Seven Months out from surgery today! It seems like forever, but I know it is not really that long in any real perspective. I feel a bit like I’ve gone from newborn to a seven-month old in terms of the leaps of knowledge that have occurred. I’ve gone from, “I don’t know,” to “I don’t know and that’s all right.” Grin. I know how to smile and laugh and sit up now. Of course, I write metaphorically. I could do those things within coming out of anesthesia in the hospital, but now I seem to understand the reality of what’s going on a bit better.
Here’s the thing: They weren’t kidding when they said it would take a long time to heal. Considering how much better and brighter I felt within weeks of the brain surgery, I did have the hubris to believe that I was all better more than once along the way. What I have learned is that the things I am able to do, and the things I ought to do are not a necessary match in the scope of self-care, and real holistic health. I am able to do pretty much anything I want, even write, but my constant temptation to show this to myself and anyone in my periphery is dangerous to my full recovery. I’ve paid for over-doing time and time again since the beginning of summer time because I am stubborn about my ability and not stubborn about my rest. I am trying, trying to switch this in my thinking and planning, but am really an amateur at knowing what schedule I can really handle and I know there is so much I want to be that rest, meh, seems like a Universal manipulation to undo my ambition to be frank, and yet...
When I do too much, and I write this for anyone recovering from serious surgery, I pay for it. There is no recourse. I am down and out, and it isn’t from major efforts. It is from efforts I consider normal, like seeing friends, taking on a little more work, and generally expecting myself to be productive. I can’t do that yet. It seems insane to me most of the time to say, “No, thanks, I’m not up for it,” when I feel fine. But just because I feel fine after a good low-down time, does not mean I will feel fine after I do the most mundane things to “catch-up” with one thing or another. In fact, I will be knocked out. I am susceptible to colds and headaches, like everyone else who is overdone, but what I am most susceptible to is exhaustion, and it feels disappointing and pathetic to me sometimes.
I really understand how frustrated babies must feel when they cannot do yet what they want to do. It is just around the bend, so close, but sitting up alone, or standing up at the coffee table is simply not a solo act yet for them. Eating chewy foods are out of the question. Ah, the life of a babe. It seems from the very start of life we are in a rush to catch up and catch on and perform. Is it even possible, within our nature, to be calm and enjoy being slow, and being where we are at? Maybe only if we are surrounded by folks who are in exactly the same place and that doesn’t happen ever, and I suspect even then we’d compete to see who elevated off the floor first.
How can I limit myself, and admit that I cannot take on a normal life when I want a normal life? It is not possible. I just keep edging forward until I fall. I cry like a big baby at the feeling of failure. Then I do it again! I really believe this is the nature of our being and to pretend that I’m going to acquiesce to self-limitation until I am better is like putting a child in a car seat and never unbuckling him. I’m going to fall over and have a few bruises and need some recovery time, but each time my determination enters that recovery time sooner. I remember that my potential for accomplishing my dreams is as important as lying down to lick my wounds.
Today, I am in bed with laryngitis, but lack the interest in staring blankly out the window has caused me to write, when drawing out on the dining room table seems too energetic. I will not last all day here. The person I want to be whispers in my ears constantly, “Get up and see what happens...” like the "Cabaceo" look of a gentleman who'd like to dance with me.
It has nearly been a full month since I had my skull opened and the little-gray-ball-of-dirty-laundry removed. What a month! It started with what I can only describe as partial delirium. I was so happy to have the thing out of my head, and I suppose the morphine, and anesthesia sort of had me on a different plain of perception for a while. Yet, I was a lot less delirious than I had really expected to be, to be honest.
Fionn, the Modern Muse
Soon after surgery I woke up and in my daze recognized and remembered where I was and what had just happened. I saw my ancient Neurologist, Dr. Philip Yarnell, across the room and shouted out a, “Hello, Dr. Yarnell!” to him, and I think that sort of surprised him and he came right over and tested how I was responding to left and right movements like touching my nose with my eyes closed with the fingers he chose, and moving my toes. Afterwards, he said, “Yep, you’re going to be just fine.”
