Healing

I still tear up when I talk about the surgery. Not every time, not when I give my well-worn spiel to a stranger or acquaintance, not when tears would be inappropriate and awkward. No, not then. It’s when I remember the sights, the sounds, the pills, the blue masks hovering over me as I drifted into anesthetic sleep, holding someone’s hand. It’s when I remember the fear - both mine and my family’s. It’s when I’m talking to someone who is so gentle, so caring, that my crumbled guard is flooded with the memories that I can’t push away.

I want it to be done; I wish I could wipe my hands of the last seven months and just enjoy the gift I was given: a new life. I wish I could just enjoy it, but I keep getting sucked back like the stubborn straw that keeps slurping and slurping even though all that’s left is the latte-flavored water from the last melted ice cubes.

But maybe it’s good. I went through a lot. To just walk away doesn’t seem right. When I remember what I went through, I can acknowledge and accept the tests, the surgeries, the fear and the uncertainty that have branded me. When I remember, I let myself start to heal.

Naps

I still take naps almost every day. I don't know how much of my fatigue is from surgery and how much is from my medication, which is still at pre-surgery levels, but no matter the cause, I'm getting tired of it (no pun intended). I wish I could make it through a whole day like everyone else, but I just get so tired, I have to stop and recharge like a four year old phone battery. I used to have serious fatigue before my surgery, but back then I could mask it with caffeine. Decaf's placebo effect works occasionally, but on the whole it's not much help. Ah, the days when I could shotgun a Red Bull and be back in business - at least for another couple hours.

Agh! It's just frustrating! I have so many things I want to do, need to do, each day, but I feel like I can only make it through half of them. Time slides by, more slippery each time I try to catch it, and so soon the day is gone. Between heavy eyes that close on their own and the headaches that have crept back in and leave me out of play, it's as though I only have a few productive hours every day. I'm over it. I don't know what I can do about it, though. I feel trapped.

Fuit Flies

I saw my first fruit fly today. Every summer they invade my shoebox apartment, taking the kitchen by storm no matter how many dishes I do and how inaccessible my fruit is. June and July see my friends coming over for dinner and swatting them away from their faces as they sit at my table. I hate fruit flies with every fiber of my being. I'm thinking about getting a pet bat to keep them in check. Or do bats only eat mosquitoes? I'm not sure. Either way, this year I'm determined to keep them out. I'm not quite sure how yet, but I'm working on it. At least there was only one today, so I have a head start on the little monsters. I'll be damned if I can't have flowers in my apartment for fear of providing fodder. This summer, my apartment will be immaculate and will be declared a no-fly zone (get it? No fly? Like no fruit flies and no flying?).

This morning I finally paid a properly-calculated check to Mayo Clinic. Sadly, it was almost $2,000. I kept looking at the Amount Due box on the bill, checking to make sure I'd read it right, checking that the decimal point was really where I thought it was. It was. I lifted my pen to my checkbook, filling out every non-monetary or signatory line I could before slowly writing out the total amount, letter by painful letter. I hovered over the signature line, took a deep breath and looked away as I scrawled my illegible signature. I sealed and stamped the enclosed envelope and wrote the return address in the corner, adjusting my four-line address for the three lines given.

Like the fly: one down, many more to go.

Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head

The headaches have been back lately. They're strange, though, coming on sharply all of a sudden rather than a slow, dull storm cloud rolling in over the horizon, giving me enough time to take a preemptive Tylenol. The past few days, however, there's no warning, and I'm left out of commission for hours. I'd say that it's from overexerting myself - a headache hangover - but I haven't been any more active than I have for the past couple weeks. I did get taken downtown by a crock pot lid, and have a bump to prove it, but that was days ago. I'm really not sure what this is. I'm not exactly worried, just perplexed.

