Emotional Side-Effects of Surgery- 1

This third surgery I had a week ago, not surprisingly, allowed me to revisit the first two, especially the last one, both emotionally and, to a point, physically.

In the week and days leading up to the surgery, although it was pretty minor, out-patient surgery, a familiar anxiety came over me. Perhaps it is unique to how I "tick," but I've often noticed that if I really look deeper than the surface-level anxiety, first I find a thin layer of just good ol' fashioned fear, which is quickly penetrated down to the underlying foundation of unprocessed grief or sadness. This was the case once again.

I do know that I've not yet processed- and maybe it will never really be done?- the general feeling of loss, the regret and the sadness of having "done this to myself"- injured myself that is. Which reveals the fact that on many levels- most levels, actually- I blame myself.

Many people in my life who love me have been over this with me. Why blame yourself? You're human. Why just create more suffering by beating up on yourself? Why not just forgive yourself?

Mentally and conceptually, I know they're right. I agree. But in my heart, the part of my heart that is still grieving, I'm not entirely done blaming myself.

I blame myself because a portion of me believes that I wouldn't have fallen that day if I hadn't gotten so lost to myself. I had continually lost more and more of myself in the previous year and four months, partly for my own reasons but largely because of an unhealthy relationship. Little by little, I had allowed myself to be diminished, to get smaller and smaller until I was so deferential and so unable to make decisions on my behalf, so able to be talked into things I wouldn't normally be talked into, that I found myself in a situation that perhaps, "normally", my gut, my intuition or just my sense of self would have saved me from.

Of course, there's no real way of knowing this for sure.

But I was certainly in a place of complete and total emotional exhaustion, total defeat, judging against myself right and left, blaming myself anything and everything that wasn't going well either in my life or in the relationship. I'd taken up smoking cigarettes (big red flag for me), was so anxious and unsettled that I'd gotten to a point of throwing up just about every morning, if not every other morning. I'd lost about 15 pounds from being so anxious I couldn't eat. And when you're not eating, your brain chemistry just keeps spiraling down. I was depressed as well as anxious. I don't think I had more than a pitiful shred of self love at that point.

Yet somewhere, I do remember a faint, burning sensation deep in my gut- the sensation of anger. That anger was my survival instinct, the last bit of self love that would not stand for this anymore. It was determined as hell. And it was slowly, ever so slowly, growing.

Ten days before I fell, the relationship ended. That little flame was beginning to burn brighter... and then my hope came crashing down again (pun intended).

As if I wasn't feeling lousy enough as it was, I blamed myself for "letting this happen" to me because I'd always considered myself a pretty smart person when it came to managing my life, following my dreams and choosing my friends wisely (as well as lovers). Although I'm intensely loyal, stubborn and have a hard time, "giving up" I should have given up on that relationship at least 6 months previous. But I didn't. I kept at it, banging my head against the wall, throwing myself up against a wall over and over, getting increasingly depressed. So as much as I know that my dedication and loyalty and love is very much why I stayed, I must recognize that at that point, I did not recognize the limits. If loyalty and dedication and love takes you to such a destructive place, than something is desperately wrong.

What I needed was to have more loyalty and dedication and love for myself, first. I needed to insist on myself. And in not doing so, I paid a dear price for it. I'm still paying that price. And somehow, I can't quite let myself off the hook for that yet.

So, to bring this back to the third surgery, these emotional layers started surfacing. Here I am, undergoing *another* surgery, reminding me of the fact, once again, that I have a bum arm. Reminding me of the day of the fall, of everything I went through since then, of the miserable place I was in previous to it. Being cut open again, put under anaesthesia again- it took me back.

"But it's such a minor surgery, why are you so upset?" a voice might say.

This event does not stand on its own. It's yet another reminder, another thing to endure- although I'll endure it just fine- claiming a part of me, taking me back to twists and turns of the roller coaster that was most of 2007...

A Third (and hopefully final) Surgery

A week ago tomorrow, I had a third surgery on my left elbow to remove a metal plate screwed into my ulna. Even more interesting, tomorrow is exactly 10 months from the day I fell and had the plate put in. I didn't even realize that until just now.

The plate- to sum it up real quick- was a long, metal rectangle that had been screwed into the under side of my ulna soon after my rock accident in an effort to hold it in one piece, something like a metal brace to clamp down the bone fragments so they would fuse together. The plate had six holes and was literally screwed into the bone (where it was not broken) with eight screws, two screws in two of the holes to help lock it in place. It rather looked like something you could pick up at Home Depot.

