Beginning to Feel Normal

I'm gradually setting my new normal. It's inconvenient to have your foot in the air, but the elevation and ice and managing the pain are key to maintaining an attitude that I can bear this while I have to. Everything is a chore so I'm not real tempted to do too much.

I have had the most wonderful outpouring of support. It's very humbling. I will know better how to respond in the future to other people's hardships. We mostly try to be stoic and private because so many have it so much worse, but sometimes it is our turn to help and then to be helped. I'm experiencing full gratitude for all the little things and big things friends and neighbors are doing.

Surgery is traumatic, and everyone reacts differently. I tend to pretend things will be fine and then they aren't, but it seems better than dissolving into fear and terror. Most of my trouble with the surgery was emotional, but actually I am getting pretty good at handling that after 62 years of life. I was far too chatty and almost manic at first but a friend reminded me that the prescription for trauma is repeating the story over and over until it gets less powerful, and I instinctively did that instead of the way I used to keep everything secret. I scared some people with my loosened boundaries. As a writer I have always tended to overshare and that just makes people uncomfortable who don't like that much information about weaknesses and emotions.

So I guess I helped some people tighten up their own boundaries in regard to me but except for being sorry, those are not my problems. They do what they have to do. There's a difference between creating drama and articulating experience. I had the need to name and identify all of my insights and realizations, and I will have to continue to do that but I'll just choose whom I share things with and remember to let other people do what is best for them. It's my blog and I'll whine if I want to. Actually I don't really want to whine. Healing is what it is in front of me right now and I have the image of just surfing the material instead of drowning in it.

I had a lot of beach and ocean images in my process. During surgery I had a lucid dream of being on a beach. In post-op I was trying to take care of everyone in the giant room and had an extremely hard time taking care of me. I later remembered a psychic reading I had decades ago where Olga Maria told me I was a healer in the South Seas and I'm going to find that and look it over, because even though my skeptical self dismisses that stuff, the associations give me insight. There could have been suggestions in my subconscious because of the year anniversary of not only the tsunami but our more personal Market family loss.

General anesthesia is powerful and your body is taken to the edge of what it perceives as death. Having a tube down your throat for three hours, being on your stomach with people opening up your foot and moving your bones around, well, that sends terrifying messages through your nervous system. It wasn't an easy experience for my body and I hardly cried or got scared at all in the two weeks between the accident and the surgery. I wouldn't let myself. I was in control and I knew I could depend on myself to get through it.

Probably being helpless coming out of the dream into the reality was similar to being caught in a personal tsunami. My rational mind knows it is just a foot and I will be fine after some weeks of inconvenience. My psyche struggles. My body is wounded. Healing has to involve all of it.

I love that I'm more insistent on writing my own story about it, moving through it the way I need to. I've learned a lot about that over the years and in post-op I just went with talking out loud to myself and every other wacky way I acted. I tried hard not to comfort the comfortable and concentrate on my needs. Eventually I was able to do that piece by piece but I was still worrying about the convenience of the nurses and on down the line. Part of that is just the way women are taught to take care of others. I am definitely a woman.

I'm settling into putting my foot first and allowing myself to rely on help. People are so very kind and reliable. I feel like whatever help I ask for will be given, at least in some form. I have even received a lot of help I didn't know I needed.

This is where I will put some of my learning and processing and if you don't want to read it, feel free to not read it. I want to get back to my house research and other projects but I can only do a little each day and the nights are long and boring. It seems like there will be plenty of time for all of it as I improve. Just go make some Jell-O while you wait. Don't eat it...play with it. It's pretty and smells good and it will make you laugh.

Thanks again to everyone. Really. Painkillers make me repeat myself and then repeat myself again but I am just going to keep saying thank you in pretty much every conversation. I've always been lucky, and I'm still lucky to be in this wonderful strong body and mind. Everything will just get better and better, with a few low spots in there for contrast. Eventually this will all be a memory and a good story.