Healing in the Meantime

I’m not the most coordinated person (Tahd, STOP LAUGHING), so it came as no surprise when, last February, I took a rather awkward tumble down my wooden stairs.  Jude wasn’t much more than a newborn, and the fog of sleeplessness coupled with the haze of colic hung thick around our house, and, quite honestly, I was probably due, not having had a spill in quite some time.  I don’t remember the details.  I just remember crying in a heap at the bottom of the stairs, hoping hard that nothing was broken and trying not to scare my kids.

My left elbow took the brunt of the force, looking like this just a few weeks later…

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Pretty, right?  My arm worked just fine, though, so I didn’t think it was broken.  And I went about life, because what mother with a newborn and two other kids has the time or energy to deal with appointments and doctors and xrays for a bruise?

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I can’t remember where I was going last week, but on one of our (many!!!) car rides–as I propped my elbow up on the arm rest–I remembered.  Ah, yes, don’t sit like that.  That elbow STILL hurts.  And then I realized that my fall had been more than a year ago and that we might have crossed the point at which this was still considered normal.

It’s funny how days turn to weeks and months and you figure the injury will heal in the meantime.  But it doesn’t always happen that way.

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For Mother’s Day this year, my family gave me a book I’d been wanting and also told me they were sending me on a little weekend getaway.  It’ll be part nose-t0-the-grindstone to get some writing done, and part girls’ weekend with some Texas friends.  So exciting! This is, certainly, one of the biggest benefits of Tahd’s extensive traveling…travel points!  They make trips like this possible.

My weekend is quickly approaching, and as it’s been getting closer, I’ve been feeling more and more anxious.  Not the good kind of anxious, either, where you’re so excited you can hardly stand it.  No, this is the anxiety kind of anxious, the kind that paralyzes and chokes and says, “DON’T DO THIS!!!  THIS IS BAD!!!”

Of course, it’s not bad, but it’s not coming easily to me. Tahd has been reading a book about fear and about listening to your inner cues (probably a gross oversimplification of the book on my part, but anyway…), so we were talking about my fear and trying to tease out its roots.  Finally, it all came tumbling out.

“I don’t want to go,” I told him, “because I’m afraid something will happen to me while I’m gone and my kids will grow up without a mother.”  Classic overreactive imagination on my part, which he gently tried to point out.  But you don’t understand, I thought.  I’m unlucky!

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When I was pregnant with Mara, two friends unexpectedly lost their pregnancies.  One of those women was in her second trimester.  I was so heartbroken over her loss and couldn’t get it out of my mind, and when I told a third friend how I was feeling, she sensed the depths of my anxiety and tried to firmly lead me out of it.  “You’re not Kim. Just because Kim lost her baby doesn’t mean you’re going to lose your baby, too.”  Wise words, and true, too.  But I did.

After the miscarriage, for the longest time I grappled with feeling unlucky.  Who loses a baby who had a heartbeat, who passed all the genetic screens, who was at the beginning of the second trimester?  Who loses a baby on Mother’s Day?  Who experiences a miracle only to lose it in a cruel, strange twist of events? An unlucky person, that’s who.  All I wanted to do was huddle up at home with my boys in an environment I could control, safe from everything out there that could “get” us.  Sticking together was the key.

Over time, the panic of going in separate directions abated, and the sense of unluckiness was gradually replaced with an odd but comforting mixture of grief, chance, and purpose.  But it’s still there, I guess, still lumbering and faltering under the surface, however deep.  This trip triggered it to bubble up.

It’s funny how weeks turn to month and years and you figure the injury will heal in the meantime.  But it doesn’t always happen that way.

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I had a regular checkup at the doctor last week and meant to ask her to xray my elbow, but I forgot.

Likewise, I started getting things ready for my trip at the same time as Jude lost his marbles–the figurative ones, not literal ones–and has, therefore, cried and carried on for hours.  So, I forgot about unluckiness and felt eager instead.

But forgetting doesn’t heal.  The injury is still there, going about its business.

Several friends have suggested my elbow is probably a bone bruise, and apparently bone bruises can take a long time to heal.  So, too, a grieving heart.  But do you know what a bone bruise really is?

Bones are composed of 2 different types of bony tissue, the compact (cortical) bone and the cancellous (spongy) bone.

The compact bone is the outer layer of bone and is highly organized, solid, and extremely strong…The cancellous bone is the innermost layer of bone.  Unlike the outer layer of bone, it is not arranged in concentric layers, but in plates (called trabeculae) which form an irregular meshwork that is neither as organized nor as strong as the outer bone.

The term bone bruise is a misnomer and makes the injury seem less serious than it is.  A so-called bone bruise is actually a fracturing of the inner layer of bone…

…An injury to this area of the bone represents very small fractures to the trabeculae in the meshwork of the bone and may be referred to as a bone bruise.  [source]

Treatment for a bone bruise is mostly rest, but I’m beginning to suspect I might also need a little physical therapy.  Something’s still not quite right in there, and I think it might need a little guided exercise to get it the rest of the way to health.

I think that’s sort of what this weekend is for my heart, too–a stretching, growing exercise to take my heart a few step further down the healing journey.  That–plus a few full nights of sleep and a little time by the pool–will hopefully help.

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