Fracturing

What if it had happened differently? 

In this moment, I don’t remember any of the symptoms that led me to the doctors in the first place. I remember dreading the doctor’s appointments. I remember the dark rooms with long slabs of what looked like butcher paper that I was supposed to pee on. I remember the florescent lighting in the tiny bathrooms, the blue and white tiled floors where I would give urine samples. My mother’s face.

What if there had been a gentle way to hold a child in staying connected to her body?

When I was five, I had a surgery where they cut me open and rearranged my “plumbing” so that my urine would stop going into my kidneys. Vesicoureteral reflux (VUR), or the retrograde flow of urine from the bladder into the ureter, is an anatomic and functional disorder that can result in substantial morbidity, both from acute infection and from the sequelae of reflux nephropathy.

At the time it wasn’t very common to operate on someone so young. I was in the hospital for a little over a week. Intermittent day procedures for a year or so leading up to the grand operation. My memory is still vague. But I remember being hooked up to IVs, peeing through a tube and being rolled around in a red wagon. I remember that it took multiple nurses to hold me down so that they could deliver cone-shaped drugs called suppositories into my anus. I remember a clown coming to visit me. I remember the scared look on the faces of the friends who visited. I remember the two friends I made that week, one with cancer and the other with AIDS. That’s about it at this point.

What if in a soft and still space of observation, an organism could reorient itself to optimal health?

They called the operation a success. Forever branded across my lower abdomen, I could go back to kindergarten the next week. That was almost 30 years ago. While I don’t remember the symptoms that brought me in, I am still working with the symptoms that began to pile up after my hospitalization.

What if upon my first symptom someone had taught me to slow down and listen?

Upon reflection, I reckon I learned A LOT that year about how to survive. I suppose that without my awareness a significant fracturing was in process. I suppose that my body did for me what I could not do for myself. I believe that as Peter Levine talks about in his book “Waking the Tiger, Healing Trauma”, that when faced with what is perceived as inescapable or an overwhelming threat, humans and animals both use the immobility/freeze response. I believe that trauma “stems from the frozen residue of energy that has not been resolved or discharged and that this residue remains trapped in the nervous system where it can wreak havoc on our bodies and spirits.”

What if I knew what was happening inside my body because I was the expert? 

I believe that everyone experiences trauma in different ways and that healing is possible. That for me, healing happens when I go into my body. That it is possible to allow for parts of myself to be shredded to bits. That sometimes I can even ride the wave of destruction. Watching, as the dominos of my existence rupture. My physical crashing against my emotional, taking down my mental, bleeding out onto belief systems that slaughter thought patterns pushed up against ancient sensations I am choosing to feel my way through.  I am learning to listen to the nuances that lie beneath the surface of my skin. Learning to hear the whispers before they turn to shouts. Sometimes I feel like an expert. Sometimes I feel like that little year girl. Either way, I let myself feel loved and cared for in a way that only I can do for myself.