For the past six weeks, I've been on the mend after having an errant clump of mysterious cells roughly the size and shape of a sweet potato extracted from my midsection. After navigating a season of increasingly unsettling spells of testing and waiting, the definitiveness of surgery was a relief. A plan! Something would be done, something would be known. In the end, I lucked out—an "easy" surgery, with small incisions, that removed the best kind of benign tumor to have. (That pathology report, when it turned up a week or so later, was the most effective painkiller I have experienced.) It was all a physical fluke.
Surgery is wild, though. One day, I had a regular seven-mile-walk habit and was busy doing all the things, and the next ... I was not. Before surgery, the prospect of recovery sounded relaxing—resting in bed, long slow strolls, nothing to do but read—but it turns out, recovery is its own type of hard work, a shifty dance of pushing forward and easing up, of reclaiming and adapting ordinary tasks and habits. For the first couple of weeks, anything requiring sustained attention was too challenging—my body stole focus and just simply being was absorbing enough. (It was a good moment for crossword puzzles, magazine articles, and short stories.) With time, I'm getting better and better, but I still feel like I am living in two parallel tracks—one in my mind, which holds on to life before surgery as the baseline for how I should be, and the other in my body, which continues to heal in its own inscrutable, nonlinear way. I wonder when this weird awareness will start to fade, when the two lenses click together and simply become ordinary life again.
Here's to slow but steady steps into the new year.
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Some things I have found useful since my surgery: THE GREAT wide-legged cropped sweatpant (There is no elastic waist, which means you can tie them to rest gently wherever is most comfortable, and The GREAT's website includes all the measurements for each garment, making it easy to obtain pants of sufficient looseness for post-surgical swelling.) / THE GREAT long-sleeve crop tee / Inventive Sleep backrest wedge pillow (much more comfortable than a shifting mound of treacherous small cushions) / Serta electric sherpa fleece throw (amazing; nothing else felt as good) / Hydro Flask 40 oz All Around travel tumbler / IKEA Resgods folding bed tray (invaluable) / Sockwell Circulator wool-blend medium compression socks (to switch off/cover hospital-issued TED hose) / Salomon RX slides (comfy, with a nonslip grippy sole).
Also pictured: The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories / Slush Club cup.
Not pictured, but essential: ARQ's generously cut high-rise undies, for avoiding tender incisions, and a Jellycat sun purloined from a kid's bedroom, useful to press against your abdomen while laughing if you, like me, foolishly elect to watch a comedy special the day after you come home.
