Today will be the second day at home, the Saturday after the surgery. The surgery happened in the not-yet-to-be-called morning hours of Sunday.
I am forgetting. I can’t remember the details. I am not sure that any story I tell from this week has an ounce of concrete truth.
Is it the mind or the body that has this necessary and indecipherable skill? Part of me knows every detail of the surgery, of the words spoken, of the incredible undertaking and dance that both body and surgical team traversed.
Part of me remembers the inability to open my eyes, or the first time to stand, or the rise and fall of the initial pain. But it is fading so rapidly. When I type, it comes out in tears that make no sense. The tears are the unprocessed pain, the emotional response that has to pass through.
It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t supposed to make sense.
The first two days in the hospital are a blur. I know the drill at this point. Every few hours, the team checked vitals, drew blood, listened for the alarms. There were a lot of alarms. This IV had completed. The pulse oximeter suggested oxygen. Occlusion in a line. People in and out.
And I did my part. I walked the loop. I sat in the chair. I took shallow breaths that were as deep as my lungs would go. And I slept. And slept again.
I probably assured people by phone and text that, yes, I am alive… again, still, miraculously. I went in thinking that I would probably come out. The Divine has its own plan. I wasn’t fully certain. But I am a very logical person. This isn’t logical timing.
Shante and Mark are moving north in less than a month. Rosanna’s sloth baby shower is in the making. These are important, deeply loved people, doing enormous, complex, life altering things. It’s the wrong time to die. Logical mind says so. And God, smiling at my childish, human wishes, allowed it to be so.
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