That’s what Cynthia said as she led me back to the surgery prep room when I told her I was scared. “And don’t you worry because God made women stronger so we can get through anything.” Cynthia works for St. Luke’s hospital in Kansas City, and although I don’t know her official capacity, she wears a bright blue and white button that says “success coach.” Her words were cool water to me in the desert, pretty literally because I was parched from the no-water-before-surgery rule, and I was crazy scared.
Over the next few hours when I was prepped on Friday, she popped in the room every so often, teasing me about going to the restroom so often, an effective avoidant strategy for me and inconvenience for the medical personnel when I’m hooked up to IVs and monitors. But her words about how God’s got me helped me breathe just a bit more deeply.
Now I know all of us don’t resonate with the word “God,” and to some it’s more than off-putting, but I believe that something/someone/somehow has got us. Call it the higher self. Call it the life force. Call it the Great Spirit. Call it Jesus or Buddha or pure love or real life. For me, God works just fine, shorthand for “the force that through the flower drives the green fuse” (to quote Dylan Thomas) as well as for the unconditional, abiding love we’re capable of giving and receiving.
Since surgery, I’ve come to the oasis of Cynthia’s words to refresh myself even and especially when I’m in pain. When post-surgery head pain and nausea dissolve into hours of exhaustion and restlessness. When an excruciating migraine wakes me up at 3 p.m. and I need to wait until daybreak to take my meds for it because they have caffeine. When surprise nausea hits for a few minutes, and more often, I’m rushing to the bathroom for bouts of digestive hell. When the itchiness and drainage of this right eye drive me crazy. When the fatigue and confusion of my left eye, surely mourning the loss of her partner for these five days, disorients me. When, which means most of the time, my right eye burns. When there’s little I can do but color and listen to birdsong.
But then there is birdsong, color, and all the ways God’s got me. When my close friends and mother’s voice on the voices tell me I’m still me in this good life. When Judy and Ken carefully rescue a green caterpillar caught against the screen porch screen so it can go on to transform into whatever butterfly it is next. When I listen to Brandi Carlile’s “The Joke” or anything by Mary Chapin Carpenter on itunes. When Kelley shows up with soup that’s just what I need. When Ken and I laugh together at a scene in Northern Exposure for the hour each day I can watch something (I get too eye-tired after that). When I blessedly fall asleep on the porch to the tune of hummingbird buzz and the unseen birds on the left chatting up the unseen birds on the right. Whenever I look at the gorgeous bouquet of flowers my sister-in-law Karen and my nieces sent. There’s also texts full of heart emojis, our daughter’s voice on the phone, our son coming here each evening to patiently take our dog, a little freaked out that he can’t be near me, to my in-law’s home for the night, and mostly, there’s Ken, sick with some crazy virus himself but making me tea, sitting outside with me to take in the walls of green life, and talking with me when I otherwise would be talking myself up and down walls.
I can only hope others going through challenges, particularly those of you who are chronically ill in ways that keep unfolding in unpredictable or same-old-same-old ways, have such support holding you. At the least and the most, I wish that someone’s got you too (as in “gets” who you are and holds you), which makes me think of the ending of this Rainer Maria-Rilke poem (translated by Stephen Mitchell), “Autumn”:
We’re all falling. This hand here is falling.
And look at the other one. It’s in them all.
And yet there is Someone, whose hands
infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.
Wednesday, there’s both relief and another big passage ahead: the same surgery, but this time to remove the gold heart (as I’m thinking of it) full of radioactive seeds. I don’t know if I’ll see Cynthia, but I’ll wrap her words around me like a woven shawl of blues, greens, prayers, and wishes. As with everything, I don’t know what the aftermath of that surgery will be like, but I’m grateful to know God’s got me.
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