• Saturday •
Bored by the usual things so need to do the not-usual things? I walked, sans chaperone, from Mark’s house to the little market near the park — high adventure, for coffee, as I’m not three weeks out from a total hip replacement. My sense of vulnerability, uncertainty, a bit of boredom and hopelessness — all those post-surgical feelings continue. But I’ve found some things to occasionally tap my attention. It is difficult still to imagine yoga. But by next week, maybe? A week ago walking this far still seemed not possible and it was not possible, but now I’ve come this far. But what about patience?
I don’t know who I am anymore, is that true? is that a post-surgical feeling? I want to change. What is change? So much anxiety. But I know what anxiety is, have learned to wait for it to subside. Do I need drugs? No. Am I sleepy? No. I still find myself sleeping deeply each night and am surprised by that. Yesterday evening — unbearable anxiety attack (but one bears it) — heart racing — I lay on the bed to listen to the relaxation tape. Gradually a weird crunched-up sorrow arrived, my face contorted into an unfamiliar shape, and tears. Not sobs; a crunched-up set of tears. I feel that I am afraid to feel. This is not like me. Feelings — feel — distant. Except for anxiety, which swallows me whole. Social anxiety too. Shall I write this in public? Oh, and the not knowing what to write, for whom or why. That’s not bad. But — but what? I need to send a note of thanks to Claudia. I keep forgetting.
I am jealous of everything. (Is that true?) I bought myself presents. For three days I’ve felt myself wanting to BUY something, to have a package come to me in the mail, to have something new arrive. I observed my desire to acquire curiously — why, exactly? Shopping — online shopping — to relieve boredom? I didn’t buy a book, not clothes either — no clothes until all my parts are functioning fully and I’m “myself” again in body. I bought a keychain and a backpack. That sounds childish, now that I say it here. September, back-to-school type things. For children, in adult versions. Was it seasonal impulse to buy? It wasn’t. Surgical intervention is traumatic. In all of my preparatory research and planning, I neglected — I didn’t fully absorb the reckoning with the emotional impact of the transformation — of the “controlled trauma”, as my surgeon put it. The first thing I asked the nurse, coming up from the anaesthesia (“deep sedation”, actually, plus a spinal) was “What do they do with the bones?” She didn’t tell me, but I know they incinerate.
Last night, finally, I could bring myself to watch short animations of the surgery — no muscle, fat, blood, scalpels, saws, or sutures, just sanitized disembodied animations focused on excision of the diseased bone and the settling of the implant. I’m shocked that there is a foreign material in me that’s now mine to own and care for, invisible to me as my own bones were, but now working in me. It’s as though it isn’t true. I said a guilty and loving farewell to the old parts a day or two before the surgery. I can walk now without pain in my hip, any pain comes from the muscles and tendons relearning old shapes — shapes compromised a long time by the rigidity of the hip. Lots of people do this: in the U.S. alone 400,000 people each year.
If I didn’t do it now, by next year walking any distance at all would have been impossible. Mark spent a lot of last year planning a course on the Civil War, and I followed along as he gathered knowledge. What’s come to me most often during this period of convalescence is a kind of horror and sorrow for those soldiers having lost limbs or parts of limbs or undergoing any kind of field hospital surgery or recovery, sans anesthesia, without — my god, how could anyone do it? Uncontrolled trauma. Strange collapse of distance, to find myself weeping for the wounded soldiers of the Civil War. Except how fresh those cuts and their causes still are. Other frailties have made themselves more clear to me now also. That’s another subject.
Far-away friends were visiting last night to give a reading, I couldn’t go to the event (too soon), but was able to spend an hour or two with them talking. That was something.
