I’m telling you, I didn’t ask for this. Most major things that happen in life, we can see them coming. Or if not, afterwards it really does make sense why it happened. Not this time. I’m pissed. I worked so hard, so hard to get where I was. So hard. I had a job I loved, a great boss, friends I love, shamanic work I love and a home I love. I even had a brand new activity (doing soundscape for assisted living) flowering in my life and in my heart. And then, I just got swept off the board and set down on an entirely different one.

I thought when I got home from the hospital that recovering would be a walk in the park, a few weeks. But the forest isn’t clearing and every day I discover new things – not only about my limitations but about what happened to me in the past month. I can’t believe it’s been a month. I can’t believe my friend spent five hours trying to figure out what was going on with me and what to do, searching through my paperwork for the right phone numbers to call and labeling all my medications and finally getting the green light from several different parties to call an ambulance. That must have been terrifying, traumatizing. Then she opened up my phone and texted everybody, whether she knew them or not and my mom called the last person who brought me to the hospital and people sat with me for a day while the nurses had a hard time waking me up to give me neuro checks. And then I had surgery and I woke up and now I know why it wasn’t so unbelievable that my brother was about to arrive in two hours from California. Because all that time had passed and I didn’t know it. 

I learned that the brain does not like to be disturbed. The brain says fuck you. No extra blood in my space. No pushing me to the side. No drilling holes into my skull to remove the blood. No going through my arteries to seal them closed. All of those things make the brain angry. So as my wonderful, tender and nurturing acupuncturist says, there is healing from the accident trauma and also from the surgeries. She leaves me on the table, and and it takes over forty minutes before I feel my energy, like magic, come back to center. She invites me to come back the very next day which I cannot do but I will as soon as she’s back from vacation. Because I don’t know if my energy stayed in the center. 

Another friend took me today to get the staples taken out of my head and I don’t think my brain liked that either because my headache spiked. She took me to a park I really wanted to go to and I joked that I’m like a dog being taken for a walk, breathing in that beautiful fresh air and the smell of the water and the birds. But then it became difficult to walk without stumbling and I needed to get home to the couch. 

This is not a fun blog. But the providers and my friends keep telling me that I look great, that my spirit shines through. Looking great is now on a wider spectrum, now that I see the trajectory of healing is going to be longer than I thought.

There is no guarantee I will not have another bleed. I am now in a population that is in danger all the time. At some point I will have to let go of this terror and completely put myself in the hands of the spirits. I continue to live my life, or I live in fear. I must continue – savor each day. Still, I am full of gratitude.

Life has become small and so big at the same time, for what is so vastly important is in the small things around us. In order to function in society, we need all kinds of barriers. But in being truly vulnerable, I can see things I could not before, and one of those is all the different ways that people love. In this, there is no reason to make sense of the world anymore. What will happen, will happen. It is useless to panic.

I hold such gratitude.

Tomorrow, super-special visit from my cuz.