Sunset with a tunnel of red light the first night home
Time is a strange substance that envelopes us. A day ago, a week ago, a year ago…..and voila! Here we are now. It’s almost 72 hours since I went under the knife for repair/re-wiring of my digestive track — a nissen fundoplication (no Japanese cars involved, and not a lot of fun in fundoplication either) — and I sit in the sun, still healing, but remarkably healed so much already that it’s hard to fathom this tunnel of time I’ve just flown, crawled, hiccuped, and puttered through.
Thanks to good and great help from Ursula Gilkeson, an energy healer I work with for all my surgeries (this is #4, so we’ve got a groove by now), I had lots of guidance is preparing myself, from breathing exercises to calm my jumpy nerves, to guided imagery work with various colors of light. Ursula also did several treatments on me, placing her hands on or above my shoulders or feet, stomach or knees, and helping alignment my body, spirit and intentions so that easy and abundance healing could flow through. Ursula writes about her process, “As much as the body stores information about the cause of a problem or an illness,the body also reveals what is needed in order to heal.”
Make-your-own-beach kit (thanks, friend!)
I also had the immense benefits of a great surgeon, Dr. Chad Tate (here’s a video of him talking about his practice for any of you considering this kind of surgery in Lawrence), who’s superb at this kind of surgery and won my confidence easily with his clear and informed approach. Supporting my family and me during the procedure were a great team who spent hours at the hospital holding us in spirit or person, and many friends and family close and near who sent prayers, wishes, good thoughts, and some wonderful little gifts (from canvasses for painting to a make-your-own-beach kit to luscious snacks when I get beyond this liquid-ish diet).
No surprise that with such support, and such excellence and compassion in healers and healing professionals, I’ve come through surgery easily, that is, once I got past the nightmarish stretch out anesthesia and through the long night in the hospitals, where many manner of beeps and a very dry throat punctuated sleep. I needed no pain medications except a little Tylenol, something that’s been the case for me every time I work with Ursula, and the wounds are healing so quickly I can see change from morning to afternoon each day.
On one hand, the other side of surgery is fast with so much progress so quickly (this morning: a half cup of oatmeal, something unthinkable to eat yesterday). On the other hand, it’s slow going if I consider going back to life as I know it at its usual pace. My thinking is expanded out and slower to gather momentum. I wake up and go back to sleep often, spending a lot of hours unconscious, which makes me well-attuned to the lives of my cats. We stretch out on the bed, do or don’t do something, then get up to sip a little water before lying down again. This time has a timeless quality to it: watching the chickadees land on the branch, staring at the quilt on the bed, stepping into time to do various small tasks and back to now, where the sky is brilliantly clear and open, and this human being is happy and grateful.
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