I have these two scars. I've had them for over 3 years now. One runs from slightly above my navel to just above my pubic bone. The other hangs out mid-abdomen, below my belly button, on the left side, about 3 inches long, perpendicular to the first one. The first one was the result of an emergency surgery brought on by a perforated bowel from a diverticulitis attack. The second one was the closure of the temporary stoma they had to create because of the perforated bowel. They are permanent reminders of what happened to me physically; there is no forgetting. But they are also symbols of healing and compassion.
Today, September 20th, is the anniversary of my first surgery. It all started the night before, September 19th, 2016, when I was hit with excruciating pains in my lower abdomen around 9:00 pm. The pain was unlike anything I had experienced before, and I knew it was serious, and beyond troubling. It wouldn't abate. All night, I lay in bed moaning. My son was 12 at the time and could hear me from across the hall. He kept telling me to stop making the sounds. Thinking back on it, I'm filled with a rush of sympathy for the boy he was. Nobody wants to hear a parent in pain like that. Nobody. But I was stuck because I didn't want to go to the hospital and leave him alone during the night, so I was determined to stick it out. My plan was that I would drive him to school in the morning, then drive myself to the hospital. Ever the independent woman. Needless to say, my plan never happened.
Around 4 am, unable to stand the pain any longer, I texted a former boyfriend who I knew would be awake as he worked at a golf course. I texted him because I knew in my gut I would be hospitalized and I needed someone to look after my dog, Licorice. He had always liked Licorice, didn't have a dog of his own, was single, and likely able to help. He answered right away that he could take her. More texting resulted in him coming to pick not only the dog up, but me as well to take me to the hospital. So at 5:00 am, he arrived at my place. I will forever be grateful to this man for his help when I needed it most. I woke up my son to tell him I had to go to the hospital, texted his father to tell him what was happening and to make arrangements for him to come and get him in a few hours. Then we left.
The rest of this story is a surreal nightmare of sorts. Although I was given attention at the hospital fairly quickly, the next parts of the trip weren't so quick at all. I was placed on a bed in the back somewhere and lay there moaning (although a bit less with the morphine drip) for over 12 hours. Fast forward to 5:30 pm when I got up from my bed, dragged my ass and the IV pole to the nursing station and made an announcement to about 5 nurses laughing and chatting that I had had enough. They had been telling me all day that I was going to get a CT scan, even made me drink a bunch of water 2 hours prior in preparation for it. Yet it wasn't happening. In a voice that shocked me with its calmness, considering the state I was in, I told them that I didn't understand why this was taking so long, that over 10 hours had passed, that I had a known intestinal condition, that I had already been hospitalized for 4 days for this same condition 3 months prior, that I was probably sitting here with a perforated bowel. I advocated for myself with all the strength I could muster. It worked. The silence at the desk was deafening as I spoke. They all listened to me, and within 5 minutes someone came to take me for the CT scan.
After the scan, the 5 minute thing happened again. Although they told me I would likely get my results from the scan in about an hour, within 5 minutes a doctor was at my bedside informing me that they were indeed going to have to admit me because I had a perforated bowel. Fear met reality at that point for me. They wheeled me somewhere else where I waited another 5 hours to see an emergency surgeon. She told me that I had 2 options: 1. have surgery to remove my problematic sigmoid colon and have a temporary colostomy bag or, 2. wait out the night and see if the IV antibiotics would kill the infection, with the hopes that I could then have elective surgery at a later date and therefore spare me the joy of living with a colostomy bag. I chose the latter. It sounded nicer.
Over the next 24 hours, I waited to get better. My friend and her husband came to the hospital to be with me that evening, and I am forever grateful to them as well for doing that. A few friends came to see me the next afternoon, and I am forever thankful to these wonderful women too. I was starting to learn, unfortunately, that laying in a hospital bed, hooked up to an IV, being sick and scared and vulnerable is a really shitty thing. Seeing a few familiar, caring faces was a soothing balm to my fragile state.
Around 3:30 the next afternoon, a nurse came to check my temperature, and she told me it had spiked to 38.5 degrees. The 5 minute thing happened again. A group of doctors appeared at my bedside, and the surgeon that I had decided I didn't like during my previous hospitalization, looked down at me with the kindest eyes, and in the gentlest voice said, "I think you need to have surgery". I still think about and am grateful for his compassionate delivery of the news. I asked when this would happen, and he said "In about an hour". I'll never forget the panic and temporary madness that filled me as this news sunk in. Everything seemed concentrated into one point in that moment: my son. I had to text him, had to tell him I loved him, had to tell him without showing how terrified I was that I had to have surgery. I was filled with horrifying thoughts that hijacked my brain. There were many hijackers, but the most frightening of course were the ones concerning my actual life on this planet: What if I didn't make it? What if I actually died on the operating table? What would happen to my son? How would he cope? I let the thoughts do their thing for a bit, but then I decided to shut them down and go with Faith, something I don't have a lot of normally, but in that moment, I grabbed onto it like it was the biggest of life rafts in a turbulent sea. It got me through.
By 10:30 that evening, September 20th, I was back in my hospital room. This time was of course radically different, for a few reasons. For starters, I had a transparent colostomy bag attached to my abdomen and could see my actual colon ("stomie" as I would later come to know and call it intimately) resting there, swollen and pert, looking up at me. Then there were the tubes coming out of almost every orifice of my body: a catheter drained urine into a bag attached to the bed below me, an epidural and other drugs ran into the pick line they had done earlier that day, the NG tube ran from my nose to stomach (this would eventually almost drive me mental), and finally, a tube running from my abdomen into a small pouch attached to my hospital gown that collected what appeared to be blood and pus from my stomach. I was a mess. I definitely had had better days. But, on the bright side, I knew that the offending agent- my sigmoid colon that housed the diverticula that had caused me such grief off and on for years- had been removed. I would later learn that I now had 13 cm less of my colon. But I also had 13 cm less of problematic body parts, so I decided to focus on that.
There is much more that I could write about all of this (because of course the story doesn't end with my first surgery) and maybe someday I will. It was in many ways a harrowing journey, and harrowing journeys, despite their awfulness, often make for great stories. Today though, I decided to start with my "scars", and so I will end there.
As I sit here and reflect on the 4th year anniversary of my first surgery, I am filled with many feelings about my scars. When I stand in front of a mirror and look at my body, my scars look back at me and tell me things. Every time. Things about strength, courage, determination, humility, grace, suffering, pain, and yes, even love. My scars are a reminder of what I have been through, but more importantly of what I have survived. Although I think of physical pain sometimes when I look at my scars, what I mostly think about is healing and compassion. I think of the ways my body has physically healed (the human body is indeed a miracle), but I also think about the emotional healing I have gone through since then, my own personal journey to match the physical one. Another thing that happens though when I see my scars is I am suddenly filled with compassion. I can't look at my scars anymore without feeling compassion... for myself, for others, for all of the suffering that humans sometimes endure while being alive. My surgery changed me in many ways, but the opening of my heart, ironically, was one of the biggest ones.
