Post 488 - December 4, 2022

I don’t have pictures to share this week because I never really left the apartment. I’ve been recuperating with my nurse.

I’ve been thinking about healing.

For most of the last two weeks or so, I’ve been moderately stoned. Instead of the oxycodone that I was prescribed following my procedure, I switched to medicinal gummies. I don’t know if they reduced the pain or just made me not care about it, but either way, I seem to have gotten through the worst of it. A few days ago, however, after the last check-up visit that I had with my doctor, I was hit with a seriously bad chest cold.

Sitting up and standing were both problematic right after the surgery, but the chest cold also made it impossible to sit and stand for any length of time because I simply got worn out. I couldn’t figure out where one issue ended and the other one began. So yesterday, I took a walk to the corner drugstore.

When you are in rehearsals for a show, it is almost impossible to tell how the show is going. You get wrapped up in it and start grabbing onto only the positive things that are happening or, if you are in a fatalist frame of mind, only the negative. You become convinced that the show is either good or bad without being able to see the entire thing properly. In my experience, all that changes when the first audience comes in. Suddenly, I can put myself into the shoes of a person seeing it for the first time – especially if someone I know is in that first crowd. Even before the performance starts, I then have a clear idea of whether what we have is art or just a can of soup.

Walking outside yesterday and finally breathing in some fresh air, was my way of getting some objectivity about what was going on. What I discovered is that the repaired hernia seemed to be responsible for about 5% of my discomfort and the wracking cold the remaining 95%.

Over the course of my life, I have now been through at least two or three medical procedures that left parts of my body temporarily unrecognizable - bruising and swelling and all the rest of it. Coming home from the hospital, the first time I stand in front of a mirror all I can think is, how on earth will this ever get better? It seems impossible that the human body can right itself after it has been subjected to such an aggressive invasion. And yet somehow it does.

After two and a half weeks, my current bruises are fading and the swelling subsiding. Things are returning to their rightful positions. In some ways, I should be grateful for the chest cold because it has kept me lying down most of the time. Without it, I might already be pushing myself to go out and walk more. It was a sneaky way for my body to buy itself a bit more time to repair itself.

I don’t blame anyone for any of this. Things happen. This is just the thing that happened this month. There have been plenty of others and there will be more. The coronavirus pandemic is a trauma from which none of us has yet to fully recover from. The combination of the planet shutting down, the racial reckoning the murder of George Floyd triggered and the 2020 election has left scars that no amount of vitamin E oil is going to repair. Like the procedures I’ve been through, overall, our societal body, in some regard, has been made stronger and more resilient, but there was a tradeoff. Some things had to be removed. We must now learn to live without them.

I’m not sure that we ever fully recover from any of it. Can it be said that we’ve recovered from the AIDS crisis? Vietnam? World War II? The Slave Trade? Some of those old wounds haven’t even scabbed over yet.

I can take in my body and point out where all my scars came from: the stitches in my forehead from when I was a toddler, the white marks in various places where skin cancers have been removed, the incision marks from the robotic prostate surgery I had ten years ago and now this Frankenstein-like scar on the left side of my lower abdomen. None of those marks are ever going to go away completely. In each case, though, they represent something that has, in theory anyway, been made better.

Things break, things fail, and things wear out. It’s basic entropy. Then we try to fix them. Sometimes successfully and sometimes, maybe not so much. The first step is to accept that there is something broken that needs attention. This is true about our bodies but also about our whole society. We are in the middle of witnessing an entire national political party implode because they can’t see how damaged they are. They cannot fully let go of the thing that is going to be what destroys them from within. They’ve abandoned any pretense of actual governance. Something must be done. Something must be cut out.  Unfortunately, it’s on the patient to allow the procedure to happen and if the patient is unwilling then things will either stay as they are or get worse. The cure is rarely easy, it has its own costs. Whatever it is that goes, the recovery from it is going to be long and painful. Not cutting it out would be worse, but it takes a while to accept that. The clock, however, is always ticking.

We should celebrate our scars rather than try to hide them. We all have them, so why pretend otherwise? Healing doesn’t mean the scars go away; it means that we become strong enough to live with them. Like the chains that Jacob Marley forged for himself, we amass a collection of hurts and losses. No matter how much healing has happened, they never go away. We train ourselves to be strong enough to bear their weight as we carry on.

Antique Hawaiian poi bowls increase in value if they have been repaired. The effort of carving out a wooden bowl is so great that when one would crack, rather than discard it, a butterfly-shaped insert would be made to pull the two sides back together. The whole thing would be smoothed over and the bowl would be as good as new – maybe even stronger. The repair becomes part of the intrinsic beauty of the bowl and radically increases its value.

Today is the first day in about two and a half weeks that my head feels clear enough for me to be able to think. I was not expecting the recovery from this to be this intense. The recovery and the chest cold, each by themselves, would have been enough to knock me on my butt, but together they wiped me out. I can’t quite believe how long it’s been, but I have been in such a haze that it seems like nothing. That’s part of the healing, too. We forget.

It's a perfect late-fall day outside. The jury is still out on whether I will venture out into it. If not today, then tomorrow. Those pictures aren’t going to take themselves. In the meantime, I am going to take a shower and change the dressing on my incision. As my battered body settles down, I am starting to see what I’m going to be left with.  I think I’m going to have an awesome scar.