At that point I felt no pain but I was terribly thirsty and so I asked for water, but all they could give me was ice cubes to suck on and little sponges to dip into water and suck on. So I did. This was followed by my husband and father bounding into the big room together with smiles on their faces, delighted that I was so chirpy.
Then my Neurosurgeon, Dr. Mark Robinson, walked in to talk to them, and as they talked, I felt some kind of relieving sleepiness. I remember Dr. Robinson pointing at my head, and nodding and I remember them asking some questions and him answering, but I have no real memory of the words, even though I am pretty sure I participated in the conversation as if I were very intelligent indeed. Har.
I was taken care of in Intensive Care for a surprising two days. I say it was surprising only because apparently they expected I’d be going home after two days, and that didn’t quite happen. As good as their intentions were, some things got kind of icky.
Devora is Awake
Before I go there, I want to tell you that I did something very important to my recovery unbeknownst to the medical folks. In secret I took a large dose of Arnica the morning before surgery and then when I got to my ICU room I had Michael bring me a second large dose of Arnica. This homeopathic medication has helped me in previous medical crises (oral surgery, and a hysterectomy) to recover super-fast and very well, with little bruising. I encourage you to sincerely consider finding more about it if you’re facing surgery. Unfortunately, you cannot discuss it with a surgeon or the nursing staff because they don’t work with it, and will rule against it. Someday, I hope this will change because I've healed fast enough to get wide eyes from the doctors...
In ICU, meanwhile, they were pumping me full of Morphine and all kinds of other medications that my body is not fond of at all. Sadly. By the time it was dark outside, I was vomiting in a little pail the nurse quickly provided for me. As I was recovering she started putting in an intravenous dose of Dilantin. If you don’t remember how badly I reacted to the first time I took Dilantin, let me say that my reaction to this way of taking the medication was near paralysis. I made her take it out after only a 1/4th of the dose was given and I could feel it as it climbed up my arm and into my head, like a march of pick axes within my veins. I screamed. I admit it. I screamed. I shouted at her that this was not the way we were going to do anything. I asked her if she had bothered to give me any antihistamines or Zantac (could this be why I was throwing up, perhaps???). What followed is that I had to review with every shift nurse exactly how the medication business was going to work, and I would not let them use the intravenous hoses for anything but water and anti-nausea medications. I stopped taking the morphine and moved to oral Percocet and oxycodone. I didn’t really care if I had a little more pain. I was very self-advocating and protective.
Meanwhile, the left side of my face swelled up like a puffer fish. I got a black eye that I could barely open. Frankly, I think I had a severe allergic reaction to the entire experience. I looked no different in those moments than I had when I’d reacted to the cotton harvest on my Pretty Pa’s combine in the Rio Grande Valley some 42 years earlier. I had to build up all the anti-histamines in my system and the hospital pharmacy didn’t actually carry one of the anti-histamines, nor the Zantac I’d been taking leading up to the surgery, so my dear husband had to go to the grocery store and purchase what I needed. The hospital didn’t even have the oral Dilantin to fill in the missing 3/4s of a dose of it for several hours.
After two days they moved me to a regular room and they removed the blessed catheter and I was able to move around my room when I rung up the nurse to remove whatever IV was hooked up, the blood pressure arm squeeze and the ever-marching leg thingies. Ah. That was such a blessing. Finally, a neurosurgeon on call at the hospital came and cut the gauze turban off of me, and told me I could take a shower. Hallelujah! I thought I’d be going home right afterwards, but apparently, not.
All this time, my husband sat quietly next to me, reading his phone in the dark or daytime. I must have slept now and then, but I don’t remember sleeping lots.
