1. decennium

1

decennium

12.14.2021

My parents may have given me life on that Labor Day weekend of 1987, but on this day 10 years ago Dr. Belzer saved it. 

An entire decade has since passed I had a surgery that saved my life from the deathly grips of Crohn’s Disease. I had been sick for years. In and out of emergency rooms across the twin cities western metro area in hopes there would be just one competent doctor out there who would take my case as seriously as they do on any episode of Grey’s Anatomy. I wanted to be able to do something that most people do without a second thought.

I wanted to eat. 

It was a winter day; one of those bone cutting cold days that only you get to experience if you live in Minnesota. I found myself laying in a hospital bed. Shivering from the cold, antiseptic air and what I can only imagine was the perpetual rattle of every nerve ending in my body. The nurse placed her sterile, gloved hand onto my forearm and asked if she could grab me a blanket. I told her yes, but that my inclination was that the shivers had more to do with nerves than it did the actual temperature in the hallway outside the operating room.

There I had sat, wasting away in that hospital bed for 13 days already. I had no one to brush or braid my matted hair. I was unable to shower on my own. I couldn’t speak without having to pause because of the tube that was quite literally shoved through my nasal passage and crammed down my gullet, down my throat where it lay resting in the pit of my stomach. I had sat for hours a day watching fluid drain from my body, out of my nose and into a clear bucket. There were four different IV sites plugged into my arms that had to be relocated every couple of days. My body was a graveyard of bruises from the days prior. Bruising easily has always been one of my many talents. I remember the medical staff saying we may need to start moving to putting IVs in my legs. I was hoping to get out of the hospital before that part would have to happen. The only thing keeping me alive at that point was being plugged into those clear bags containing fluid that only the medical professionals could identify. I was a human Capri Sun. 

The nurse looked at me with one of those smiles you give someone when you know there’s not much you can do to help them within the moment. She asked me if I wanted something to help with the involuntary rattling of my body. I told her yes with eyes full of tears. She placed her hand on my shoulder and told me she’d be back with some paperwork for me to sign before they started the surgery. As promised, she came back with the packet of papers, a clipboard, and a pen. She sat on the side of my hospital bed and went over the documents with me. She asked if I was okay, and I told her I was and I was just ridiculously anxious. She brought me something to help with the anxiety and issued the dose of medication through my IV directly into my veins. I can’t remember what it was. I do remember it helping. 

For those who have never had surgery, it’s normal procedure to tell patients that the surgery they’re about to have could result in death. We are supposed to take that information and say, ‘okay’ and sign our names at the bottom of the paper saying we understand that this may be the last time we are going to be able to experience consciousness as we have come to know it. Typically signing this document doesn’t bother me however when you have a major, hours long emergency surgery ahead of you with backup plan B and C, it starts to feel like death is a slightly higher possibility this time around. 

I teared up. I remember thinking first about my kids. It was almost Christmas and was Jaida’s first; she was only a mere ten months old at the time. I didn’t know if I would be home in time to experience that with her. All I could think about was my family who would be spending what is typically the most cheerful time of year worrying about me. I hated that. Up until that point in my life I was the only thing my babies had. To say I was terrified going into that surgery was an understatement. I was wheeled into the operating room where they parked me under a light that shone as bright as a thousand suns directly into the back of my corneas. I was asked to sit up and swing my legs over the edge of the bed. A nurse came and stood at either side of me, hooking themselves under my arms as I was given an epidural. A process I had already experienced several times already. To this day I can still feel the shuddering of the needles as they scratched at the discs in my spine. That’s a feeling I’ll never forget. 

I looked around to see more hospital staff than I had ever seen in one room. Each of them buzzing around and catering to their little area of the room. Everyone cloaked in scrubs, face shields, gloves… some with bandanas tied around their heads. They were quietly chatting with each other as they counted the medical supplies and went over the plan for my surgery. It was overwhelming. I closed my eyes and swallowed the tears that were making their way to my eyes. All I could do was face towards the ceiling and wait to be put under. My final thought before they placed that plastic gas mask over my face was that I hoped I would get to wake up and at best, have my life back to some degree. and how much I love my babies. I apologized to them and told them I love them telepathically in my head and hoped by some miracle they would hear their momma and hopefully not for the last time.

Upon waking I had no concept of how much time had passed, of course. By the tired looks strewn across the faces of my family it had been longer than expected. The surgery lasted 8 hours.

But… I woke up. 

