Daily Excerpt: One Family Indivisible (Greenebaum) - on letting go and coming back

 



Excerpt from One Family Indivisible

on letting go and coming back

I needed to power back a bit after the heart surgery. I tried to resume my activities and in many ways succeeded. But there were some things I just couldn’t do any more. That’s hard to acknowledge. Still, it’s intriguing to me that it was easier to let go of what I couldn’t do any more than to deal with the things I couldn’t do yet. Can’t do “yet”? Ok, then how soon? Next week? Next month? Next year? When?! … Patience. Patience!! It was hard for me to learn that — well, to be honest, I’m still working at it. I think it must be a lifelong effort.

But most enlightening to me was seeing how others reacted. I learned early on that I could best communicate my approach to my heart attack and surgery by not calling it that. I quickly began calling it my heart adventure. An adventure was what it was. Fascinating, as Spock would say. There were so many things to discover and unwrap, both about recovering from surgery and about myself. To be sure, not all of the discoveries were pleasant. Indeed, one was downright painful!

It was one of the few places where my surgeon’s team let me down. I was transferred from the hospital to a cardiac rehab facility after four days. I had not yet had a bowel movement and only learned later that I should never have been released under those circumstances. Whatever, with all the pain meds I was taking, the fact that my plumbing was clogged should have surprised no one. The tension came from my being told repeatedly to be very, very careful when visiting the bathroom — that “exerting” myself could increase my blood pressure and cause a heart attack given the freshly attached arteries. Keeping my blood pressure low was crucial at this point in my recovery. Now, after almost two weeks with blocked bowels, I was in severe pain.

But what could they do? A saline enema was off the table as it would raise my blood pressure to dangerous levels. I was on every laxative they could throw at me, but nothing worked. For the first and only time during my heart adventure I found myself afraid. My overactive imagination got the better of me. Would I survive a heart attack and triple bypass only to die from over-exertion as a result of my plumbing being plugged? Good flaming grief, how ironic would that be?

Obviously, the problem got solved. At last I passed three baked-potato-sized brown concrete bricks. I mention this only because the truth of it is, we never know what will scare us and what won’t. And none of us is immune to fear. The fun came when I showed my nurse what I’d just passed. She nodded absently and flushed the toilet. Like those concrete bricks were going anywhere! A maintenance crew was hurriedly called and worked for close to an hour to unplug the toilet. It cracked me up! My sense of humor had returned.

This one experience notwithstanding, it was and remained an adventure — as is all of life. I have tried to be gentle with those who express their sorrow or fear for me. If I were thirty, it would still be an adventure, though I would definitely see the grounds for some sorrow in that powering back after age thirty is rather different from powering back at age sixty-seven. But still, it’s a great adventure. The creativity and the challenge for me is always, “Ok, these are my new cards. What can I do with them?” 

THIS BOOK EARNED THE PINNACLE BOOK ACHIEVEMENT AWARD.




For more posts about Steven Greenebaum and his award-winning books, click HERE.


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