on healing after a myomectomy

the days were quiet and long. slow and dreary. uncomfortable and dark, but the light eventually came.

the most jarring thing about surgery and what comes afterward is that life stops. what once was just a minuscule part of my day was now gone.i couldn’t roll out of bed and onto my yoga mat to stretch as the sun rose sending shadows across the floor, i simply couldn’t get out of bed without strategically planning how i'd do so and would only make it to the bathroom before making my strategic entrance right back into bed.

but that was three weeks ago. and even though the aches still exist and everything still feels just a little uneasy, i'm healing and have healed so much already. my body may not look the same, and will forever be scarred so the work of learning to love her as she is starts now.

the blur of time that the past weeks have become is also a reminder that life as i knew it may have stopped but life in general kept going and what i thought would last forever is already over.

healing is a lot like grieving i would assume: it comes in waves, takes longer than you thought it would, catches you off guard, and warps time.

i rubbed my leg as the pain intensified while the meds wore off and thanked my body ( “ you doing so great, keep it up, thank you so much for doing what you need to do” ), something i wouldn’t say is a normal activity but one that got me through any moments of weariness and frustration.

we live inside these homes of skin, muscles, and bones and forget that they’ve done everything they can to keep us functioning for as long as we’ve been alive. and in that moment I felt the weight of what a simple ‘thank you’ can hold and thought that this is the least i could give my body for all it’s done to get me here.

so the healing isn’t complete, the sutures still not dissolved, the pain still there, but i'm lighter than i was on July 1st before they spent four hours removing those masses of tissue from my uterus and i am forever changed because of it.