No ER For This Kind of Pain

I can feel the start of the metaphorical hemorrhaging, the spilling over of trauma into other parts of my life. I'm not sure what kind of tourniquet exists for such things. I knew I’d start seeing the emotional bleeding at some point, I just didn’t know when, where, how, or the severity of the bleeding. Donald Miller said in his book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, after the end of a significant relationship, "I knew then the shock was wearing off. A certain fear grew. They don’t have an emergency room for the kind of pain that is about to happen to me, I thought" (194). I've been to the ER for a seizure, which led to the discovery of a giant brain tumor, but there is no such ER for what I'm experiencing now.

As I approach the one-year anniversary, I feel the weight of this past year starting to catch up with me. As one friend noted from her own cancer experiences, it feels like trying to clean up an oil spill with a paper towel. Impossible. I feel the hyper vigilance taking root. So many things gets flagged as warning signals in my brain. Trauma doesn’t allow a person to differentiate in a healthy manner anymore, and I'm losing the ability to differentiate between what's safe and what isn't. So many things feel untrustworthy, a danger, to me right now. 

My own mind can’t be trusted. 

The world around me can't be trusted. 

And most of all, perhaps God cannot be trusted.

Tish Harrison Warren wrote in her stunning book Prayer in the Night

It was a gray Sunday morning when I was in college. A few months before, a three-year-old boy in our congregation had drowned. Our church was still staggered in grief as I sat listening to my pastor, Hunter, preach about trusting God. "You cannot trust God to keep bad things from happening to you," he said. I was dumbstruck . . . But Hunter's point was that God does not keep all bad things from happening to us. He cannot be trusted to do that because he never made that promise. Doing so is, apparently, not his job. Our Creator lets us remain vulnerable (22).

Doggone it.

I'd prefer it, God, if you did make it your job to never let bad things happen to me and to not leave me vulnerable.

I see the hemorrhaging playing out most tangibly right now in the physical house I dwell in, a house that's stood for over seven decades and has been in my family for four generations. I swear I hear dripping all over the place. Appliances, vents, walls, ceilings, pipes. I go around listening to all these things, and I feel like I'm slowly losing my sanity. I lost some good brain cells in the surgery, but now I feel like I’m losing my whole dang mind. Did the contractor not do his job when he replaced the siding and the roof in the last couple of years? What if there's a leak and I find it ruins my walls? What if there's something wrong in my appliances, they catch fire, and the whole place burns down?

I dwelled in a body for four decades to discover that it had been harboring a malignant brain tumor for as long as maybe two of those decades. Potentially HALF MY LIFE. No symptoms. No warning signs. Then the bottom dropped out and my world erupted. A fully-loaded freight train I never heard, never saw, and never felt coming.

What if there’s something lurking beneath the surface of my house, in its walls, in its roof, subtle symptoms I ignore, and some day I’m going to watch the whole thing come tumbling down all because I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. What if my house has its own figurative tumors? What if things go undiagnosed in my house and the whole thing falls down around me? There are no ERs for houses. There are only fire trucks and fire hydrants, to douse the flames of what's left, just like chemo and radiation are dousing the flames of what's left of my tumor.

I'm having to wrestle all over again what I believe to be true about the sovereignty of God, just like I did before my surgery last April. God already hasn't stopped bad things from happening to me, but what if there's even more around the corner, waiting, lurking? The disparity grows between my reality and my faith. 

I don’t trust God to not let bad things happen to me. 

God, help me to narrow that gap once again. Do what only you can do.

_______________

Health Updates

I ended the pills for cycle number five this week, and it wasn't the abyss that the last cycle was, thank God. I don't know who all was pounding on heaven's door and what you said once you got there, but this round was significantly less severe than the last one. I still fought off some nausea, but no vomiting, no laying on the bathroom floor - none of that misery. I was able to eat like normal and water tasted perfectly fine. I'll see the neuro-onc again the week of January 26 to review this cycle and look ahead to when I'll start number six, which will be the halfway point!

One of my goals has been to get back to the gym. I've been talking with the owner of the gym to see about setting up times to meet with her one-on-one and slooooowly get started on some basics, build back up over time. I have no idea what my limits are any more when it comes to how long I can work out, how many reps I can do, etc. I am starting from ground zero. I keep joking with her that the scene from Apollo 13 is our inspiration. We are going to have to put this thing back together using nothing but that, meaning we are going to have to work at putting my body back together, but there are some things my body just isn't going to be able to do right now and will be eliminated as options until we know better.

The week of February 2 will mark the one-year anniversary since the first seizure, the biopsy, and confirmation of the diagnosis. I'm sure it will be a weighty week, and I have another post coming that will go with that week. Some people have asked how I'm feeling about that anniversary. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of emotions and sensitivity around it, but I feel like the anniversary of the craniotomy in April will be far more emotional because that to me is when the real chaos and the descent into the abyss started. 

I would appreciate your prayers for mental wisdom and stability as I sort through trauma. I'm making connections to a trauma counselor, but nothing firm yet. And prayers for wisdom in what I tangibly need to address in my house and what is just my brain being weird.