You think I’m joking, don’t you? I mean, really, why would you leave me behind? I’m awesome, I have mad chicken slaughtering skills (okay, I only participated once and I couldn’t actually go through with it even after several glasses of wine…but I totally could do it if the zombies were coming!), I’m clever, funny, and encouraging. Plus I always score at the top of quizes like “How Long Will You Survive the Zombie Apocalypse”. Okay, 34% isn’t the top of my game, but I took that quiz a long time ago and I’ve learned a lot since then!

Run! The zombies are coming!

Back in March I posted about a hernia that was finally getting fixed after having lived with it for a long time. I got it during a bike accident and after a bunch of hullabaloo and two different hospitals, I got a diagnosis and a surgery scheduled. After the surgery, the Dr. told me that it looked just like a puncture from a bicycle handle bar, and she’d never seen anything like that before. But, she said, it was a success! After nearly two years of pain, my hernia was fixed and I’d be right as rain within 8 weeks.

So I went home, relaxed, took some pain medications, and tried to carry on with my life as carefully as I could. But I just wasn’t feeling right. I had weird fluttering feelings, I had pain that made it near impossible to walk or stand. I figured that since it was a hernia I had lived with for a while, it was just taking a lot of time to heal. I went back to the Dr. and she said she wasn’t sure if the surgery “took” or not, so she sent me home to rest, put me back on a 10lb lifting restriction,  and told me to come back if the pain didn’t get better.

It didn’t. In fact, the pain just increased to the point where it was hard to wear underwear. I went back and she was able to tell right away that the repair had, in fact failed. I needed a second surgery.  So on July 28, about 4 months after my first surgery, I went in for a second operation. This was was also open surgery and it was also deemed a success. They cautioned me that the healing time would be greater because it was the second operation in the same spot (opening the same wound) for the same problem.

So I went home and made sure to be even more careful than I had been last time. I didn’t lift my cast iron skillets. I didn’t mop, took my pain medications regularly, and basically just laid around for a long time. About six weeks after my surgery, I still wasn’t feeling right, so I went in for a check-up, and guess what?

The surgery failed AGAIN!

The doctor who did the previous two operations decided that she wasn’t going to operate on me a third time, so she passed me on to another surgeon. This new guy is kind of a cocky jerk who acted like he was doing me a favor by covering the other surgeon’s ass, but I hope that he’s a jerk because he’s good. Maybe his cockiness and assholish ways are just his way of exuding confidence and skill. I have to believe that, anyway.

My next operation will be September 29th, eight weeks after my second operation. In the meantime, my life stinks. I feel depressed, angry, hurt, useless and overwhelmed. There are so many things that I just can’t do, like sit upright or stand, that have made me feel helpless and hopeless. It’s so easy to look around the house and see all the things I can’t do. It’s so easy to look at my friends and see all the moms nights I can’t attend or all the baby showers I have to leave early and it’s enough to make me feel like curling into a ball and crying. The pain is god awful, but the emotional stress of this is worse than the physical pain in a lot of ways. They can give me drugs for the physical pain, but there’s nothing that can help the emotional pain.

Fortunately, I have a wonderful network of amazing friends who have really rallied around me and helped take care of me both physically and emotionally. They have worked together to take BB for sleepovers, playdates and camping trips. They’ve coordinated bringing us food and hanging out on the couch with me while I complain. I’m very lucky to have such awesome and supportive women in my life. But even that brings me emotional pain. I feel like we’re all given an allotment of love and support in life, and surely I must have used up my allotment by now. How in the world can these women still love me? How in the world can they still want to help me? And even if they can and do, is it morally right of me to allow them? Surgery and pain should be old hat for me by now, so is it right for me to lean on them when they have their own lives? I suppose what I’d say if it were one of my friends is: “Wait a second, sweetie. Friends do this kind of thing for each other because they love one another. Friends look out for each other because friendship is a family unit all its own, and it means a lot for me to be able to help you in some small way.” I’d say that because I feel it. But I don’t know that I deserve to have it apply to me.

Logically I know that’s just a bit of depression talking. I’ve been pretty much useless for years and it’s been painful to watch the changes in both my mind and my body. I hope to have this damned surgery in a few weeks and then heal quickly and easily, but I’m afraid of that, too. What if a third operation fails? What then? At what point do I just say “Enough! I’ve tried to have this fixed x many times and I’m done! I’ll just live with it for the rest of my life!” At what point do I try and find a lawyer? Is there ever a point to find one? At what point do I look for another place who will take my uninsured ass? Speaking of which, is it because I’m uninsured that I’ve gotten such bad care to begin with?

So, like I said at the beginning of this post: If the Zombie Apocalypse comes, just leave me behind. I’m too wounded to do much good when on the lam from the undead.

Unless…

Yes…Unless…Unless you bring me along, take care of me, and then use me as bait in your great escape plan. I could totally do that.

That’s what friends are for, right?