Packing a Wound

We're going to start with some medical stuff up front.  I'll understand if you want to skip down to the bold below, right to the reason I want to bring it up as a metaphor today.  

When my bowel resection surgery failed, we had some immediate and catastrophic fallout to manage.  It was a relief when I heard I was going back to surgery, mostly because I was very ready to be unconscious again, which promised to hurt considerably less, but also because we had a course of action, and I tend to feel better to have a plan.

Waking up was a bit of a different story.  There was a lot to sort out, and the pain hadn't exactly evaporated, just changed.  In order to clean out all of the spillage in my abdominal cavity, I had a couple of deep incisions where organs were literally rinsed with sterile saline and carefully repacked again.  It is pretty much impossible for them to have cleared EVERYTHING out, so there was a lot of resulting infection yet, hence a number of surgical drains, but those large, deep gashes, those were something.  I'm talking about five inches long and almost an inch deep for one of them.  

These couldn't just be sewn shut--with all of the rampant infection, that area was sure to spawn its own, all of those exposed, vascularized tissues a veritable playground for opportunistic bacteria.  Instead, these wounds had to be packed, unpacked, repacked, until they closed.  

Packed with what, I hear you ask in my mind.  Sterile gauze or gauze soaked in some kind of antimicrobial.  It could be a square of something or a long string of something.  In my case, the gauze was about a quarter-inch wide and we would lay the first piece along the whole bottom of the incision, hit a side and reverse back, folding the fabric back and forth until it had completely filled that space and then covering that with sterile gauze to protect the wound.  

Every few hours, we would change the packing.  We would remove the outside covering and gently pull the strip all the way out.  This was painful, especially in the beginning, but when we got to the end, I was always a little amazed at how much pus and grossness had made its way on to the end of that gauze just in that short amount of time.  It sucked but, boy, it was clearly necessary.  Even that bit left to its own devices even for a couple days could turn into a huge problem.  

Bear with me just a moment longer.

Slowly, we needed less and less gauze as the edges creeped together in a bright pink scar.  It hurt less the shallower the stretch became, but we still had to unpack and repack regularly.  This allowed the wound to close without any additional infection as well as keep a close eye on these vulnerable spaces.  This whole process can also work for abscesses created in the body, that after the initial infection is drained, we cannot leave the gap to its own devices, instead packing it and repacking it until it can close healthfully.  Even if you haven't had this degree of abscess, think about the most painful pimple you've ever had and what a relief it was when it was finally cleaned out--there's a level of empathy, here.

Here's the point:  

I'm a bottler when it comes to emotions.  Or more accurately, I suppose I'm a recovering bottler.  I remember being told when I was newly diagnosed with Crohn's that stress could make it worse.  My twelve-year-old brain internalized this as "I'm not allowed to have negative feelings or I'll make myself sick."  Even today, I stress a bit more about stressing out than I would like.  However, those "bad" emotions were still valid and still needed to be discharged.  Swallowing them again and again eventually creates an emotional abscess.  The feelings themselves are not harmful, but the chronic holding and ignoring of them for decades and all else, that's where the cumulative effect can putrefy.  

Bottling creates an emotional abscess.  All that blah and the stress of holding on to it can become a HUGE pocket.  Sometimes it leaks out a bit:  I find that when a small thing sets me off (e.g. going Office Space on my printer), that in reality it just happened to be that one final thing, not the whole stack of things I wasn't dealing with.  Things I would normally be able to take in stride become that one thing too many, and I bite back with momentary vitriol before I can tamp it back down.  

When I started to really look into the depths, to THOROUGHLY clean out space, oof, there was a lot of purulence to purge.  Grief on top of grief; anger and frustration; trauma; pouring out in wordless, violent sobs.  It sucked.  A lot.  

But just like draining an abscess, it was healthier to purge it out.  There was a lot of relief in that moment, too.  And it was going to require a few more times, yet, to clean out the depths of it.  The longer I let it go, the more that needed addressed.  Simultaneously, the more I routinely clean it out, I find three things:  

1. All the blah doesn't leak out unexpectedly, meaning I'm less likely to have a random breakdown in front of the white bread at the grocery store or otherwise snap out in anger to a loved one.  
2. It slowly hurts less and less to clear it out, also taking less time--maintenance rather than full excavation.
3. The wound will slowly get smaller, the more attention and compassion I show it by keeping it clean.  

Inevitably, there will be things that have to be stored in the moment--like when a client says something that you cannot respond to with your true interpretation of their suggestion--but it's a discipline to keep the long-term storage tidy.  If you're considering the burden of things you've been carrying, the hardest part is seeing the extent of the space and those first handfuls of true excavations.  Taking some off the top still helps, too, if you cannot get to the deep parts in the moment, but the true cure is in the repetition.  Pack it cleanly; pack it often, but not too often as to leave yourself constantly raw.  

The scar will remain--the incident never completely forgotten--but we learn how to carry it better, a rolling suitcase rather than a rope around our neck.  In other words, this is not to say that I would never carry anything negative ever again, but more that the infection is under control, that I am feeling a much more reasonable level of burden rather than the one I'd grown accustomed to.  The body moves and operates much better without a raging infection; so does the mind.  

Debride.  Flush.  Pack.  Tend.  Treat.  Repeat.  Heal.