Let’s have coffee in pajamas, because I can’t get pants on yet.

I am having my coffee in a disposable cup with a lid even because it is safer for me to have hot liquids contained. And I wore pants yesterday for six hours, I am not doing that today.

Here is what I have been doing since we last had coffee.

Latest Project:
Recovering from surgery. Which I am clueless as to what to do and how to do it. What does it mean to take it easy and refrain from activity? I am supposed to walk, but stop if my body aches or feels heavy. Keep active, but don’t do too much. Don’t lift, don’t carry, don’t bend too much, no squatting, but walk. So I wander outside and I go up and downstairs. I take my camera outside, but then I forget and I start to bend and stand too much. And I fret. I fret about the surgery failing. I fret that one morning I am going to find my bladder escaping again. I overthink every activity I do or don’t do.

What I am Writing:
I took my journal with me to surgery. I started to write the minute we were seated in the dark and icky admissions waiting room at 4:45 am. I wrote fast and hard and filled pages. I wrote while on the pre-op stretcher waiting for the nurse to start my IV. He blew the vein. I wrote waiting for the IV expert. I knew that writing would keep me focused and calm. I wrote with a mission to remember. I wrote in my brain while I was still conscious in the operating room, and I started to write in my brain during my extended stay in the recovery room. I have taken pages of notes since I have been home. I am not ready to write about the surgery yet and the impact of pelvic organ prolapse, but I will. I want my granddaughters and every woman to have this information on my experience. One in five women will experience prolapse. One in five.

What I am Reading:
I realize now that what I read the first three weeks of surgery, I have to reread. No retention at all. Week five I am feeling connections being made in my brain. The surgeon reminded me that it was a huge surgery. For many hours I was inverted on my head to allow robotic access, it takes a long time for the body to calibrate back to normal. I have a stack of books to read, but the one that has stopped me in my tracks is on my Kindle. I am reading “Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World” by Tim Ferriss. I am only on the third mentor and have taken a pages of notes and want to have a dining room book gathering (not club or study) to explore this gem with snacks and coffee. If it is a gathering and not a study, we can be informal and pet dogs as well as talk about the book. And I have never been much a club person.

How am I feeling?
Roller coaster. I hate roller coasters. I nosedived a week ago today. The prior evening my neighbor harassed me about my “weeds” alongside our garage. She feigned interest in my recovery and then laid into me about the weeds. Even now, just writing about it, my body is cascading with a stress response, tightness in the chest, accelerated heart rate, which tells me I need to keep writing about it. By all that is holy, don’t be an asshat to someone who is recovering from major surgery.

I shook for most of the night. And you can say “don’t let it bother you” but is that healthy? I have been told that I have a great capacity to nurture and love, if I lose that so asshats don’t bother me, that is not a solution. If I lose the gift of empathy, then I have become part of the cold and uncaring world. If you cut me I will bleed. I will get back up, but I will still shake and bleed.

The next day I crashed and burned. Bad. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. I was dehydrated and the deep slippery pit I was in was getting darker. I felt despair and rage. I was tired of living in a world without Justin. I was tired of living with the weight of grief. I was tired of living in a small town of narrow minded people more concerned with their lawn being perfect than living in community. I was tired of living in a body I didn’t understand.

Doug stayed home from work and did what many people won’t do for someone gripped with darkness. He crawled in the darkness with me and talked to me, he recognized that there was hurting human burrowed under that mound of blankets. He did not tell me to pull myself together, or be happy, or be grateful, he didn’t tell me anything. He did the hard thing. He listened to me spewing that I did not feel safe in our backyard anymore, that someone is always watching me, he listened as I tried to articulate that the little Eden we had created was no longer a place of peace. There was a snake hissing at me and it felt evil.

And then he said two words, “stockade fence.” The first hint of a rope ladder into my pit. “This we could do?” me from the burrow.

“Yes.”

“Can we go measure?” Reaching for that rope ladder of hope, a ladder of options, I climbed out, shaking, but I was up. Walking the yard, looking like two days post-op instead of four weeks post-op, I could see the possibilities. I am still not back to the where I was before my neighbor’s visit, I am having to work extra hard at meditation and feeling safe in the backyard.

What I am Remembering:
“First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.”
C. S. Lewis

Writing is sanity for me, like photography and gardening, I need to write. I had forgotten.

I am out of words, out of coffee, and my feet are cold. Thanks for having coffee with me, I will write more soon. We are twenty-eight days away from the ninth anniversary of Justin’s death, writing will help me grapple with the how is that even possible.

Love, Terri