Another two days went by. I watched some television and really couldn’t perceive how so many stupid infomercials could exist. I tried to watch news, but settled on The Weather
Oriah Enjoys the Lake
Channel. That was the only television that made a lot of sense to me. Passing storms, wind, sunshine and snow. I would then dream of the sets of shows and watch people walk in and out of these sets that were actually their lives, and how the world beyond the sets they believed in was totally different, open to change, neutral. The sets were set, but they were not true reality. They were perceptions that had thin walls, and the potential of being blown away in storms. Beyond the sets was a world or a dimension of reality that had not been decided on yet, and I could walk in it.
Another set of dreams I had placed me back in 1996, when I was at another turning point. After eleven years in a difficult and abusive marriage, I had determined that I had to begin living my own life and pursuing the things I was truly interested in. I had done three years of weekly therapy and was meditating daily and my creative spirit was expanding in many new directions. My dream then was to write very artistic, visual scripts about lives that were not easy, poetry and to create a new Tarot Deck called “The Cosmic Egg”. I was ready to consider leaving my first husband (now wasband) and even our house that I had painted wall murals and re-landscaped with a triskelion and a fire pit, a forest of gingkoes and redwoods, California poppies and tea tree bushes. Still the only person who knew that my husband was abusive was my therapist, and so when my therapist became abusive and insisted that I wanted to have an affair with him, my evolution unraveled rather quickly.
Within four months I went from my first steps towards independence backwards into a desire to be approved of by supporting my husband, and even finally fulfilling his wish to have a family. I turned my therapist in to the board, and I gave my husband a cut up condom for his birthday. I went from being a part-time freelancer with time to paint and write, to a full-time publishing consultant with no time to even mother the child I was pregnant with, so that by the end of the year I would have a personal assistant, a housekeeper, a gardener, and a year later a nanny. I insisted giving up the house with my murals painted, and moved into a swanky Spanish Colonial that may have once been a boarding house to Charles Bukowski on the two block street named after my favorite inventor, Nikolai Tesla. I went from $25 dollars in the bank to making $15k a month. Yes, all of this really happened that quickly. It was all for approval from my first husband, from my friends at the time, from my parents, and I got it. And, it undid my chosen road very precisely.
Alma in Her Habitat
Oddly, the dreams I had were very much about saying good-bye to those mistakes peacefully and accepting that my dreams continued painfully, like a forgotten and downgraded pavement next to the approved highway, throughout the last fifteen years. The dreams continued to be alive even if they were fought against as distractions from cleaning the house and taking care of my children and seeking approval from everyone. In one dream I told my husband of 1996 that I loved him, but that it was time to move on. In other dreams I made peace with my children and told them that their independence was crucial to me.
The doctors sent me home from the hospital on the fifth day, and the dreams continued in my hour and a half naps, and even as I was awake until they felt processed and comprehended. I found it hard to concentrate on “reality” to the point where I was occasionally overly grumpy at the disturbance of life to the unconscious realm I had such good connection with for the moment. I hate to admit that I occasionally snapped, and apparently this is common for people recovering from brain surgery. The word patience is hardly enough for making a commitment to decide whether to stay in dreamland or start coming into reality.
Making these dream-level departures from the decisions I made in 1996 has been such a relief, but has also unleashed years of frustration and anger over carrying the weight of a life that led me away from my true self. Yet, in just a month I have some sense that I am reuniting with myself, putting my feet on the abandoned road, after years of pounding my head against the wall of approval...could this be the reason for the tumor? So, as I’ve come out of the haze of medications, and gotten confirmation that the tumor was indeed benign and that it had been caught early enough to have no lasting damage, I have hope unlike any hope I’ve had for fifteen years. Though, certainly, there are temporary setbacks like the pain and lack of rest, and that the left side of my face feels like it is just coming off of Novocaine -- all the time. I feel confident that I’ve turned a corner again and found myself in the realm where the sets of my life haven’t been completely determined and there is the potential to create some new and simple realities that are better aligned with who I am now. Where the road I'm now on can find the door to this set.
