Head’s up y’all, this one is pretty light on the actual medical info.  Tl;dr it’s not easy but she’s doing wonderfully.  

I’ve been thinking a lot about healing.  

Mom’s doing well, though the last couple of weeks out of the hospital have been bumpy.  But I’ve been thinking about the expectation - sometimes mine, sometimes hers, sometimes our perception of other people’s expectations - that progress should be linear and each day she should be stronger than the last.  That isn’t how healing happens, and I think it’s a really cruel standard.  

I like the word healing a lot better than the word recovery, although they’re often used interchangeably.  To me, recovery implies getting something back or finding something lost.  A life raft thrown overboard to haul someone back onto the ship.  I don’t think health and illness work that way.  

Healing is fundamentally forward-moving, not back.

People are not mathematical functions getting incrementally or exponentially better on predictable schedules.  Damage, pain, trauma, illness - physical and emotional - do not heal tidily.  You don’t “get back” everything you had, and if you do, you’re still changed by it- by the having, the losing, the healing, the process.  You’re a different person on the other side, one who has healed, but not one who has magically jumped into the body and mind of your pre-trauma self.   

I think we do ourselves a real disservice when we act as if the goal is to return to a lost state of well-being - you can aim for health and peace and wellness without framing it as a return to who you used to be. You aren’t who you used to be. Your best self isn’t a “you desperately longing for your pre-baby body” or your 30-year-old knees or your pre-cancer energy levels.  It just isn’t.

That doesn’t mean everything is always getting worse and you can only resign yourself to decay - just that growing the good that you have now is much more satisfying than trying to reverse time to a halcyon perfection that might never have existed the way you remember it, and which you probably didn’t enjoy when you had it.  

Mom has done an incredible amount of healing.  Her one-month scans are all clear and the transplant seems to have taken without a hitch. But the long, miserable days of extra hours at the hospital, extra meds, extra tests, extra draws of blood and bone marrow - those things threw her body into a miserable spin of needing pain meds which have side effects and nausea and trying to coordinate med schedules to counteract other meds and trying to keep food in her stomach to cushion all the pills and get her hydrated to protect her kidneys when she was unable to stop throwing up and when she had to fast before having scans.  

That good news - that progress- that proof of healing- came at the cost of some suffering and “backsliding.”  

Healing is not linear.  Our brains protect us from things that are too hard in the moment.  Often you feel worst when you think you should be getting better, when the crisis is past and you have resources to spare on processing feelings.  Wounds hurt more after the adrenaline wears off and you’re not in fear of your life, and after the elation eases, and you’re not stunned just to still be alive.  

Remember the scary weeks this spring when mom had the sudden, awful chemo reaction and spent weeks in the hospital, went septic and could have died in the icu? You were so sweet, to her and also to me, offering to help, to come, to do whatever I needed.

During those weeks what I mostly wanted was for everyone to stop suggesting that I leave the hospital to “take care of myself.”  That was where I needed to be; that was what I needed to be doing; I was handling it fine; I loved y’all but I mostly wanted to be allowed to do my job and not have to keep convincing people that I could do it.  

Shortly after, when we were able to come home for a few weeks before the transplant, I crashed hard.  We got back to Pennsylvania and there were other people around to look after my mama and I basically shut down for two weeks.

We both did, really.  

I’ve been mentally ill my whole life; in my earliest memories of depression I am ~4 years old.  I have had much worse and much better times, and some very, very dangerous times, but despite the wobble in the graph the trend is always up.  Not because my depression and anxiety have been or can be cured, but because my sixteen-year-old self didn’t even know what a panic attack was but just felt broken, and because my nineteen-year-old self was exhausted and thought she’d tried everything but hadn’t found a medication that helped, and my twenty-two-year-old self had fewer tools and coping skills and less self-awareness and a more fragile identity than I do now.  

So I have never been seduced by the idea that there was a perfect time pre-MI that I’m trying to recover, but it’s always hard not to feel defeated when you’ve done everything right, and you’ve worked so hard, and today is harder than yesterday for no good reason.  

But that’s healing, that’s how it works.  Healing is messy, and it hurts, and it takes you somewhere new, not somewhere you’ve already been.  

If you heal perfectly and regain full function of whatever was damaged, you are, after, not a person who was never hurt.  You’re a person who knows what it’s like not to have that functionality, and what it takes and what it means to get it back.

When mom’s energy is increased she will still be a person who knows what it’s like to be so tired that she has to pep-talk herself into getting out of bed to pee. 

Healing is frustrating and unpredictable, but it’s happening.  

Be kind to yourselves while you heal.  We love you.