My head isn't the only strange thing: it's been raining in Colorado for two weeks now. At the edge of the desert, we're flooded with sunlight, not rainwater. Like my headaches, heavy rain comes on with no warning. The thunder booming outside my window was kind enough to wait until I got inside before dumping its rain on the stairway beyond my door. Maybe it was making up for yesterday: I had to go downtown and decided to be a good world citizen and take the bus. After trekking to the wrong bus stop, I eventually found my way to the 15 and got off ten blocks beyond where I'd meant to. It was nice out, though, and the walk was nice. However. Trying to get home, I walked past four bus stops before finding the elusive 15 again and paid my $2.25. I had thought that taking the bus would've been cheaper than paying for parking, but apparently not. But I digress. Ten minutes later, I saw my street coming closer and closer, and timing it just right, I pulled the Stop Requested string. But the bus didn't stop. Instead, it started raining, pouring, and though the red light was on, the driver pressed on just short of a mile farther. Really? Are you kidding me? I disembarked in my tank top and skirt, my purple backpack my only shield against the sky's assault. There were no trees to block the raindrops attacking my head. My scar hurt, but there wasn't anything I could do. I booked it as fast as I could, getting in my workout for the day. I cursed the rain, the thunder, the lightening, the sky. I willed my backpack to protect the computer inside it. I passed tattoo parlors, dive bars, diners, sex toy shops and used book stores. When I hit Walgreens, I knew I was almost there. Turning onto a side street, I darted between trees, seeking cover wherever I could. Tree to tree to tree, like connect the dots, I made my way to my apartment building - the building with an open-air staircase. Awesome. I climbed the stairs, wishing I had an elevator, wishing I lived on the first floor. Collapsing into my apartment, I thought to myself, those rainclouds owe me. Big time.

Four Months

For four months, I defied my ancestry. I swam upstream, like a salmon, fighting against the notorious klutziness that is in my DNA. I stepped carefully, moved with caution, and I made it four months without hitting my head. No bumps entering a car or grabbing under the table. Nothing. I'm very proud of myself.

Then today, it came crashing down on me. Literally. I had put the meatballs in the oven and opened the pantry door to get my crock pot off the top shelf. Standing on my toes, my hands found the base of the pot and lifted it gently. But then. As the pot moved closer and closer to the edge of the shelf, something shiny caught my eye: the glass lid sliding off the top. In slow motion, it began to fall, knocking against a phone book like a bumper in the kids' lane at a bowling party. There was nothing I could do without dropping the ceramic pot and breaking my foot as it cracked, so I just stood there, watching. The heavy lid careened off the bumper and WHAM! A sharp pain on the right side of my head made me cry out. I set the crock pot down and my hand flew to the impact point, checking for blood; there wasn't any. I knew a bump would form soon, as well as a massive headache, so I popped two extra strength Tylenol before it had a chance to get too bad. I couldn't believe the pain; I was shocked at the force of it and didn't know how to stop it. My eyes welled with tears - the kind that come with a head bump and embarrass you by making you look like a little kid. It hurt so much, but yet I was grateful: grateful that it hadn't hit my healing left side and grateful that I made it four months without something like this.

As I expected, the pain spread from my traumatized right side to my fragile left side, leaving me with an overall sense of fogginess like I hadn't felt since leaving the hospital. I would put myself at a six, maybe a seven. I tried to do my dishes, but I felt nauseous. I tried to reply to a few emails, but I couldn't think straight. Eventually I gave in and made my way to my couch with a glass of water and an ice pack. I knew I wouldn't touch my To Do list; I was out of commission.

The ice pack was heavy and, though the cold felt wonderful, only increased my headache. I tried to hold it up with my hands, relieving the weight, and it worked for a while - until my hands got too cold... Suffice to say, I spent the rest of the day watching reruns of Bones and feeling sorry for myself.

Transitions

Lately I've been spending my time in transitions. As I write a book based off a long series of blog posts, each its own thread of memory, its own stream of thought, it's a challenge to string them together, like beads on a ribbon, into one, cohesive piece. Maybe it's because I'm living it, and because each vignette comes from my own mind, it's hard to view them objectively and come up with a way transition between days, weeks and months that makes sense and doesn't sound forced.

The rest of my life is living a transition, or, more accurately, a transformation. I feel like the flowers that bloom a little more each day as I walk by them on my way to the park. So closed for so long, I am finally open. Maybe a few staples were missed, a metal plate forgotten, and it left a part of my mind exposed. The world is fresh and full of bright colors and blurred lines that I'd never seen before. Something more was taken out of me during that surgery than a piece of brain and it left a chink in my armor.

Delayed Reactions

It’s hitting me now, what I did. The fears and unsurities I felt are finally manifesting themselves. The tears I never cried now run down my cheeks. The chest into which I bury my face catches my sobs. It seems like I fight them every time I tell a memory from the hospital. I don’t know if it’s the memory of the fear and pain inside me or the love around me that overwhelms me now. Maybe both.

