Fat Tuesday, but only technically

 

I don't think I've ever in my life been ready for Lent, and I suppose in some sense that is not surprising. Who can keep up with God? But this year it did at least occur to me a day in advance. I woke up this morning knowing it was Fat Tuesday. I had actually already thought about feasting on fat things; however, I spent most of yesterday in narcotics withdrawal, and I didn't think eating crazy amounts of chocolate or even a meal with meat was a good idea on an uncertain stomach. I had a cookie or two that a friend had brought me. To splurge and celebrate my new-found ability to sit in the car for ten minutes, we ate out. I had a vegetable stir fry: broccoli, carrots, peppers and rice. Living large, I am. We thought about going out for dessert afterwards, but it was cold out and the only dessert places around served ice cream, so I came home and made brownies. Then I ate one. Yes, that is how I live it up around here, one week post-surgery.

More to the point, I have actually been thinking about Lent and how I should observe it before it begins. The trouble is, nothing traditional feels right. In past years, I've given up chocolate, and I suppose I could do that again. Last year I fasted between breakfast and dinner one day a week, which turned out to be a difficult discipline for me, and meaningful, but since I am deep in the throes of some heavy healing, that doesn't seem like a brilliant idea.

What feels right to me is if the last six weeks could happen in the next six weeks instead. During the seasons of Christmas and Epiphany, I was going through my own Lent. I was thinking about this yesterday as I was walking in circles in my house during one of my assigned ten-minute walks. Now that the narcotics are out of my system, and now that all of my concentration need not be focussed on surviving great pain from moment to moment, I was startled to think of life going on. I am not allowed to do anything, really, yet. I can walk 10 minutes every two hours. I can sit for up to 15 minutes. But it increasingly looks like some time in the next months I will return to some acceptable level of function, and the thought is completely bewildering to me. What will I do? Who will be my friends? What will I do? What will I DO? I feel as if I have spent the last seven weeks being stripped of everything that might have been used to define me. I not only stopped running, which I hadn't done for months anyway, but I stopped any form of exercise whatsoever. Moving myself from the couch to the bed at the end of the day wore me out. Standing long enough to eat a meal was more than I could handle. I stopped cleaning my house. By the end, I wasn't even able to cook. I quit my job. I quit the band. I quit the choir. I stopped going to church. I never left the house at all, in fact. I haven't seen anyone but medical staff, family and one friend since before Christmas. I need assistance to shower and to put on my own socks and shoes. If the purpose of Lent is to strip away all that comes between me and my God, the last seven weeks have done about as good a job as anything can.

One of the ways I got through endless days of shooting, burning pain was to bless it, to make it something holy from God. When things got beyond the point where narcotics could help, I would force myself to become very very still except for my breath, and I would imagine that my pain was sentient, something like an angel, not a friend, exactly--it was too fierce for friendship--but something that was intentionally purifying. I imagined God with me in my pain. The pain and God blended, and I felt a presence with me. Not an easy, happy presence, but not a dark or cruel one either. Something powerful and ultimately to be trusted with what little I had left. I do not believe that God sits in heaven thinking of ways to torture us children into obedience, but in a more abstract way, I believed myself and my companion pain to be held right in the middle of God's will. And I found peace there. I even, as strange as this sounds in this day and age, was grateful for my pain, for my prolonged stretch of being stripped down and without pride or purpose. I found a sort of comfort in the knowledge that at my most unpleasant, my most unattractive, my most useless, I was still something beloved and cared for. I was grateful, most of the time, to lie still and have my pain erase everything in the world that was not my most basic me and my most elemental God.

It all sounds like one of the ancient mystic saints, doesn't it? I don't mean to come off as someone born again into a life of unshakable faith. I'm sure I'm not. And I'm almost as certain that I'm not crazy. But I do feel as if, for the first time in my life, I really really experienced Lent this year. I don't think I have the self-discipline, or the faith, for that matter, to wear a hair shirt and self-flagellate and fast to the point of suffering. But I see why people of great faith might do so. I am amazed to have found myself, several times, at the point of true surrender, and to have found something greater than anything I could produce by my own actions or will still holding me together, still calling me by name, still willing me to live. I can attest that it's worth a great deal of pain and disability to feel oneself nakedly in the presence of the holy. It is awe-ful. The word has been misspelled.

Which brings me back to tomorrow, Ash Wednesday, the observed beginning of Lent. Where do I go from where I have been? Lent is approximately six weeks long; my expected recovery time, the time it will take me to get back to where I can even begin to get back to "normal," is six weeks. It will be months and months before I can be athletic and before I can truly put this injury behind me, if it is to be my fate that I do ever recover fully. That six weeks feels like it has some significance though.

