Home and whole and ‘back to normal’

Home and whole and ‘back to normal’ February 2, 2025

We are home from the hospital.

Thursday was surgery day. For once, it did not get bumped or delayed or rescheduled. My wife finally had the surgery she has desperately needed for more than three years.

The doctors were very pleased. She is expected to make a complete recovery. Within a few weeks, after a little PT, the surgeon said, she should be “back to normal.”

We’re overcome with joyous gratitude, relief — literal relief — and newfound hope. We’re also struggling to try to remember what “normal” means. My wife has several incisions and sutures within and without and for a little while these will all be painful. But it’s a different pain, and the old familiar pain, the one she has lived with, constantly, for years, is now gone. She can eat without pain. She can manage stairs again and walk more than 50 feet without stopping.

“Normal” is glorious. Normal is the most beautiful thing we have ever seen. We are overwhelmed with gratitude for the possibility of “normal.”

We are also overwhelmed with gratitude for the support so many of you have provided us throughout these last few years. You have kept our lights on and kept a roof over our head through this long period of not-quite getting by on a single income. Thank you all again so very much.

I am trying now to let go of the long frustration that has been our not-normal normal for so long — the frustration of not being able to help someone you love bear their pain, and the frustration of knowing all the while that her pain and disability and financial hardship were unnecessary and fixable. They have now been fixed. I will focus on that, but never forget, because it is important to still be able to tap into that frustration and anger for others whose pain and disability and financial hardship are also unnecessary so that I can speak up and advocate for them as I did for my own family.

For now, though, we’re just grateful and relieved and happy and pain-free. I’m saying things like, “Be careful, don’t overdo it” and that’s such an incomprehensible, joyous change from saying things like “Come on, just a few more steps, you can do it” and I’m starting to remember a “normal” that for so long seemed so impossible.

That’s why I didn’t say anything here — or anywhere — about getting this last, actually-real-this-time, date for surgery day. It wasn’t so much a superstitious fear of “jinxing” things as a St.-Thomas-like inability to accept that something we so desperately wanted was possible. But this time, finally, it was.

And so the past week has been surreal for me. I’ve been in waiting rooms and sitting at bedsides, watching our greatest hope and dream come true. And all the while I’ve been reading and watching the news, seeing a bigger picture unfold in which many of our greatest fears are also coming true. We at last have the chance to “get back to normal,” but the rest of the world seems to be moving away from normal at high speed.

We’ll talk about that in the days to come as I’m able to return to “normal” posting here.

But here just let me say again, thank you.

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