I blinked my eyes slowly, several times before they were able to consciously register the world around me. I was able to come back to myself in the recovery room, but just barely. A light shining above my head, less intense than the last one that I saw before I slipped into unconsciousness. I was groggy, hooked up to every kind of machine possible. I had pumps attached to my limbs that would fill up with air every so often, squeezing my limbs to keep blood flowing. My IV sites throbbed with every inflation. A new, smaller tube had been placed in my nose. I could barely speak, I could hardly move, and I couldn’t feel a damn thing. Which was cool for a while after you’ve been in consistent, gut-wrenching pain for years at a time. 

I remember feeling haunted by the fact that each time I blinked I could feel some sticky residue lying vertically across my eyelids. My eyes had been taped shut. The next day I remember accidentally ripping the epidural tube right out of my spine as I tried to adjust the dead weight of my body in that hospital bed to get in a more comfortable position. Since the epidural had come out, I was given a morphine drip. The nurse commented on how sparingly I used it, and that I must have been in a lot of pain for a long time to have a surgery like that and not want to inject myself with morphine at each of the allotted 15-minute intervals. She wasn’t wrong.

Once I regained control of the lower half of my body, I wobbled my way to the bathroom. Comparable to the way I can only assume newborn giraffes do fresh out the womb. I had been posted up in a bed for nearly two weeks at that point so my muscles were a little rusty and required much encouragement from my brain. I stood and looked at myself in the mirror. Naked except for a hospital gown draped over my sickly frame, paired with lead colored wool socks with white grippers on the bottom. I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and reached behind my neck to untie the navy strings that were holding together the hospital gown. I dropped my arms and reached behind me to untie the slackened knot placed at the small of my back in front of my tattoo. 

My gaze fell over my body at the same rate the hospital gown hit the floor. I gasped at the way my skin had settled into its new space. My eyes filled with tears. This is a new body, a new home. Four sets of gauze had been taped over the space where my skin had once been smooth. I removed the gauze to find stitches and medical tape. My belly button had been removed for the surgery. It was from this site where they had pulled two feet of decaying sections of intestine and other organs from my body. I had two small slits at the top and bottom of my abdomen where they had tried to go in laparoscopically to repair what they could. When they got in there, they realized that what had been shown on my scans was miniscule in comparison to what they found once they were able to place eyes on my insides. There is about an inch scar under my left rib, where Dr. Belzer said he was able to hold my gall bladder in his hands, massaging it, and deciding that I could keep that piece. A detail that freaked my family out. It was through this opening they stitched my intestines back together after removing the diseased parts.

My hands reached for my mouth; fingers extended over the chilled tip of my nose.

I cried.

I stood in the bathroom and grabbed onto the sides of the cold, smooth, white porcelain sink. I dropped my head; my matted hair halfway falling around me. I watched my tears fall down the drain. I took a deep breath and reached for a robe to wrap around my cold, depleted skin.  Fresh out of abdominal surgery, bending over to get the hospital gown off the floor was not going to happen. I felt guilty leaving it for someone else to have to pick up.

At that moment, it was like being born again. I emerged from this cocoon of illness and decay and was on my way to experience minutes, hours, and days that could have very easily been taken from me. I was given a new chance at life. 

Typically, on this day I reflect a lot and I always end with the thought, ‘How do you thank someone who quite literally saved your life?’ 

Today I think I figured it out. 

You live it. 

You kiss your kids.

You hug your families.

You extend gratitude for everything that makes you happy no matter how great or how small. 

You pay attention to sunrises, sunsets, the moon and the glittering of the snow in winter and the glimmering of the water during the lake days in the summer.

You stop worrying about things you can’t control.

You love your people a little more than you did the day before.

You go on little adventures

You read books

You don’t ‘save’ things for a ‘better’ occasion, because you realize what better occasion is there than today?

You are kind simply because you can be. 

You tell people how you feel.

You take & keep shitty pictures of the moon on your phone.

You find magic in almost anything that crosses your path. 

You say thank you and you say it often.

You leave people and places a little better than when you found them. 

You smile from your soul,

And laugh from your belly.

You fall in love more intensely than the time before. 

You find a little more joy and add it to your routine. 

You do all these things with the utmost gratitude and excitement that the next day you get the opportunity to open your eyes and do it all over again. Because someday we will all be denied that privilege. 

The last decade has been a wild ride - and I am so glad I’ve got to be here for it all. 

Here’s a glimpse into snippets of my last 3650 days. And some even from a time before then.

Thank you for being here and allowing space for my words to breathe and live.

It’s truly a dream come true.