I have been practicing artwork again on a daily basis, and thinking about the off-formula stories I’m always intrigued by, but had learned to reject in favor of an approved formula that I've grown to hate. I’ve been resting and waking at all hours of the day or night. I’ve been watching how my daughter, Bea, is increasingly aware of the world she is entering as a new adult, and wears her grief over her lost childhood. Then also I’ve been watching how my younger son, Lio, is already aware of some aspects of adulthood that excite him to the point where he’s leaped ahead of the family at age eleven to webbify his life with video streaming, video chats and group games.
Dear Quimby in Pastel Land
My wasband has been as supportive as he can be, and taken time with the children that I normally would have had. He is who he is still, and they’ve both had terrible colds that lasted longer than a week and needed some Mommified assistance. So, both children have had extra days here and there, but only one at a time.
Finally, my dear husband has been carrying the load of my transportation, childcare and household upkeep for some six months now, and has concurrently become increasingly responsible for projects at work. He’s like a Lancelot, courageously determined to see that things get done because they need to get done, and at the same time exhausted, and falling into the river of forgetfulness because there is just too much on his mind. Now, poor man has collapsed with fatigue and the caught bug of his step-children.
This leaves me, only me, to be fully conscious and begin taking care of business, too. I’m glad to say that I can to some degree, and that what I can’t do, I’m actually fine about not receiving approval. This is a leap for me. I will hang on more determinedly to the emerging unconscious knowledge I’ve always had and hidden from by trying other roads that might be worthy of rewards outside of me. This, for me, is real healing because finally I comprehend that the road I'm on now leads me to my own door.
In case you missed what I was getting at, by sitting in my frozen fallow field, and in case I missed it (which is more than entirely likely) it is this: My writing vocation cannot come without grave sacrifice. Geez. This is not what I want to hear from my unconscious mind. I want my ease and effortless now! I didn't know that this is what "sacrifice" meant. Can I give my calling back now? No? Shoot.
This is what it is like: My daughter wants extra money for a field trip, and I have to say, "No, sorry, honeybee. Mommy is a writer." My son wants some new food treat at the store as I am frugally buying groceries, and I have to say, "No, sorry, little peach. Mommy is a writer." I would like to buy a new winter coat, and I have to say to myself, "Get real. There is no extra money while you are developing this writing. No, you can't buy a bottle of wine. No, there is no vacation yet. No, don't expect little goose-bump treats and surprises while you are laboring in the field of writing." It is either, "No," or it is giving up on my calling. It is agonizing to understand this fully now, late in the game, and to look at the big picture of my life and to comprehend that nothing will change until I fully accept this bill.
So when someone excitedly announces to the world that they've been "called" to do something, I am not likely to be the one who cheerfully high fives them. I'm the sober one in the corner, thinking, "uh oh." I know it is possible that had I answered this call, made these sacrifices when I was much younger and less obligated to be responsible that it might have felt differently. All I can say, is that I was doing the best I could under the circumstances, and this is the first moment in my life when I felt that, "Now, it is possible to focus on that calling." That may be the way it is happening for you, or maybe your calling is buoyed by a different kind of angel-winged support. At any rate, I do believe that old saying that "nothing good comes without a sacrifice." It is just unpredictable what will be demanded of us.
I know that I am lucky beyond measure to find myself in a supportive relationship. Even my children will back down from their age-appropriate demands when I say, "I'm writing." I have friends who are equally good writers working nearly full-time to support themselves while they write. They may not have children at home, but they have bills to pay. The sacrifice is always there.