When I fell, I was rock climbing at Smith Rock State Park in Oregon. After being evacuated, a very painful process in and of itself, I was driven to St. Charles Medical Center in Redmond, Oregon where I had the most miserable hospital experience a person can laugh about later.

After the swelling went all the way down, this plate on the under side of my ulna could be seen under my skin. It was a gnarly looking thing that came to formidable-looking point. I found great amusement in using it to start up conversations with strangers or new acquaintances.I would have kept it in just for having the battle stories but it had begun to really irritate the skin stretched pretty tightly over it. I'm a petite woman so it was possible to actually feel the heads of the screws beneath my skin. Where it came to a point, right at my elbow, the skin was getting very irritated and it felt almost like one day, that plate might see the light of day, but not on my terms. So, cool as my pointy, ridge-shaped ulna/elbow was, it was time to get it out.

Friday, Feb. 22nd they whisked me in and out of surgery in about an hour- unzipping the elbow, unscrewing the plate with what was listed in the op report as nothing more than "a screwdriver" and then zipped me back up with some nice stitches.

To my relief, I didn't experience hours of vomiting after this surgery like the last two, but then again, the last two were 3-4 hour long ordeals and this was not.

Unlike my previous two, more serious surgeries, I was not wheeled into the operating room; instead, I had to walk myself and my IV down the hall, naked ass hanging out of the gown.

My friend and coworker, PR, had come to keep me company and escort me to and from this process. After having to burn a couple hours at a local bookshop because the schedule was backing up, we spent another hour "backstage," waiting for them to be ready for me. To pass the time, she read to me out of one of her pre-grad school books, a book of essays by women, beautifully entitled, Bitch In the House. I got a good chuckle over the pre-op nurse catching a glimpse of the title as PR sat there reading to me, in my sexy hospital gown, all hooked up on the IV with my cool little hospital socks (with friction rubber on the bottom so I wouldn't fall as I walked my naked ass down the hall to my surgery). The essays were pretty damn good, too- mostly about relationships and sex from the point of view of women.

Just like the last two surgeries, I recall nothing of the experience after hearing the words, "we're going to give you a mild sedative now, Tamara." And thank god for that. I read the operation notes from all my surgeries and I was already cringing by the time I got to the plastic tube which they shoved down my air way.

So hooray. As my friend George put it, I am a little less Terminator-ed. There is a little less metal inside me and once I get these stitches out, I'm looking forward to reaching down, feeling of my left elbow and getting reacquainted with a normal feeling (and looking?) ulna. I'm anxiously awaiting seeing my new x-rays, which with the screws out, will probably show a bunch of little holes in my ulna, something like boney swiss cheese? Eventually, those holes should fill in.

In the meantime, I have a bulky bandage over the stitches and get to relive the joy of showering one-handed, with a plastic bag over my arm, raised way above my head. In a few days, I'll get to catch of glimpse of the new, non-pointy elbow!

The story behind the broken wing...

This is a story- one that will be ongoing- about losing control, about getting lost, about getting really hurt, and ultimately, about somehow finding enough determination to overcome all that. It's about finding hope (and sometimes just creating it) even (especially?) while being terrified; it's about a kind of fear matched with stubbornness that makes a person look an "expert" in the eye and tell them they are wrong, wrong, wrong about what a human being can and can't do.

And it's about the rare but powerful experience of being moved by something inside that takes over in a crisis, never knowing that such strength could exist in such a damaged person. It is that part which drove me to write this story down.

There are so many metaphors and layers to this story, so many things that happened on so many levels, penetrating other levels, creating metaphors upon metaphors- but it will take some time to get there. It's hard to know where this story really begins, so let me start here:

On April 29, 2007, I broke my left wing.

I think of it as a wing because I was trying to fly.

Well, not literally. But close.

One might say I was trying to fly because I was in one of the lowest places of my life and had just been freed from part of the anguish of that place, at least somewhat.

I don't think I was necessarily thinking of flying, however, at the moment I fell, although someone once asked me,"What were you trying to do, fly off that cliff? Is that why you climbed up there, T?" From that "cliff", I took a 30-foot fall, head first, and stopped about half way up the pitch when the rope finally caught.

On the way down, something caught my left elbow and smashed it up nice and good, from radius to ulna to olecranon, creating quite a nice little puzzle for surgeons to come.

Breaking this arm has become very metaphorical to me. I hadn't thought much about my arms until I only had one that worked. But after my fall, aside from the new, shocking realization of how truly useful they are for every day living, I realized what they meant on so many other levels.

