Monday, December 13, 2010

Reverb 10 -- Body and soul

For Dec. 12 -- Body integration. This year, when did you feel the most integrated with your body? Did you have a moment where there wasn't mind and body, but simply a cohesive YOU, alive and present?

It wasn't a particularly good experience, actually, but what I remember the best about this year, about my body and my mind, was the moment I woke from surgery on my wrist, swimming up from the anesthetically-induced fog into the recovery room.

My first thought was 'I'm alive -- thank you God. I made it through.' I felt alive, I felt 'right' again, I was so, so grateful to just be there.

I had gone into surgery with great trepidation, mostly because a couple of the doctors who were in the pre-op process were questioning some of my test results, iterating out loud that 'well, it could mean this' and 'it's a possibility' and bringing me back to a bad experience that happened in 2002 when I was misdiagnosed in the emergency room. I was scared and my heart rate and blood pressure reflected that.

So when I knew I was alive, that everything was all right, that my wrist was fixed, and that I just needed to breathe deeply and then I could go home, I was so filled with gratitude for that instant that nothing else mattered or registered.

Awareness set in shortly about the cumbersome bandage, my dry mouth and swimmy head, and when Tony appeared in the post-surgery area to take me home, I burst into huge sobs of relief at seeing him and at being okay, surviving.

The worst week of that whole injury was already over when I came out of the surgery -- it was between the accident and the surgery itself, and filled with pain meds and their icky side effects, and I was very aware then of the connection between body and mind but was dealing primarily with the body's unhappiness that week.


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