There are no guarantees. I may write into this void until my dying days, but it is somehow a requirement of my soul. Freeing myself from the fantasy, that I can serve everyone else’s needs and desires instead of writing, or still writing, is terrible. I have spent the better part of a year second-guessing this lesson that’s been poking around my heart. While I have made easy money before in my life, it was strange and dehumanizing to me. This experience, even sitting in the frozen, fallow field of my dreams is very human feeling, and, for even this truth alone, I am grateful for the sacrifice and my good fortune to follow it to its end. I hope by setting this example that my children will have the grace to follow their dreams early and ruthlessly, but I know that every person has her own journey on the spiral staircase. I hope that my orchard of peaches, my writings, will one day bring pleasure to those who stumble upon them. I feel like these are not fantasies. I hope I’m right.
Moonlight is reflective, of course, and is not the source by which an orchard grows. Even so the ancients worshiped the moon's light on a dark night. I cannot imagine a more lovely vision than sitting in a mature peach orchard in the moonlight. And, as I contemplate this reflection of the sun, I happen upon a clue to my orchard's design. While I may be suffering from a lack of connection to my ultimate purpose, I can be reflective of the concepts I study and care about in the dark, even if I can't find the switch to that inner sun.
The senses play a different hierarchy in the dark. Sight turns inward, and smells and sounds take the lead. Tactile senses, touch and taste, can be challenging because using them at all requires trust in these new leaders. Confidence is shaken in darkness. Everything that once seemed one way no longer holds absolute. The dark night of the soul is something like this because the practices that were once filled with meaning seem to become irrelevant, and confidence in beliefs is shaken. It may be that all one has to rely on is reflective thinking rather than the bold initiatives of the active mind.
As I'm investigating the experiences of orchard growers near and far, and wondering how this metaphor can apply to the cerebral practices of a writer, I am struck that I am wandering around in the dark. Panic sets in when I realize after 27 entries of this blog series, I still am not certain about anything much. Could it be that my writing life died and I'm just now discovering the body? Who am I, if I'm not a writer? I have no replacement dreams waiting in the wings. (No, I can't actually imagine myself becoming a farmer.) I wait. I pray for a clue. Anything that might set me in some direction. I dreamt of this orchard and thought I had it in me, and though I've named them peaches, I don't actually know what that means.
I am looking for the ultimate writing prompt, and I look up and I see the sliver of moon peeking over the horizon. This sliver of moonlight is the hint I needed. The moon doesn't invent the light. It reflects with reverent beauty the light it dances with in the darkness. And as its wistful shimmering shines over the loamy earth, it creates stark shadows, and picks up the delicate dew upon the spider's new weaving. The fragile light is enough to make out the edges of an orchard that is coming...It isn't about me. It's a reflection.
I allow myself to think big dreams. Lately I’ve been withdrawing from the world. Almost as if I’m fasting from everything and everyone who I once filled my life with frantically in an effort to steady my dreams. Now, my air and my water are my kids and my husband. I’m really at bare minimum most of the time. A part of this fasting has been to cleanse my brain of dreams that I took up over time that might not have been my own entirely. I want not to have to defend dropping them to anyone else, as I am having a hard enough time with my own discernment.
I’m trying to get down to the nut, to the pit, to the seed idea. It’s not so much going back to what I wanted to be when I grew up, as it is finding the action that swells me up with enthusiasm now. What I have found is that most of the things I come across are too small to inspire me to action. I am looking for the impossible dream, the dream that is so big it will challenge me for the rest of my life. I want to want to "Climb Every Mountain."
I have some contenders incubating right now to see if they hold up, or if they can sprout, or if they’ve been dormant too long and need to be added to the compost. I’m searching for the dream that contributes beauty to the world, serves humanity somehow for a long-time, and that is worthy of all the mistakes I’m likely to make on the path. These dreams will change lives, and that's what they're for after all.
It is a narrowing of an aperture on dreams that have been left on panoramic view for far too long, but it is still not narrowed into wide-angle, yet. You see when you're looking through a panoramic viewer then everything seems small and insignificant except when it is all together. A focus on a few big dreams and then each one gains stature. I finally realize that I can't do everything in the panorama, but I can do a few big things well. Big dreams are the ones that have the potential to sustain and maintain a life for a lifetime, and perhaps others beyond.
