6 surgeries in 18 months
/3 x 2 = 6
In 18 months, I have undergone 6 life changing surgeries that I am still very much healing from. Turns out it takes a long long time for your neurological system to heal! Not only that, but I am realizng that although I have physically recovered from most of my surgeries, the energetics of all of these surgeries has caught up with my body and I am never truly “healed” post opp.
Writing this here is an attempt to practice communicating better, as this is one of the hardest things for someone with insane neuro symptoms has to come to tearms with.. as well as putting some of this experience not just in written form, but in a form that communicates what I hope to get across.
I wrote this as I was recovering from second styloid removal this summer. Without the ability to pull the photos and words together, it as stayed locked on a note on my phone. I would like to commit to writing more.. even just for my own sake. Some stability in this never ending hurricane I find myself trapped inside.
Six life changing surgeries on my body in the span of 18 months. That brings the total to 25 surgeries during a tender life span of 35 years. I know these will not be my last. I often crave the escape of a anesthesia, something I’ve known since a child, an escape from the horrible pain, for just a little while. When it wears off, I’m jolted back into this reality with full body muscle spasms, and an exorbitant amount of pain at the surgical site.
We all know that our body keeps the score, and I wonder what my body remembers and holds from all of the knives that have gone into her on the cold, sterile operating table. Not only that, but I often wonder where my soul goes during these interventions? Does it leave me fragmented? Am I off helping another? Am I able to go home to recharge myself with the love I need to keep pushing forward?
What you see as the surgical intervention is neither the end nor the beginning. The emergent state of each of these surgeries is a culmination of a lifetime of pushing my body too hard, not understanding the damage I was doing nor the nature of #ehlersdanlossyndrome . They are the culmination of years and years and years of searching for help, years of fighting for insurance to cover the exorbitant cost of these interventions. Years in solitude spent living hour by hour, with pain beyond what any living being should have to hold. Screaming like a dying animal, with a brain that was unable to form the words to advocate fully for myself. A lifetime of gaslighting from the medical community, belittling the truth of my physical experience, and wearing me down to a place of hopelessness and despair. Years of finding alternative treatments that have helped me function, until they couldn’t anymore.
And let’s not forget what happens after the surgeries: the long arduous task of recovering. The slow slow healing and recalibrating in a body whose tissues do not heal as a normal human does. I have taught myself to walk again twice in the span of 18 months. Which is huge, considering I was unable to walk further than a block for 7 years prior to these interventions.
I am a person who is able to hold hope in the darkest of nights, but this journey took that hope away. The hope I began to long for was death, and even as I was given the splendor of crossing the threshold of death, pain brought me abruptly back to my body.One time I was even escorted out of an Emergency room by a police officer, I have been put in a psych ward in a foreign city, and have been treated with a cruelty that cuts so deeply into my tender heart. This is not how humans deserve to be treated. I want to believe that people enter into the healthcare system to help, but it ends up being even more traumatizing for people like me. Having to fight to prove your need for medical intervention, to become the healer and doctor yourself, and to understand more deeply the injustice so many people face daily without it being a choice. Love is what will heal. These experiences allow me to love deeper, to step into spaces that once scared me, to provide comfort for others in the raging storm.
Here, I want to provide a pivotal thought. How could you know my gratitide for all of this without my expression here. I write two pages of gratitude daily, It is overwhelmingly beautiful what this practice can do to rewire and open your perceptions. I do not require your pity. I do not any longer require that I am seen and understood. Instead I seek to understand. In that place of understanding and gratitude I can perceive the gift in all that I have been given. I am a white upper-middle class women raised in the south with a very small framework of the real world. I have been given privilege where many do not have, and have been privaledged in existing within a loving and nurturing home.
These instances of injustice I am able to experience have set my life on a very different course than most women from the south with certian expectations placed upon them. I have been able to experience so much more of what it is to be human. What it is to suffer, to choose life, to have been given the chance to transform not by my own choosing, but the choice I keep facing. A choice I made before this life started. Yes, I want to know what it is like to be margenalized so I can understand my neighbor having a disadvantage just by being born with different skin color than me. To experience the injustice in our healthcare system drives me to holy rage.I want to reiterate that I am grateful for all of this. I am grateful for what this path has given me. I am grateful and so proud of who I have become because of it. Not instead of it.
Within it all I refuse to let my heart harden. It is a conundrum to me that with the more I endure, the softer my heart becomes. I understand so well the statement Jesus made as he died, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” A body cannot hold hate without it corrupting the tissues from the inside out. So, I choose love. I choose forgiveness of others and even my own tissues.. I choose to forgive my mind for thinking that I was always broken, instead of knowing the truth that there is never brokenness, there has never been inherit sin. I forgive those old beliefs and choose new ones. I will write more about this. I hope you hear that gratitude and acceptance in my words that you read.
These surgeries have been a traumatic miracle where heaven opened golden pathways for me to walk through. It has not been easy, and has taught me even more about surrender and healing. Without meditation and breath, the doors would have stayed closed and I would not have been able to walk through it all with such grace and trust. Without the prayers of the saints, and the devotion of my mother, provision from my father, and insurance through the marketplace none of this would have been possible.
I share this because I am not the only one who faces these insurmountable odds. There are many more brilliant souls who live in a body with hypermobile connective tissue, making the gravity and toxicity of earth a weight almost impossible to move and live within. Our lives are often in the shadows, locked away from the world in which we desperately long to experience. I’ve heard it said that our traumas create a new earth. If that is the case, then we are all imagining and manifesting a new earth right before your eyes. Are we a product of evolution, or a product of a polluted and dysfunctional earth? She is our mother, and our bodies are much more sensitive to her state and the collective consciousness, cosmos and hearts of love around us. You may not see us, but we are here, transforming, transmuting and holding suffering for the rest of humanity. Kind of like angels.. or maybe exactly like angels.
