I Had a New Surgery (Two Weeks After the Last)

I was vaguely nervous...

Welcome to a new week.

For the last two weeks, I was sharing pieces of the fictional novella, “Senseless”, which I am considering self publishing or (wouldn’t it be nice?) finding an agent one day to lock in the damn thing.

Thank you for being willing to go off on a new and unexpected journey when that wasn’t you possibly “signed up for”… and for gifting me that recovery time.

I actually JUST had surgery last week (by the time you’re reading this), and was trying to bake in as much healing as I could, before dropping back into the sometimes essayist, sometimes lifestyle beauty geek, sometimes interviewer of cool-people-I-admire mash-up of events that happens here at “Catching Breaths”.

(Ew. That felt sort of like saying a name in the third person.)

I am rather phobic of illeism in general, but I also generally want to make you feel like your time, eyeballs and potential support here is worth it, SO….

I will be going back to sharing sprinkles of thoughts and stains in the way I normally do, but: If you liked the shards of Senseless shared or want more eventually, I would be honored to do keep going with its chapters the next time I have a large operation and need some recuperation. That way: You can find out more of what happens.

Thank you for caring if you care, and sharing [if you would like more or want more to exist], and thank you for YOU…

Every sprinkle and stain.

I just had surgery.

It is two weeks after another stomach surgery (to remove ovarian cysts that came as a plot twist), which was about one month after having two discs in my neck replaced. One was a replacement of a replacement so… sometimes I wonder how many redundancies I can fit into one human body and still call myself a person.

I was vaguely nervous to have surgery on my stomach just a couple of weeks after surgery on my stomach but… just barely.

This winter, I had a surgery to basically anchor my lower back and pelvis with a Tinker Toy medley of cages, screws and bolts, and they went through my stomach one day, and then went through my back two days later. Another time, many many years before, I had a J tube accidentally placed too close to my ribs (on a very short waisted person), and it prevented my torso from being able to breathe fully, which led to a lung infection just a couple of weeks later. So I had a new (and final) J-tube surgery done just two weeks after my first one ever, and I remember thinking that was intense. A lot of things, too close together. Now, my “close together” often feels too part. I want to bend and mold time, so that I can get “past” this to some imaginary future where there is no more of… this.

Since the J on J, I’ve had a gallbladder taken out urgently at around 1 in the morning, just a couple of days after a stomach surgery for alternate reasons- which quickly taught me that “back to back surgeries” aren’t really that impressive once you’ve had one (two) once. See? Redundant.

The surgery I JUST had was a replacement again, in a way; It was fixing the fading battery in my gastric pacemaker, which I could not afford to have go down. That one little “tadpole” in my stomach (that sometimes makes it looks like I have abs if I flex at a certain mistaken angle) is one of the best inventions I ever agreed to, and has done so much more for my repetitive person than I had ever realized (hence, we needed to repeat the surgery again to make sure it’s shored).

I can still remember the kaleidoscope of colors on my abdomen when it was first placed. Days later, I went to the YMCA with my daughters to “work out” (show off on a Bosu ball to feel like I had worth), and I still am not sure why. What was I trying to prove? I remember doing that abdomen exercise-thing where you hang from the bar-thing and you lift your legs from the floor up towards your ribs like you’re on a childhood playground… You know what I mean? And I can remember how vividly bruised my flashes of flesh were at the time, and how borderline-unnecessary provocateur I was for no one but myself. The room was mostly empty. Who cared? I didn’t care who cared… But I cared.

For as long as I can remember, no one hurts me more than me.

It’s like I am the Gasper Noe or Yorgos Lanthimos of my own life. Directing and re-editing the body horror to try to make something pretty out of the Poor Thing… Only to realize I can’t, so I might as well embrace the brutal camp of what is often called my body. “Bruises are f*cking rainbows, aren’t they?” I scream to no one (the rooms are mostly empty). “Why can’t we find this beautiful?”

I don’t.

But everyday, in order to see another one: I must watch the purples and blues develop like an oil puddle in a parking lot. The eyeshadow around a pigeon. Something we all think is ugly… But if you look at it long enough:

It’s iridescent.

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