I woke up gradually and saw the face of my youngest daughter gazing at me rather anxiously. My hip surgery was over and now it was time to get back to the real world.
“Hi Mom, how are you doing, dinner has just arrived, would you like some?”
I must have answered in the affirmative as a few minutes later I felt some mashed potatoes being spooned into my mouth. And then I surfaced again and I heard her say “Swallow the potatoes Mom, swallow the potatoes!” Somewhere in between I had floated back to Never Never Land. It was the last laugh I was to have for several days.
When my mind finally cleared I attempted to move a little…but my left hip refused to move one iota. I have always been a mind over matter person but this time everything failed. Was I to be imprisoned in this bed forever? I could feel a kind of bitterness invade me. This was not what I expected. “The pain will be gone, you’ll be just like new,” had been the story I’d been told. No one mentioned the nausea, the frustration, the inability to move.
And then Satan stepped in and I went into a depression. It wasn’t obvious until I got home five days later, but wow was I one unhappy camper. So, as I have so many times in the past, I picked up my pen and wrote my thoughts down. Those that have been there will relate well to my experience, those who haven’t may better understand that even people with a deep faith can bottom out once in a while…so this is what I wrote…
…I have lost who I am…not through disease but through circumstance.
Once I was young…that’s gone. Once I was married…that’s gone too but I have tried to maintain a certain dignity. I have a few skills and I felt they were acceptable and helpful but I could not find myself in this body that could not move and retched at the smell of food and this mind that had little hope for tomorrow.
The eroding of your role in society is humbling, especially when it takes place in the last refuge you have…your home.
I’m still a mom, but now so fragile, finding it difficult to accept I need help, impatient when it arrives, unhappy when others (through necessity) are invading my privacy. Modesty is a thing of the past as I need help to get onto the seat now strung across my bathtub. The bathroom door remains open as my daughter calls to me: “Are you okay, Mom?” How the roles have changed!
My fashion statement those first few weeks consisted of a long nightgown with panda bears on it…well, it was warm and I could pull it over my head. My closet contains outfits for several kinds of occasions but I sulked and wondered if there would be any more “occasions” in the future.
I am in unfamiliar territory…not sure how to treat my oldest daughter who has offered to “care-give” me for two weeks. This is not the usual “holiday with Mom.” I give her money for gas and groceries and she gets upset and insists she is not “paid help”. I of course am used to paying my own way. It is a conundrum.
When I asked myself who I really was…certainly not this crabby old lady…I realized I explained myself in “activities”…a choir member, a hospital volunteer, a writer. They have all slipped by the wayside for a while.
So I cry out to the Lord “I am losing who I am, help me.”
And He is there! As the poem Footprints explains…He has been carrying me.
Scripture phrases, learned as a child, wash over me. A cloudy sky disappears behind the glow of the morning sun, a hot cup of coffee is lovingly placed on my side table and I remember again all the blessings I have…including a brand new hip. My pen moves faster across the paper as I begin to feel my depression lift. I still have some living yet to do and God is there to guide me through it.
