Yesterday Ben and I watched a sternotomy on utube. Yes, this is the major surgical procedure I had done two months ago to remove the baseball sized thymoma in my chest. Hey, I'm curious! I've always enjoyed science, I loved disecting frogs in middle school and when those mad-science people did presentations at assemblies I was the first to get in line to touch the organs (did they really let 5th graders touch a cadaver's brain?? I guess it must have been fake, come to think of it.)
At the time it didn't seem like a big deal to me to watch the sternotomy. The fact that Ben was watching it, and had even initiated it, now that was the real shock. The poor guy has been desensitized since the good ol' days in college when he sat in pre-natal development class slumped in his chair with his hoodie pulled up over in head, looking like he might faint. Two children and a couple surgeries later and he's immune it would seem!
So the video was pretty interesting. I won't go into too much detail but I really had not considered beyond "cracking open the chest" what all a sternotomy entails - and mine included the bonus of a couple ribs being accidentally severed and a lower neck disection to remove thyroid cancer on the trachea! It's all pretty intesnse and really incredible to think a body can recover from such a procedure.
So today I feel reflective. I have a newfound and profound respect for my body and what it is capable of going through. Following a wonderful but stressful year of business start-up and care-providing, the loss of that business and our home, among other personal and relational losses, being literally in the middle of moving into a new apartment, I was very fatigued. And then I got the phone call that a routine scan came back with scary results requiring urgent attention. And then this intense surgery, in which the very core of the body is basically torn apart, assaulted and abused, then wired and glued shut as if to prevent the telling of it's awful story..
And then at some point during the past couple weeks when I was at a very low point in the healing process I contracted a virus and was sent to the ER for testing, where I all but begged to be admitted to the hospital, convinced I would die if they sent me home. I honestly thought I was dying. No, really. I started planning and arranging in my head how to practically deal with leaving my family and this known world. This is the most sobering things I have ever experienced. I'm not sure how to talk about it yet.
But today marks three consecutive days of feeling like I am gonna be ok and I'm starting to believe it! Especially after watching the utube video last night. Wow. It amazes me that we (people, individuals, humanity in general) keep going in the face of adversity. I know I am not the first or the only one to go through major life struggles, consider that I might not make it through, and then see the light at the end of the tunnel only to attempt to leave it all behind like a bad dream. And I guess that's the natural coping mechanism at work but I think there is also much value in remembering, at least to some extent, the trauma of the hell one has walked through - even if only to remind myself that I am strong and there is something or someone, a power, a love so great in and beyond myself which exists with or without my existence or belief, but is made more beautiful through both my being and my believing. My life is borrowed, it is a peice of the Whole. I hold it only breifly. To present it authentically, lovingly, graciously back to the Whole through life and in death. That is what I see as the ultimate existence.
Some great examples: My brother Caleb, Mother Theresa, Henri Nouwen, Brother Lawrence, and my current "teacher", Thich Nhat Hanh.
