Traumaversaries and the Truths Our Bodies Tell

On the Anniversary of Almost Dying, I was admitted to the hospital. 😬

These are the dog days of summer, when the brightest known star rises with the sun. And I am living them shadowed yet shimmering, because one year ago in the heat and hope of summer, my light nearly left.

What I’m stumbling into saying is that one year ago last Tuesday, I was in a hospital begging my body to keep breathing. And this year, I spent the anniversary of that awfulness in the very last place I wanted to be.

This letter’s longer than usual, but I believe the context carries clues of how to apply this to you. Read it at your leisure, maybe when you need a break from the wild news cycle that is the Election Year of Our Whoa. Also, in case the fact that I’m able to write wasn’t enough of a consolation, let me be clear, I am okay.

I once was afraid of dying. But then I became afraid of living with the life I had left.

Do you know this fear?

I once assumed the mark of healing would be the absence of hurt. But then I kept hurting while healing. And my body asked for acceptance beyond answers.

Do you also feel this friction?

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early last July in the Arkansas River at Browns Canyon National Monument

Last July: I sit in a stream in a canyon, my legs submerged in the cold water to cool my body in the heat of the day, book and notebook in hand, chest aching. I look down to write out a quote.

“This is our meditation practice as women,” Clarissa Pinkola Estés writes, “calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of ourselves, calling back the dead and dismembered aspects of life itself.”¹

White water rafters keep floating by, waving and laughing, while I sit here with my journal open, trying to open my heart to accept the object tunneled under my skin as part of me now. I’ve come to the water to feel welcome. I’m probably too sick to be here, camping with my best friend and husband just a week after having surgery to place a port, but I need nature to nourish me. We came here straight from the hospital, where an interventional radiologist checked my surgical incision and prescribed a strong antibiotic in case an infection is the reason I’m just not recovering. This surgery was supposed to be simple, but it has felt searing.

I jot down lines, the start of something that might be a poem.

The stars and river sing

a creation hymn

over my bones,

over every riven thing.²

The sand at my feet glints gold and a gentle breeze surrounds my skin in warmth. I close my eyes and let the sound of the river calm my fears. In the dark of my eyelids, I see stars.

Last night, Ryan and I slept with our tent open to the sky. The whole right side of my chest burned like hydrogen squeezed at the core, but we watched the stars dance long into the night with our heads cradled together in equilibrium.

This is why I want to be alive, I thought, eyes wide with wonder, because though there is ache, there is also amazement.

One week later, I go into severe anaphylactic shock. Again and again. Eleven Epi shots and over a gram of steroids later, and my body only stops running to the cliff-edge of near-death when a surgeon cuts the port out of my body. I’m left with Lupus and two distal femurs³ dead from the medicine that kept me alive.