'Lucky'

I finished reading Alice Sebold's 'Lucky' last night.  It has stuck with me all day.  I thought I had bad luck...I have nothing on her.  Her writing is mesmerizing.  I felt like I was reading a friend's journal and at times I almost feel guilty, like I was reading something too private to be shared with someone like me.

It certainly has allowed me to put some perspective around my own circumstances and my own traumas.  I think what I went through was equally as emotionally devastated.  I spent months not understanding what exactly happened to me.  I spent months separated from my family.  I spent months in 'old folks' homes when I was only 35/36 years old.  The experience sucked a lot of life out of me.

It drained me most of hope.  I would lay in the hospital bed, day after day, and the only thing I cared about, the only constant I had was when the shifts changed every 8 hours and when I received my pain medication, every three.  I had visitors, I had phone calls, I had cards and letters, but I didn't have my freedom.  I was trapped by tubes and other apparatuses that I didn't even know existed - a wound vac and a jujenostomy bag.  I was a shell of the person I was once, I was dazed and very confused.

While mine was due to a surgeon's mistake, and it was not rape, it was still a terrible experience.  I pushed it way out of my mind...so far away that sometimes the anger boils up with out any trigger or notice.  It's definitely unfinished business.  I never got to ask my questions.  I was too busy just trying to survive to actually live through it and understand.  Surviving is NOT fighting.  Thriving is fighting.  Thriving is the only way to truly get over something as horrific as what I endured.

I hope to one day begin to thrive again...I'm hoping through my writing I will find a 'happy' place.  I want the ability to move on.  But, even as I sit here typing, the anger rises.  I feel the heat burn up from my stomach, then slowly through my arms.  I feel the air tighten in my chest and the dull ache in my stomach.  It can take me right back to my hospital room.  The loneliness I felt for six straight months.

I think I see it starting to want to  make it's way out of my head and on to the screen...as November 1st gets closer, I know that I will spend the entire month writing about my experience....I'm getting ready.  It's time to let the beast out...

love and hugs,
k