An Anniversary of Sorts

While Andy and I celebrated our fourth wedding anniversary this year, we pulled out something that he had given me for our second anniversary:  the Peterson Family Scroll.  He made it himself, a place for us to document significant moments in our marriage and lives together on cloth between two wooden rods.  Some of the dates were easy--our birthdays, our wedding date, our engagement day--but some of them were a bit harder to pinpoint immediately, such as what days we officially started working at Skyward and then, well, when my surgeries happened for the first year of our marriage.  As we watched our wedding video, it hit me once again how we had absolutely no idea how hard the next year was going to be.

This scroll was a wonderfully thoughtful gift from Andy for many reasons, but the most significant reason for me was that it was evidence that he thought that we had a long future ahead of us, where all of that blank space would be filled with adventures and experiences.  At that particular moment in time, I had been grateful enough just to have survived to our second year.  I remember thinking that perhaps we could hopefully soon get past surviving and get to really living, still uncertain of what that timeline would actually be.  I ended up writing on the scroll "06/12" for the failed surgery and subsequent clean-up surgery as a combined entry.  

It made me a little uneasy to not pull the date up immediately--that was a pretty big life-event to misplace.  I could shrug it off to some extent at least because the whole timeline of that year blurred together in a mass of depression, fear, pain, and all else; who wouldn't want to forget at least some of it?  

My family had the layout etched in more cleanly than I did.  June 9th and June 10th, if I'm on the correct dates now.  We all went in to my first surgery expecting a quick turn around, a few days in the hospital and then on with the rest of our lives.  We maintained that optimism for the first few hours upon waking up.  

And then my pain slid quickly out of control.  Andy will tell you that I shake my head at the pain scale, that it's subjective in a lot of ways and people who have no pain tolerance will tell you with a straight face and calmly that they're at a level ten.  I will refer you to a better pain scale here than the one you'll normally see in doctor's office.  Recovering from surgery, I was sporting a solid five or six or sometimes seven, finding those momentary sharp pains when I moved further than the strictures would allow (and as we figured out that a particular pain medication just didn't work for me).  Then, as the tissue around the new internal stitches disintegrated, we ramped up to a steady ten, easily the worse pain I've ever felt in my life.  At that time, I certainly did not care what day it was.  

Here's what I do remember.  

• A feeling of relief when they told me we were going back to surgery, immediately followed by a deep weight.  I wouldn't call it fear exactly, because at that point being unconscious was where I wanted to be and this was the only way forward from here.  Fear was in that mindset, sure, but this is just what needed to be done at this point.  I could settle into a state of action.
• My surgeon going from cocky to contrite very quickly--the odds of these complications were slim, but still real.  I still don't blame him, though I wonder if he wishes he had played it safer and gone with the ostomy from the start.  
• Waking up three separate times from the impossibly heavy fatigue one feels when coming out of anesthesia and having someone inform me that I had an ostomy now.  Each time, I said something to the effect of "okay."  Two of those times, they checked to make sure that I understood what that really meant, and I confirmed in the same level tone.  The third time, I replied that I had already been informed and they seemed to leave it at that.  
• Hurting more waking up from this surgery than the first, about twenty-four hours before.  It was a little better than before going in, but as much infection as there was all through my abdominal cavity, there was no real rest.  

The whole subsequent month was a blurry mess.  The infection seemed better, the infection seemed worse, my kidneys were shutting down from all of the antibiotics pumped through my body, we needed more drains which had to be put in while I was conscious, we went back to ICU, we left ICU, I learned how to change my ostomy bag, we addressed how to move around again, and I watched a lot of Law & Order in the wee hours of the morning.  

For the most part, though, I took it with a relatively level acceptance at the time.  Somewhere, I made the decision that my overall strategy was to get through today and process it all later.  

To mark this anniversary of surviving through the most difficult two years of my life (because there were two more surgeries and a lot more recovery to be had), Andy gave me a symbol to track how far we had come and how much time we have left for new adventures.  Here now, two years from then and four years after the event itself, I'm still working through all of those emotions that I had put aside, when it was time to act instead of feel.  Hell, there are still physical ramifications that I'm working through.  

I feel like I have said the exact same thing before many, many times, that I still feel some kind of emotionally screwed up with everything that's happened, and yet I need to say it again and again still because I do not feel relief yet in saying it.  There is some relief, sure, but the words I have clearly not found yet still press against my throat, trying to force their way out without form, if need be.  I keep saying what I can in the hopes that this time I will find what it is I really need to say and finally let it out.  To be fair, there were a few times there where I actually could have died; that's still a hard thing to digest.  I'm tired of carrying it, yet I cannot figure out how to let it go.  I suspect that there will be some of it that to linger permanently, but I have yet to know how much.  I don't want to keep more than I have to, so I keep trying to find how I'm supposed to release it.    

This was a long-term traumatic experience, followed understandably by some very real depression.  I have been asked more than once if I was cured or if "that Crohn's thing" was "still a thing."  Somewhere I need emphasize that this is a permanent situation, that remission is possible but never indefinite.  I can feel people wanting to change the subject when I bring it up--some people have more stomach for the gore than they do the emotional, oddly enough, though I would agree the grieving components are easier for the average person to identify with, perhaps the answer unto itself.  And I still need that support sometimes.  It's still a thing.  I'm not sure how to ask for it without depressing my audience, and I do not usually cede that information without being directly prompted.  And most unfortunately, many times I don't even realize until later that I needed that support in that moment, until it catches up with me later when I'm finally alone where I can have a good cry or ask Andy just to hold on to me for a little while, without either of us saying a word.  

And I've said this all, too, that there are many cases besides myself where people are in the middle of an invisible battle.  Can we ask each other how we are and be earnestly interested in the answer?  Can we stop ourselves from internally rolling our eyes when someone struggling with any condition that they haven't just "gotten over it yet"?  I don't mean to infer that we should exhaust ourselves to tend to everyone's every little concern, but that we should act with compassion to all persons and be open when that special attention is required.  

I celebrate how far I have come and those who have helped me through those especially difficult moments.  I celebrate what adventures lay before me.  I still walk through this world a day at a time, trying to make what sense of it I can.