All the King's Horses

(continued from “Rude Awakenings”)

"Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall..."

My lung collapsed. And while I can explain to you the physical repercussions, which were life-threatening, there was something scarier about it to me.

My doctors; the professionals with the answers and the plans; the ones I trusted to the point of allowing them to cut my entire body open like a fish; the ones I allowed to fuse metal rods to my spine, a procedure that could have led to paralysis or death. These great men that I loved and trusted – how could it be that they of all people would now have no definite answers for me?

Aren’t doctors supposed to know everything? Isn’t that their job?

And aren’t parents supposed to be able to tell you that everything is going to be okay?

Wasn’t I supposed to only be here for 4 to 6 weeks? I remember them saying I was going to have a surgery. I remember them saying how long I’d be in the hospital. But when were they going to tell me what happens afterwards? When was I going to wake up from this nightmare? When was everything going to go back to how it was before I ever came to this crazy hospital? When was I going to be normal again?

I was so naive. “When was I going to be normal again?” What a stupid question. It just shows how little I understood about what was going on.

And you know what’s really pathetic? I’m crying right now as I write this, because I haven’t learned a thing in all these years. I’m still waiting to “return to normal”. Every year that goes by I have to face a new reality – a new machine to sleep with, oxygen 24/7, and now for the second time in my life, a tracheotomy. That means suctioning, new machines, new procedures, new employment goals, new fears about what “attractive” means – it affects everything.

And even though I know, I KNOW, that these are the realities of the deterioration of my condition, I still keep waiting for that day when it all just goes away. I even asked my new lung doctor last week, “Do you think I’ll have a tracheotomy forever?” He laughed and said “No, just until you die.” I was crushed. But why? Why can’t I accept what has happened and is continuing to happen to me?

I think it goes back to that blog I wrote a while back… "It Shouldn't Be Like This..."

But it is. That’s where I am and that’s where I was at all those years ago. It all happened so fast and there I was, facing a new dilemma, and all I wanted to do was go home and go back to school. It felt so far away – like I hadn’t been there in years.

And, to my horror, “All the King’s Horses and All the King’s Men…” didn’t have any idea how to re-inflate my lung again.

(to be continued)