In an attempt to come up with a plan, I poked around on a few websites to see what exactly the significance of Lent is supposed to be. Wikipedia, the source of profound truths, says Lent is meant to prepare the believer. It didn't, however, say what the believer is to be prepared for. Alas. A Catholic website claimed that Lent is about conversion. It's not about giving up some indulgence for six weeks but of learning to let go of an old life and embrace new life. That wording works for me this year. I once had a certain life--not all good, not all bad, very very human--and circumstances beyond my control gave me a chance to see myself without any of the trappings of that old life. I was allowed to let go of everything for a little while. It seems to be my fate and fortune, however, that I should, now, reenter life. It isn't true to say that I get a fresh start. I will, gradually, resume most of the same responsibilities I once managed. I will reenter many of the same communities of which I was once part. To the rest of the world, I had a spine injury and surgery and recovery period. I will pick up where I left off some time ago. For me, though, coming out of my own wilderness of pain and mandatory idleness, it feels like starting over, like learning how to live again. If Lent is the period between the old life and the new, then my Lent has already happened.

And so for me this year, it feels right to find a discipline that will teach me to enter new life with the assurances I found in the midst of the in-between place. How can I re-enter the chores, the little competitions, the insecurities, and the politics of a busy modern life and remember what was so clear when I was naked of all of anything that might claim to lend me worth? I must learn to live with the idea that nothing I do can make me more worthy of the love of the Divine. The temptation of the new life will be to forget how to be humble enough to find holiness.

What's happening

Yesterday I saw the second of two neurosurgeons. I had been advised that in such matters as neurosurgery, it's best to seek out at least two opinions. I suppose the good news is that both surgeons said pretty much the same thing: I need surgery, and the sooner the better. I have a severely herniated disk at L5-S1. According to yesterday's doctor, it's about as bad as a herniation gets. It's filling up about half of my spinal column. We joked a bit yesterday with the doctor that I've always been something of an over-achiever and so I wanted to have the very best herniation he'd ever seen. Good for me. Seriously, though, it is, for some reason, helpful to have my pain validated. Yes, this is as bad as this type of pain gets. It really is. So I truly am doing well to not be a wailing pile of mess, and I've been bearing up remarkably well for having been in this condition for several weeks.

Both surgeons are able to get me into surgery on Tuesday. It's not a herniation to mess around with. If they operate soon, there is still a good chance that I could regain full use of that nerve and therefore full use of my right leg which, of course, is important to me. The surgery involves a fairly small (not much larger than an inch) incision in my back. The doctor will then peel the muscles off of the spinal column and keep them retracted and out of the way. Here is where my athletic physique will cost me a bit. If those muscles were weak and atrophied, it would hurt less. Mine, however, are robust and meaty and will HURT. Even so, better to have them hurt than be cut. The doctor will have to drill a little hole in the lamina of my vertebrae in order to get to the nerves, which will be pushed aside, and the disk, the extruded part of which will be cut into pieces and removed. The doctor will then look around with his tools and microscope and make sure he isn't leaving any fragments, and then put in layer upon layer of dissolving stitches and close me up. Done.

I have decided to go with the second doctor, although it was a hard decision because both seemed very good. The second doctor was more thorough in how he spoke to us, although both seemed knowledgable and confident. He also put more emphasis on the non-surgical aspects, like physical therapy, and he already has a connection with the physical therapist I've been seeing and whose professional knowledge I trust. He also was very adamant about the need for an overnight stay in the hospital after the surgery, whereas the other doctor was going to send me home same day. For spine surgery, that seems ambitious. And it's a lot of responsibility to put on Doug. Lastly, he is closer and uses the hospital that is only two miles from our house.

So that's the plan: surgery on Tuesday, home on Wednesday, beginning a gradual walking plan in the first week (walks measured in minutes at first) and physical therapy after the second week. I have a few more days of this kind of pain, a few days of surgical pain, and then I should start to see the pain go down. I almost cannot imagine life without pain. I'm willing to try it.

Reasons to be thankful

In the last few days I've talked to two different friends who are down. I've been down before. This fall I was in therapy for major depression, until a few weeks ago when I became unable to sit for even a few minutes, much less an hour. I thought at the time that most of my depression could be traced back to my chronic injuries and my inability to run. However, since then, I have lost not only the ability to run but also the ability to bike, to swim, to walk further than from one room to another in my own house, to sit down to dinner, to ride in the car (and since I cannot walk either, basically I've lost the ability to leave my house,) to go to church, to be in the band, to participate in choir, to teach, to sit at a computer, to put on my own socks, to tie my own shoes, to get my hair cut, etc. Basically, I've lost the ability to do anything not involving lying on the couch. Or in bed. And sometimes it hurts too much sleep, so that's out too.