They were my ability to reach out and create or take what I wanted and needed in life, especially from the sorry place I was in. They were my ability to wrap my arms around the world, my friends, my family. They were tied in with my ability to love, to bring things I loved to me, to hold on to just about anything, literally or figuratively. But most of all, they had come to represent wings. I had just begun to think about the metaphor of flying out of that bad situation, something like a baby bird out of the nest, when I broke that wing.

And while what technically happened to my elbow and how it was that I fell, and why I was up on those rocks climbing to begin with is a part of this story (and will eventually, be revealed), this story is really about what happened to my spirit, my heart... and the wings that grew there instead.

So... here we go...

The Class

My dad used to talk about the inherent problems with the idea of "cause and effect." He argued that if you looked for the cause of an event, you could also ask what caused the first cause, and in turn, what event caused *that* cause and so on and so forth ad infinitum. Eventually, maybe you'd even end up with "God" causing it all but then, who "caused" God? Aha!

I admit, it's a little difficult to not look at the world at least a little bit in terms of cause and effect... You could obviously say that what caused my elbow to shatter (effect) was it hitting the rock (cause).

But to ask what caused me to fall that day, what caused me to climb that day, why I found myself in that particular situation at all, well, that is where there is no clear beginning to this story, no clear cause that set the whole thing in motion.

Why I fell could be as simple as an inability to hold on any longer and the word "gravity." I've come to accept a slightly more complicated explanation in the past year but let's just start with the rock climbing class as one beginning....

In March, I had decided to take a rock climbing class with my then boyfriend. This was a bad idea. Our relationship was on the rocks (pun intended) in a big way. In fact, it had come within a mosquito's whiskers of ending only weeks previous. I deliberated about the decision, for sure, but somehow came to believe that maybe taking a class together about something we both loved (the outdoors) would give us something else to talk about other than us, something else to bond over and could miraculously breathe new life into what was already a pretty battered and beaten relationship. Yes, bad idea. I had reservations about the class from the beginning, not only whether or not we would be able to get along in the class but I also wondered how much I really, truly burned to learn the skill of trad climbing or if somehow, his passion for it had over-ridden my own desires, as tended to happen with us. Maybe I'd just convinced myself that I wanted to learn this skill at that exact point in my life, even though I was incredibly muddled and emotionally exhausted at this point. Regardless, I decided to take the class.

This was a class in how to "lead"; in other words, you're on the end of the rope, climbing up a bare rock with nothing there. It's up to you to put in pieces of pro (short for protection), little metal gadgets that fit nicely into cracks and crevices which you then clip the rope to, should you fall. If you fall, hopefully your well-placed pro holds you, once you travel/fall past the pro and below it where the rope catches on it. So, that means if you climb 10 feet, or 12 in my case, above your last piece of pro and then fall, you're going to fall 20/24 feet plus rope stretch.

I had absolutely enjoyed rock climbing in the past but had only done "top-roping" where the rope is fixed to an anchor above you; if you fall, you only fall a few feet, as long as your belayer knows what he's doing. I'd not really done much rock climbing at all, had always been more of a snow climbing kind of gal, mountaineering and such but had been wanting to 'get more into rock' at some point in life. So why not now? Why not as a way to save a doomed relationship?

Now, this is not a story about the relationship. The relationship is largely why I had reached such a lousy place in my life, I will admit. Trying to make something work that wasn't working was a huge part of feeling so defeated and there's more to say about that, more to be learned. And I hope not to dwell too much on exactly what was going on in that relationship that beat me down so much although it is important to mention as part of what started me growing my wings again- but for now, I'll just make this point, obvious to anyone who's ever had a relationship and obvious to me at the time, only I chose to overlook it: issues in a relationship are not solved by diverting your attention elsewhere, to a project, a class, a child. They certainly are not solved by rock climbing, not even talking about rock climbing. Granted, we did find a few moments of joy here and there, congratulating each other, trying to cheer each other on. But of course, sooner or later, more than a year's worth of resentments just found themselves playing out now in simply a different setting and by mid-April, we'd finally broken up with half the class still ahead of us.

I had entirely planned on finishing the course, as did he, unless it got completely emotionally tortuous; at least I was stubborn enough to give it a try. We were adults, we should be able to interact with each other minimally and finish this thing we'd started. Another bad idea.

However, 10 days after the break-up was the day of my fall, to top off the already completely worn out state I was in. And that was the end of rock climbing for me for a long time....