An interesting thing has happened since my appendix ruptured two weeks ago: I’ve developed laser focus. Before I got so sick and spent a week in the hospital recovering from post-surgery complications, I would look at my life with a long-range lens; fretting over this or that and always planning way out into the future.
Laying in a hospital bed alone changes all that. You are poked and prodded at all hours of the day and night. You fight for your very dignity as a human being, grateful beyond measure for the kindness of specific nurses and doctors. Your illusions of control melt away, water under the bridge of your own failing competence.
I learned in the hospital to take my recovery minute by minute. I’m not throwing up violently at this second? That’s a win. Five days of an awful NG tube, rubbing my throat and nose raw and meaning I can’t eat or drink until every vile, trapped thing in my stomach is vacuumed out so my nausea abates? The morning the doctors finally say it can be removed, I cry with the kind of joy I thought was only reserved for my wedding day or the births of my two children.
Life is chock full of wins and losses. Ups and downs. Strengths and weaknesses. In these last two weeks, arguably the most challenging of my life so far, my line of vision has become intensely small. Focused and specific, instead of generalized and broad.
When you don’t eat or drink for 7 days, that first taste of apple juice is the greatest sensation on earth. That spoonful of vanilla pudding that doesn’t come immediately back up. The Arrowroot baby cookie, consumed at 2 am in the milky darkness of the acute care ward with soft snores of other patients filling the air around you, was like the finest of gourmet meals to me.
My senses are awake again. Thoughts of digestion and standing up to get more water and planning out my next snack consume my day. I don’t kiss my children while thinking about my to-do list any more. Now they are so precious, standing in front of me in their summer pajamas with their hair wet from a shower, and they deserve every ounce of my attention and focus.
How many times have I heard the saying, “If you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything”? I truly didn’t understand it before, but I do now. I was a person who needed to learn to slow down, and I don’t do anything by half measures. I have been brought low by this burst appendix, the “lazy bowel” that followed surgery, then the large blood clot in my wrist from my last IV once I returned home.
Each challenge must be faced in turn. Everything else falls away. The big picture shrinks to the next hour: what I will eat, if I’m sleepy enough to have a nap, what do the kids need. I’ve learned that this is more than enough. My gratitude rises, as if on a float, to the level I allow for it. My blessings, in the form of family and friends, the ones you can really count on, become crystal clear.
The rest fades away. It truly does not matter. I am changed, from the inside out, from this hard-scrabble season of pain and struggle. I am enough for this challenge and the ones that are sure to come after it. I can endure the toughest experiences and so can you. I’m not interested in fixating on some pre-set idea of success in some far-away future anymore. What I have is this day, this moment, these people; this ballooning, expanding, growing love inside me that spreads into every corner of my small but significant world.