This should all be very depressing. Yes, it hurts enough sometimes that I cry and moan. Sometimes I am quite grumpy with my family due to the pain. But I don't believe that I am depressed at the moment. Odd.

I should probably provide a disclaimer before I go any further. I am scheduled to have surgery on Tuesday. It's spine surgery. It requires general anesthesia and a neurosurgeon and some expensive and high-tech equipment. And yes, I am a bit nervous about that. But the surgeon seems quite confident that this surgery will fix my pain. Perhaps some of my depression cynicism reemerges for a moment when I think of that, but I quash it pretty quickly. On the whole, I tend to believe that after Tuesday, or maybe after Wednesday or Thursday, I will start to feel better and that my life will return more or less to normal in a couple of months. Therefore, what I am about to say I believe I can only say because I believe that this pain is nearing an end.

That said, if I somehow had the secret power to go back in time and magically cure my back before it ever got to this point, I'm not sure that I would. I feel oddly grateful (now that I know an end is near) for this interlude from normal life. Yes, it's incredibly painful and debilitating. Yes, it's scary. But it's also been a very interesting experience. Just as I do not for a second regret having done natural childbirth, I wouldn't sacrifice this experience just to get rid of the memory of the pain. The memory will fade, after all.

I confessed to a friend that I feel grateful for this time, and she asked why. I've been trying to figure out just what it is. The pain itself is very purifying, I think. There is something about horrible pain that makes one blind to trivialities. When the goal for the day--or the hour, if a whole day is too much to contemplate--is just to survive it, suddenly things like bad hair and gained weight, lack of productivity and a clutter-filled house just aren't that important. I don't feel anxious that I haven't exercised because, quite frankly, I can think of nothing I want to do less. I want to lie on the couch, find a position that hurts only a bearable amount, and not move from it until I can get up for another dose of narcotics. When the pain is intense, I want to be alone with it in a quiet place and breathe into it and live it and honor it and bless it and make it holy. It is, for me at least, a spiritual experience. Plus, I also had the chance during the last couple of weeks to read Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning and Barbara Brown Taylor's An Altar in the World, both of which have helped me live my pain fully and with as much grace as possible.

Being visibly in pain and more confined and for a longer stretch than most people have to be with an illness or injury has also brought to me the blessing of compassion. I may not be on anyone's fun list, but I certainly have been well taken care of. My husband has been carrying the load not only of paying the bills but also picking up a good deal of the child care. And the wife care. He helps me put on my pajamas, drives me to physical therapy, and has been unfailingly patient. My sister Katy came over one week and took down and put away all of my Christmas decorations. She vacuumed up the fallen needles and my stairs while the vacuum was out. She dragged the tree out to the street--ordinarily Doug's job, but she did it herself. The next week she came and scrubbed my kitchen floor, something that made me breathe easier and really needed to be done, as my back has been hurt since last spring. My mom has driven my daughter to ballet and cleaned her room. She had me spend the weekend a few weeks ago and waited on me hand and foot, literally, as one of the favors I asked was for her to pull on my foot to take pressure off my spine. When she hosted my birthday dinner, she arranged it so that people stood at the counter with me so that I didn't have to eat my birthday dinner alone. My friend Jen came over and taught me to knit and brought me some DVDs of her favorite TV series and some chocolate. Another friend volunteered to take Adam to baseball practice every week, and a neighbor is going to take Gretchen to preschool while I am with a neurosurgeon. Even though I am not currently much fun, not a good runner, not a good musician, not a good housekeeper or mom, really not a good anything, I feel as beloved as I ever have. I have nothing to offer to others, but I still feel valued. What a remarkable gift.

Talking to my friend tonight on the phone I began to wonder if perhaps I am also feeling oddly mentally OK because this has been, if nothing else, a time off. Not a time away. I didn't get to run the relay in Florida I had intended to do, and I keep missing out on shows and outings, but it has been a break from, well, everything. An enforced break, but apparently I, like most women, need it to be enforced if it's to happen. This has been a time set apart. Apart for pain, yes, but still apart, for me and about me. Although I have not yet begun to heal physically, I think that time by itself has helped my soul heal from the wounds of daily living. If all goes well, I hope to come out of this with a renewed sense of perspective, a revised outlook on life, a fresh start.