So About That Surgery… And Life And So Forth

More than a few notes have arrived asking what happened, so let me just put it out here dear friends, readers and lurkers.

As always, I subscribe to the Anne Lamott theory that there are really only two prayers in life; “Help me, Help me!” and “Thank you! Thank you!” That is pretty much my life story in 8 words. Really 4 words, repeated.

I had let a situation with my digestive system go out of control and then used my not-healthy-learned-as-a-child coping mechanism of ignoring pain for so long that it ultimately became normal. *sigh* Years of therapy and grace and yet I still flop along the Way! So it goes for us all, right?

Flippity, flop, flop, flop, flip – Jesus, here I come, I’m following you, thump by thump, oops, I tripped, I fell, I rolled again. Whoa! I’m sliding, wheee! Oh, it’s backwards. Well, I’m tryin’, I’m tryin’!

In any case, my poor self-care resulted in me getting full on surgery (Nurse! Scalpel STAT!), no little laproscopic thing for me! This included an infection, pancreatitis and a few other complications. Gangrene would not have surprised my doctor, but had not yet appeared, thanks be to God. 12 days later I feel much better and all I  had to turn over, well along with my pride that is, was my gall bladder! Such a deal! *bigger sigh* 

At them moment I’m still sporting my stylin’ J.P. Drain; that gets surrendered back to the authorities on Wednesday however. Beats the hell out of a monitoring bracelet. If I were going to wear it longer, I might want to decorate it. Mark began to call it my “bile grenade,” which totally works as a name for it.

Sadly I can report that I did not consume a morsel of food for 11 days, although for the final 4 I did have what I called “my milkshake” aka TPN, mainlined into my body via a PICC line. That actually, even more than being sliced open in two places, kind of grossed me out. Go figure.

In any event, I did not eat for 11 days and I lost a whopping 5 lbs, most of it muscle mass from laying in that hospital bed. Great. Despite daily walks around the floor and my use of the Voldyne 5000 (sounds scary!), I still had some minor fluid and lung collapse to deal with. That is almost all better now and I remain as full of hot air as ever. (As is evidenced here!)

Frankly the whole thing is really a gift. Aside from the part that I could have become more seriously impaired or died, I have had some good lessons. Not lessons in that “nyah-nyah be a good girl and do it right next time” way, although a little of that, but mostly in the gifts of surrender, humility and interdependence.

What will be sown from this journey? Will my lessons hold? I hope so, but then I almost always hope so and all kind of stuff happens. We’ll see.

Thanks for all the good thoughts, prayers and wishes. As ever, I believe that I am carried on the wings of angels, even when doing my flopping around behind the feet of Jesus.

Lazy River of Consciousness Post

It has been a whirlwind of a time. Events go tumbling by like objects in the tornado scene of the Wizard of Oz. That may just be me feeding my inner Dorothy – in this chapter of my life I feel like I had a hard landing, but ended up in the right place.  Unlike Dorothy though, I don’t need to go home – I’m here.

So this is not exactly a stream of consciousness and not a puddle of it either, so I shall deem it the lazy river of consciousness post!

Oh the Facebook posts and the emails and the phone calls. I initiate many of them myself, for good or ill. Such sturm und drang in these times. While I initiate much of the conversation, I am put off by it. Anyone who has read my work for a long time or a short time knows how “both/am” I can be.

“Both/and” means I do not think that the Roman Church is good or bad, I think it is both, very clearly both.  We all know we live in sound-byte world, in a world of absolutes and as result we want things to be one thing or the other. Don’t worry, for all of my own both/and professing, I suffer from the same thing.

And God knows we want to be right – at all costs we want to be right. Once I gave up being right for Lent. I wish I could give up being right for my whole life!

We want to be in community, but we want to be in community with those that are like minded. That is a nice thought, but a tough reality – not to mention that it is not real community. We want unity, but unity means mixing it up with those of other points of view and ideas. It kind of sucks, but that is how it goes.

Community – common good, common union. These are not popular thoughts, are they?

Community and unity require some surrender and flexibility. Honestly, I don’t have the stomach for it, but in my “both/and” world, I don’t know what other choice it is. I can’t join the tea party; I have even less stomach for that.

On Monday night I went to a talk given at a local college.  It was given by Dr. Jyoti Swaminathan and it was a Hindu perspective on Conversion and Transformation. I sat in a room at a Catholic inspired college – not a room,but an interfaith chapel, filled with Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and who knows what else. I listened to this brilliant and passionate woman talk about religious experience and transformation in a truly humble but brilliant way.

And she was not trying to convert anyone… but I think she was trying to transform them. It got me to thinking about how converting someone is not very both/and, but that transformation is very much so.

In any case, I find some reassurance in that thought… transformation.

(For what it is worth, last night I went to a journalism class at another college, a Catholic college, at the invitation of one of the professors who is also a local journalist and news anchor Benita Zahn; she is also a good friend. It was a taping of a panel discussion on ethics. Other participants were Michael Brannigan, Ph.D., Sean Philpot, Ph. D., Anne Grenchus, and Fr. Dennis Tamburello, OFM, Ph.D.

It was fascinating and I left with thoughts of forced H1N1 inoculations, end of life decisions and legal vs. moral dancing in my overstimulated brain.

Today I awoke to find this essay about abuse on The Episcopal Cafe. While the author of the essay, Rev. Ann Fontaine and I do not always agree, we do agree on a lot of things. And we seem to have found many creative and bountiful ways to agree to disagree about other things. That to me is what community is really about. We are working it out as we go along, committed to more than just being right. I tend to suck at this, but folks like Ann keep me moving along.

I take no joy in reading Ann’s essay… Abuse is tragic and wrong in any context. I do however welcome the thoughts that it is not just a celibate or gay issue and that the presence of women matters. Thank you Ann.

In any case, there is much to ponder in our world, no? I awoke on Tuesday and flew into a rage. By the end of the day I was knocked dumbstruck by the remarkable nature of the world and the people in it. Even those I don’t want to love, perhaps especially because of those I do not want to love.

None of it is easy, but I shall muddle along, trying to work it all out.

Are you coming with me?