Recovery Day 8, Emotional Me

As of last night, the emotional implications of this surgery have caught up to me. I'm sad. I've realized at last what a huge thing this surgery was and how it will be my new identity in the weeks and months ahead. I don't like that.

I was doing some reading to try to figure out how my incision should be doing at this point, and I, of course, got sucked into reading a lot of other stuff. In the process I realized that, no matter how young and healthy I was going into the surgery, the healing process is a VERY long road. Don't get me wrong, I'm doing really well. I just realized that for the past couple years, the identity I've been carefully nurturing in myself has been the one of "healthy chick." "The one who does marathons." "She walks how far each day?" "She can do it. She's strong." That was something very deliberate and very important to me.

I just didn't realize fully how this surgery would be affecting who I wanted to be and who I was trying to show the world I had become. I realized last night that there may be a game of basketball during homeschool PE a couple months down the road, and I won't be able to jump right in. Our hiking group may head back up to Emory Pass in early summer, and I physically may not be able to join them. My kids may ask me to jump on the trampoline with them in September, and I very likely will have to site this surgery from months before when I explain why I'm not able to join them. Heck, I may not even be able to join the women at church the next time they bring out the Wii on a Wednesday night.

I have worked hard virtually every day for the past two plus years to not be the one who needs to sit on the sidelines. I have been proud of being the one who could jump into any sort of physical situation and at least make a go of it, no matter how silly I look doing it (ie. yoga video and hip hop dance video most recently). I worked hard for that identity, and I didn't fully realize that I was giving that up for possibly the next year.

Now it has hit me (finally, some of you may say) that it's not about how quickly I get out there and walk again. There's not anything I can do to make my body heal miraculously fast.

My internal sutures will be dissolving around day 12, and I will bleed again and I will hurt in new ways. I will go through all the stages of healing and scarring and healing again, no matter how many miles I walked the week before surgery or how quickly I got myself back on the sidewalks after. My clothes, I just learned, will probably not be fitting me when it is time to go on vacation at week 7 post-op because of the continued swelling in my stomach.

I will be about 80% healed in four to six months and "as close to 100%" healed as I'm going to get by the one year mark. So who am I until then? I'm just not sure yet.