This Broken Mess of a Life

The most devastating thing that’s ever happened to me was when my Grandpa died. I’m sure if you’ve lost a loved one, you will understand what I am about to describe… The thing that struck me the hardest was the next morning, waking up, and realizing that the world was going on as if everything was normal. I walked out my front door and I had to do some things….I had to get gas in my car, I had to stop at the store on the way to my grandparents’ house. It was absolutely insane to me that no one around me realized what huge loss had just occurred.  Everyone was walking around like life was normal when it wasn’t. I felt a little like that waking up the morning after this election.

I want to talk about “The Crazy Year”. “The Crazy Year” is the year immediately following the birth of a child or the ending of your partnership/marriage/relationship that was supposed to be life-long.  It’s the year that everyone goes crazy.

So, it's been 6 months since my surgery! Seems like a good time for a little update.

I recently reached out to a somewhat famous blogger/podcaster/personality because I heard some comments from him about his view on giving to the homeless. It really struck a chord with me. His views are pretty common. So I'm posting my letter here as well. Enjoy.

I was curious if surgery would make me lose weight. On one hand, you put your body through this major trauma and it has to heal itself, so you'd think it would cause a degree of weight loss. On the other hand, you are laying around for months so you'd assume that would negate that weight loss and maybe even cause weight gain. I randomly googled it one morning before my surgery and, apparently, LOTS of people ask this question and have LOTS of very interesting opinions about it. So what the heck....I'll throw in mine ( along with my experience thus far ).

Ok, maybe the title of this is misleading. Because, the first week or two of pain was really terrible. But I'm 4 1/2 weeks out now. And I'm going a little crazy. It's been over a month of log rolling out of bed and having to ask people to pick up my phone when I drop it. A month of walking really slow and getting tired really easily. A month of watching my family do all the chores....dishes, laundry, cleaning the bathroom. Maybe that sounds good, but for an OCD, Type A mom like myself, at this point it's kind of torture. I can't clean up after myself. I can't pitch in with the house hold cleaning. I can't organize my closet or spring clean the kitchen. And it's stupid little things too. I can't put on jeans, because they waist band kills my scars and I can't make my body do what it needs to do to get into jeans anyways. I can't cuddle with my husband at bedtime or my kids on the couch because I can't twist or bend. And when I'm ...

It's been 15 days. Overall, mostly things just get better each day. I'm weaned down about as much as I can be at this point on drugs. I had probably my most comfortable nights sleep last night. I feel, though, that I've gotten to the "cranky" stage. My back scar is to the point of being mildly itchy, tight, and annoying for anything to touch it. I am mentally clear enough to want to do a lot of things that I can't do and be annoyed by all the things I see around the house that I can't do. It's really hit me in the past few days that I have so many limits on what I can do. My biggest priority going into this was not to be "typical me" and to stick to the recovery plan and not push myself. So today I'm trying to figure out what I can do to be productive around the house that won't set back my recovery. And that's a surprisingly difficult list to come up with. In trying to be productive, I realized yesterday that if I want to...

I walked 1 mile today. My doctor said that I should aim to working my way up to a mile by 3 weeks out. This morning, I went for a walk. I was alone so I took the walker. 10 minutes down the road ( which was really only a few houses down ) I was feeling good and just decided to go for a full 30 minutes which I roughly calculated to be about a mile. It actually took me 40 minutes, and the last few blocks were slow and tedious and pretty uncomfortable. And then I had the realization that my doctor probably meant 1 mile TOTAL IN A DAY, and not 1 mile TOTAL IN ONE SESSION. Ooops.

It's day 9 of my recovery from spinal fusion surgery. I had L5 S1 fused via a bone graft and some hardware and had posterior and anterior incisions (that means I got cut in the front and back). I've been meaning to write about this for a while but today was the first day I felt mentally clear enough to do it. Probably because today is the day I've taken the least amount of pain meds. When I initially had this surgery recommended to me over two years ago, I just googled "spinal fusion" and found a LOT.....and I mean A FREAKING LOT....of really bad stuff online. Lots of people complaining a lot about how horrible the surgery was for them. I admit, that scared me off, so I put off the surgery. The thing is........my particular situation wasn't getting better on it's own. And I was in line to lose most of the feeling in my right leg and maybe lose control  of my bowels. So about a year ago, I googled "spinal fusion SUCCESS STORIES" and th...