Decisions

Lately I feel like no matter how many hours are in the day and how much I do, so much less gets accomplished than I had hoped. I’m busy all day, but I feel like I don’t make headway on any of the projects I’m working on. It’s driven me crazy the past week, because I haven’t been able to fix it. I think I know what the problem is, though: I haven’t made any decisions. I start a project and get some work done, but then I run into some fork in the road and I can’t commit to a direction, so I put it down and move onto the next. I now have a train of half-finished projects trailing behind me, weighing me down. I get a feeling of guilt when I don’t cross something off of my To Do list, and it’s been sitting on my shoulders in some form.

What I need to do is make a decision. I need to take a chance and commit myself to a specific path that will lead toward success and a lifetime of happiness. Tomorrow I’ll make my first decision.

That Girl

Sometimes I still think about it. I remember the hospital, lying there in so much pain, so scared. I remember how I made them keep my room really cold; the cold felt better on my head, my face, my neck. Everyone else was wearing sweaters, even jackets, but my sheets were pushed down, covering only up to my knees. Not that it really mattered on the right one, cause everything below the knee was numb.

I think about that fragile girl, made brave by love, painkillers and a lack of other options. I think about her and all I want to do is hug her and cry with her and try to give her feelings. She didn’t have many feelings, just pain, fear, and impatience as she waited for her next Percocet, oxycodone, morphine, nausea medication, and Benedryl for the itching. The pain medicines made her itch all over. She scratched and scratched at her entire body and during her sponge baths made the nurses scrub her back, chest, arms and legs as hard as they could with the washcloth. I am astonished by that girl. Like a parent, it pains me to watch her in pain, more than I can say, but I’m amazed by her strength. I don’t recognize her as myself. I’m not sure why, but when I think of her, it’s as if I’m a presence above her, watching over her and trying, however futilely, to comfort her. I want to tell her that everything is going to be okay, even though I don’t know if it’s true. I want to stroke her hair and look at the wires coming from her head and tell her it’s almost done, even though I know the road she has left to walk.

I thought about her this morning as I was lying in bed and it made me cry. I didn’t know if it was from fear, pain, compassion, helplessness, or gratitude that she became me. I didn’t care, though. I gave myself a minute to feel it all, then I wiped away my tears and got on with my life.

Coming Home

The space heater is gone from its spot in the corner; the borrowed walker was given back to our friends; the insurance documents and get well cards that covered the top of the dresser are missing. I sit again on the bed with the yellow striped duvet, but this time my room looks different. Unoccupied. The remnants of my four-month residence in my old bedroom have mostly been cleared out. A few clothes hang in my closet, a travel mug of mine sits next to a bottle of coconut-scented lotion my sister gave me, and the little silver Christmas tree with the usb plug that my mom gave me when I went into the hospital for monitoring the day after Thanksgiving. The coaster I kept my 2am Percocet on the first month home following the surgeries still sits on my nightstand, though on this trip I left the Percocet in Denver. The biggest memorial is the sign hung above the door that reads: "We Love Our Erica" in patterned block letters strung on a piece of orange ribbon by my sister. I remember looking at that sign again and again while the doctor stimulated each electrode on my brain and twitched as I lay in my hospital bed, hoping to God that I would be eligible for the resection in the second surgery that afternoon. That morning it was a lifeline; now it's a memory.

It's nice to be back in my parents' home. I know it's only been three weeks, but I've missed them. We became a cohesive unit when I lived with them, and in my own home in Denver, I'm a leg missing the rest of its tripod. Seeing my mom and dad isn't like re-forming into a tripod, or even like crawling back inside my cocoon, it's like a chance to see how much of what I learned here I'm able to remember.

Adaptation

I feel like things are falling into place. My eyes are open to new experiences, my heart is open to deeper, more robust relationships with the people around me. Like the flowers on my kitchen table, opening their petals day by day, I'm opening to the world. My essence is porous, letting my surroundings become a part of me. I'm the most authentic version of myself that I've ever been. I am content.

My recovery has changed me. I believe for the better. For a week, I was spoon fed by my mom because I was too week to lift a fork. For a month, my dad had to spot me every morning when I came downstairs to have the oatmeal and fruit he'd made us for breakfast. I didn't have a choice but to let people in. Doing it all by myself, never asking for help - what I'd always thought "independence" meant - wasn't an option. So I adapted.

Life is funny. When I was in a bad place, stressed, over-worked and under-slept, my body took up arms. It was my epilepsy which, when aggravated by my job and my life, convinced me to find an escape - like they say, it had to get worse before it could get better. It definitely got worse, but now, here, it's so much better than I could've asked for.