Less Like Hurting More Like Healing

I have promised myself that unitl I go back to work I will hit Starbuck's after I drop the kids off at school and write something. My writing muscle has atrophied from lack of use, but then again so have my quads. I don't however think that I'm going to be able to wake up one morning and magically run a 5K. I know I'm going to have to work my running muscles back into shape slowly and that it will probably hurt, so I guess it will be the same with my writing muscle. (That sounds a little perverted, sorry) So be gentle, this is my first workout and I'm at the couch potato stage not the 5k... yet.

Less Like Hurting
More Like Healing....

When Zoë had her tonsils out last summer, she spent approximately a week being unable to eat, drink, or talk with out pain. She was beyond uncomfortable, irritable and just ready to be done with the recovery process already. Through tears of pain and frustration she looked up at me and plaintively wailed, "I don't want my tonsils out any more, Mommy!" My heart broke for her. Now I'm the one recovering from surgery (again!) and 10 days after my hysterectomy I wailed, "I don't want my uterus out anymore!"

This is, without a doubt, the most difficult recovery I have been through. Everything hurt. It hurt to move. It hurt to breathe, it hurt to lie still. It just hurt. In the midst of all the pain and in the middle of the sleepless nights I stared asking "why?" Why so much pain? Why such a hard process this time? After all, I made it through open heart surgery last year. You might think that this surgery would be a breeze after that, but you would be wrong. So as I began to contemplate the genesis of my pain I came to believe that the pain was trying to tell me something, an important lesson that I was failing to learn. I also came to realize that the pain was not going to turn me loose until I heard what it was trying to say and I believed that understanding what was at the heart of the pain would somehow (PLEASE) banish it.

Where was all this pain coming from? I had expected and prepared for a lot of pain. Was I just getting what I expected? Was I focusing on the physical pain so I did not have to deal with the reality of what having a hysterectomy ultimately signified, or was my body itself crying out in protest against what had been taken from it?

It seemed that everyone I had spoken to who had had this surgery regarded it as the worst thing ever and the last conversation I had with my doctor before being taken to the OR was regarding my fear of the pain. So even though I attempted to focus on positive healing thoughts in the last minutes of awareness before surgery I think it was a case of too little too late. My expectation of pain was the majority of what I put out into the universe and pain was now the majority of what was coming back.

The pain also provided me with something to focus on rather that what I had just lost. There will absolutely not be a miracle, late-in-life, surprise-but-oh-so-longed for baby. Whoever that serene little girl with the blue eyes like lakes of sky I have dreamt about for years is, she is not mine. The pain filled my mind and body so that the reality of my loss was unable to bubble to the surface and drown me in tears. I could focus on the physical pain, point to yet ANOTHER scar and say "see this, it HURTS" and receive understanding but when I spoke of the loss of potential motherhood, people wrinkled the foreheads in confusion and started at me with disbelief, "but you have two perfect children?!

Maybe the pain was a physical manifestation of loss, my body adjusting (and not happily) to the now empty cavern that had once held Caleb and Zoë. Twisting and pulling, my body ached with the loss of vital organs that had sustained two lives inside me, the loss of the potential for any life to grow again, the loss of my youth. It seems to strange that my "childbearing years" (I hate the phrase) are behind me and that I have had all the children I am ever going to have. Yes, I am thankful for the beautiful boy and girl that fill my heart, soul and life with so much love, light, laughter, noise, frustration and worry, but my children are like chocolates, Two is just not enough. I could gorge myself on my children everyday and still keep coming back for more. To me it makes sense that I would want more. Who doesn't want more chocolate?

When I began to realize that the pain was all of those things, I began to see it as less like hurting and more like healing, healing from the physical trauma of major surgery and as the healing acceptance of the reality of my loss which allowed me to finally see my hysterectomy not as a interruption of a phase of my life but as a completion.

The pain is slowly abating, but I'm not rushing it. Healing not hurting I keep telling myself. While hurting was something I found so hard to manage, I see healing as necessary process that I can accept and embrace.