I walked into my main anesthetist’s office after signing my
advance directive will. I was 18 and strong. Up until this point I had
virtually excelled at all that I had put my hand to: sports, school, writing, instruments.
I was untouchable. “We’re going to insert a catheter bolus into your spine to
provide a nerve block for the section of your abdomen that will be affected…but
I do have to tell you: it doesn’t always work…it’s a bit of a crapshoot whether
we get it in the right way at the right angle.” He then made a joke and told me
to enjoy my weekend before the operation. ‘No problem,’ I thought, ‘they’re
professionals; they do this all the time; they’ll get it in right.’ Not even
considering the trauma that a puncture to your spine with a very large needle
is in itself (shout out to all the moms out there who do it while giving birth;
y’all are the real MVPs).
Four days later, I slowly wake up with the intuitive
knowledge that the surgery was a success and the massive tumor inside my
pancreas was gone. I felt a sensation of fullness in my abdomen. I had a tube
coming out of my nose that didn’t bother me. The two nurses or interns or
whoever they were in scrubs that had been waiting for me to wake up made a joke
that it’s contents looked like… excrement. And, up until a few months ago while
watching E.R., I believed them and told many the avid listener that they
siphoned poop through my nose! (For reference, it was a tube to drain the
contents of my stomach). Then I noticed the pain. There was pain. I tugged on
whoever was around to ask for something to alleviate the pain.
My next memory was getting wheeled past a waiting room in
which my darling younger sister, 13 at the time, timid as a mouse, was
red-faced, quietly sobbing. If I wasn’t in so much debilitating pain and
attached to so many tubes, I would have run up to her to hold her and tell her
it was all alright. We’re like Katniss and Prim, us. Then, darkness.
It was sometime early in the morning when I woke up, the
twilight streaming through one window and the dim hall lights streaming through
the other. This passionate, fiery Italian woman from New Jersey came in as if
she was waiting for me to regain consciousness. I forgot her name due to all
the drugs, but I’ve always thought of her as Theresa, promising to name of my
five daughters after her. She checked my vitals and bumped the hospital bed. I
groaned and began crying, I believe, and said to NEVER do that again. My whole
abdomen tensed up and caused the most excruciating pain I’d ever experienced up
until that point. She said it shouldn’t have hurt that badly so she called my
pain team who happened to be in surgery. We waited. Theresa had the years of
knowledge to know that I didn’t want her to talk to me but that I did want her
in the room.
Finally the pain team came and ran a ridiculously simple
test to see if the catheter bolus had worked. They put a piece of ice on my
side and asked if I could feel anything. “Yes,” I managed to get out. With
urgency, one looked at the other and said, “She shouldn’t be able to feel
that.” The rolled me over to both sides (for whatever dumb reason) to check the
injection site and I think decided to just take it out. I would get my pain
meds solely from my IV’s, whatever that meant for me and my pain. They left.
One, two, three, four, five. Five breathes per minute.
That’s all I could manage due to the pain. Theresa came in and calmly but
urgently said, “Anna, you’re down to five breathes a minute; I need you to
breathe.” I thought that meant I was dying (thanks E.R. and Grey’s for teaching
me about the wonders of intubation since) and I was more than okay with that if
it meant the pain would stop. Theresa didn’t leave my side for a while after
that and asked if she could play some music for me on her phone. The Lord
giveth songs (Pandora) in the night (Job 35:10). I remember thinking that this
vivacious, Italian woman was my guardian angel, fittingly since I’m obsessed
with The Godfather. Darkness.
That night was the loneliest and most challenging and painful
night of my life.
Throughout the rest of my hospital stay, I would allow NO
ONE near my bed for fear that they would bump into it causing my abdomen to
tense up and produce ungodly pain. I felt like a glass figurine in Laura
Wingfield’s menagerie1. And since that night five years ago, I
haven’t stopped.
About a year after that fateful night, I was diagnosed with
Bipolar I disorder (and ADHD). I have
been in and out of Virginia Tech for five years (managing straight A’s for all
the classes I could manage to finish with my mental health intact). I had two
short stints at Regent and TCC to see if being closer to home would help. It
didn’t. I’ve held part time jobs that I’ve had to fairly quickly quit due to
mania, depression, psychosis or a combination of the three. I have tried living
with friends and living on my own. I spent a glorious (read horrifying) week in
a psych ward but it’s all come to nothing as I have ended up living with my dad
for the better part of these past five years.
I feel like an invalid trapped in my own body and mind.
Having never before struggled with chronic anxiety, I am now struggling to
leave the house. I study formal Arabic 2-4 hours a day and usually do so at a
desk in my room. Now, I’m too nervous to leave my bed for more than a trip to
the bathroom or to get a water bottle, so I’ve moved all my books to my bed.
I fear that my soul is slowly dying… that I am turning into
Laura Wingfield herself. I don’t know what I did to deserve this. I wanted to
be a missionary in Palestine for crying out loud. ‘Hello, God, not many foreign
Christians want to be sent there and I am BEGGING you to, what’s up with all
this death and illness?’ I’m reading a book about a man who suffered a stroke
that resulted in locked-in syndrome, a process in which you can make only the
slightest of movements, if you are lucky. This man communicated (and wrote the
entire book2) by blinking his left eyelid. In one chapter, his wife
calls on the phone, “’Are you there, Jean-Do?’ she asks anxiously over the air.
And I have to admit that at times I do not know anymore” (The Diving Bell and
the Butterfly 1997).
As a recovering Pentecostal, I say this with severe
restraint and hesitancy. But through it all, I’ve heard a still, small voice in
my heart saying, “You will be okay. It’s gonna be okay.” That’s it. That’s my
marvelous message from the Magnificent above.
But as I look around, I am reminded of a movie called
Collateral Beauty. Here’s
one of my favorite scenes as Love personified talks to roaming, embittered man
who lost his young daughter to brain cancer. Here’s an excerpt from Her speech:
“No…I’m
in all of it. I’m the darkness and the light. I’m the sunshine and the storm.
Yes, you’re right, I was there is her laugh, but I’m also here now in your
pain. I’m the reason for everything. I am the only Why? Don’t try and live
without me, Howard” (Collateral Beauty 2016).
As I feel like my body hasn’t stopped breaking since the
surgeon’s initial incision so many years ago, I muse at this idea of collateral
beauty and love being the reason that makes all the pain, the suffering, the
breaking, worth it.
I have been to the brink of death and back numerous times
(via surgery and suicidal ideation) and I can confirm, or at least posit, that
Love is the only reason it’s all worth it. “We have come to know and have
believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in
love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16 NASB).
*One last thought, if you too feel like you are breaking,
mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually, remember the words of Paul in 2
Corinthians 4:7-18. My memory verse right now is 1 John 2:8b: “…because the
darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining” (NASB). After I
recite, my spirit sometimes wells up within me and exclaims, “Oh, God, your
Light is inside me; break me if you must that I may see your Light!”
**To those of you who feel as though you are breaking, read
the passage I mentioned about and here me say, “It’s going to be okay.” To you
who aren’t in a season of breaking, be the collateral beauty in the life of
someone whose is. I mentioned a few ways to help people in pain in a recent
post.
1 The Glass
Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
2 The Diving
Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby (read this with a box of
tissues on hand
Beautiful, Anna <3
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