Dear Friends, I want to thank you all for your words of encouragement, your sage advice, and your prayers. Most especially, I want to thank you for your prayers. A habitual prayer and meditator myself, I find suddenly that I haven’t much strength in me to engage in communion with the greater spirit. When I start, all I do is find myself weeping, or reviewing Bob’s bowel history, or thinking about the post operative instructions, and I find myself unable to listen and attend to matters of the spirit in a way that I usually do. So it does help to know that you have things covered for me in the meantime. I read your letters and your comments, I take your advice, and I listen to you. Somehow, your words are breaking through the static in my brain. And that’s just about all I can hear right now. So thank you.

 

The day following the surgery was horribly frightening. At 2 am Bob woke in severe pain, as the anesthesia had finally worn off. I had read about this, and learned that this was a very important time for him to try walking to loosen himself up a bit. He made it halfway across our hotel room, then returned to the bed to sit down, feeling dizzy. I stood in front of him talking to him, and then his body simply collapsed onto me. His eyes stared straight ahead, and he was completely rigid. I screamed his name and tried to lie him down on the bed so I could call for help. In just as much time, he returned to consciousness, sat up, and looked at me like I was a blithering lunatic.

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Bobby? Are you with me? Something happened! Something’s not right!”

“Everything’s fine. Why are you acting this way?”

And no sooner did he say those words than he fell into my arms again. I am certain there are many of you who read this who have been through such experiences, but this was all new for me.

“Bobby? Bobby!? Please! Please Bobby! I need you to come back to me!” The rigidness of his body was frightening, but his face was most terrifying for me. When we look at our loved ones, even when they are unwell, even when they are sleeping, upon their face and written deep within their eyes, and in the lines of their skin, are all the memories, all the emotions they have. And as I laid him back on the bed, all that memory was gone. His jaw hung open and stiff, those eyes completely unseeing, those emotions and stories written by life in the lines of his face completely vanished. I grabbed the hotel phone and asked the main desk to call the medical center where he’d had the surgery. In that time, he had came back to consciousness again, sat up, and stared at me once more like I was a neurotic fool.

“What’s the matter with you?” His memories were back. His awareness was there.

“Something’s wrong Bobby. Please stay with me. Please stay with me.” And with that, he fell forward into my arms once more. Again, it all slipped away, his face once more stripped of his history. I felt for his pulse. I found it just as the front desk called. They only had the number for the secretary’s desk at the surgical center, so they had called an ambulance. With Bob slung forward on my shoulder, I inched him back to a lying down position. I scattered my papers until I found the emergency number for his anesthesiologist. I got her on the phone, and the ambulance arrived at the same time.

 

So that morning, I learned that’s what passing out looks like. It is frightening as hell. His blood pressure had dropped too low for him to stand or sit. He needed food and water, and lots of it. The paramedic asked me for the names of the painkillers he was using. I showed him the bottle.

“What does he usually do for pain?”

“Arnica.” (I didn’t mentioned that I generally make a tallow salve with herbs…I didn’t need them taking me in, too.)

“There’s no way his system can handle this.”

 

Conscious when laying down, Bob remained in bed for the rest of the morning while I took every bit of food from the breakfast buffet and pushed it down his stomach. He was a good sport about it, poor guy. I had forgotten to eat in all the stress, and once the room was vacant once more, I began having seizures again as my body worked to shake out the adrenaline. I, too, needed food. My brain needed fat to restore function. There is nothing so horrible as food that your body needs and doesn’t want. Especially powdered eggs and factory farmed sausage patties. But we forced it down, thankful to have at least that much. We waited the eight hours the paramedic told us it would take to get the painkillers out of his system, then I picked up a rental car, found a health food store, spent $300 on groceries that would last for three meals, and drove him out here to a condo on Sanibel Island, where he can watch birds, a helpful distraction since the guy now has to go through recovery with nothing more than ibuprofin. I was able to find a farmers’ market, and now I can cook his food.

 

 

Here, we are eating well and he his resting better. And here, I am learning to stop taking life day by day. For now, it has to be minute by minute. I cannot seem to concentrate to read a book, to think about my big writing projects, my perpetual entrepreneurial ventures. The only thing I can focus on is the next meal, and whether or not my husband needs to go to the bathroom, and my knitting.

 

 

This is a minor surgery. A blip. A routine repair. To read my posts, one would think I was confronting a major, dramatic event. But I’ve never been through anything like this before with someone so close to me. I’ve been very lucky. There is a hubrice that I have carried along my natural, holistic, health-centered life, even when I have thought I was empathetic to the suffering of others. Somehow, while I would never consciously admit it, I wanted to believe that living the good life absolved me from such trials. Not so. But in truth, the life is still good, even though those trials are still part of it. We are eating well, now. I am free to give Bob all the time and care he needs. My family is taking care of me from afar, my friends are calling and writing. But I will never hear news of surgery for anyone I know again, without comprehending the suffering and angst they and their loved ones endure. This is just another part of growing up, I guess. Meanwhile, I am making some unbelievable progress on that sweater I was telling you about…