses. I was rarely lucid enough for conversation and yet they sat there, hours and hours at a time, mostly in silence, to support me. I am so loved. So blessed.

The staff at Twelve West took such good care of me. They brought me bland toast and buckets of ice water. They tsked at the way my sensitive skin reacted to all the medical tape, going out of their way to salve me down with aloe vera and invent crazy new bandaging techniques to prevent further irritation. When my kidney tube leaked, which it always did, they managed to change my clothes, my bedding, my bandages in this motherly, no-problem manner. They cheered me on when I was finally up and padding my way around the hallways in gown and slipper socks and IV pole. They knew Graeme's name and they asked me about him every day. They stopped by for extra visits when I was alone and lingered longer to tell me about their lives outside the hospital. I said, "I need your help" and they bloomed, full-color, into these beautiful, extraordinary needed souls.

I was released on Thursday for the bulk of my true recovery. The tube in my kidney was removed, leaving me with an open, unstitched incision that everyone swears looks like a knife wound. It is healing well and already, my kidney has stopped with those embarrassing back-leaks. I spend most of my hours asleep, or at least laying down. I don't have much mental energy for conversation or even something as innocuous as keeping up with a television program's plot or the words in a book. My Mom's flown home now and Daniel is meeting super-hero status to take care of Graeme and I simultaneously. He's grown, with surprising speed, into the role. Graeme is sweet and careful of Mommy's bad, bandaged back. He climbs up into bed together with me and we read a book or two together between my naps. We are finding a new normal, for now.

Saturday, I tried to do too much. I wanted to be present, to be helpful in whatever limited way I could, and so I gave up on taking my pain pills and spent a majority of the day up and around, or at least propped upright on the couch. Sunday morning, the effects of that were obvious when my wound showed itself to have been pulled open a bit in the night, reversing its earlier healing trend. So today, for Lammas, I feel like I finally put it all together. I finally came out of the dark about what it was that this experience had been all about. Yes, it is without a doubt about the selfless good and heroic compassion that exists in those around me. And yes, it is about facing those things that I fear and trusting that somehow, after the upheaval, that things will be okay. I'm also finally seeing that it is about being compassionate to myself. I took my pain pills and I went to bed. They weren't working particularly well. I finally asked myself what I needed, what I could do to feel better. It took some doing, but within a couple hours Daniel had gamely shampooed my hair in the kitchen sink (first bathing in a week!!) and I'd sat in a couple inches of water in the tub and shaved my legs. I put on some healing aromatherapy oils and pulled on the comfort of a t-shirt and pair of soccer shorts from Daniel's dresser. Hair dry and feeling human, full of bread from the Farmer's Market, I curled up into bed and slept, cocooned, all afternoon. I gave myself permission to extend my compassion to myself.

Graeme and his father enjoyed their day together. The world did not stop spinning. Nobody thought I was being selfish or uncaring. The only thing that happened when I was compassionate to myself was that I got better. I woke up and knew that I was on the path towards complete healing. The calm, loving voice of the Goddess, of Me, said with contented happiness, "This is the best thing that's ever happened to me."

~*~

Truly, your love, support, and encouragement pulled me out of the dark. It allowed me to get the help I needed and to face something that felt impossible. Thank you for being there, for caring, and for being compassionate to me before I was ever able to extend similar compassion to myself. You are the face of the divine in the world. {{{hugs}}}