Getting On With It

 I am learning – relearning – what it means simply to get on with it. 

A week ago today I had my procedure. I keep saying that: I should be saying clearly that a week ago today. I had my surgery. The good news is that I seem to be coming along nicely. The small wounds across my body from the robotic scope are still a little tender to the touch, but they don’t bother me moment by moment. The same is true of the hole in the back where I used to have the drain from my kidney. I’m doing a little more each day, and I have had my first shower. That was lovely.

It was also a little frightening. Something about showering always catches my more painful knee and I have to work around that. While I have been told I can shower, I have been cautioned against the tub bath or a hot tub or anything that would keep all of these little wounds submerged. So, I find myself stopping to wonder just how wet is too wet.

That’s what things are like at this point: I’m now safe enough and comfortable enough past the operation itself that I begin to worry about other little things. Inside me, where we cannot watch it day by day, a small piece of tissue from my cheek has been wrapped around the gap in my ureter to make the bypass. It has also been wrapped with some of my belly fat (quit your snickering!) so that blood vessels can actually grow around it to to supply blood to the new tissue. Of all of the things I worry about from this surgery, the one that bothers me most is that bypass scarring in the way my ureter did. I can feel where the tissue was taken from my cheek. It doesn’t hurt, and having bitten my cheek before I know that, given time, it will all fill in and grow back. I can know what’s happening there. I can’t know what’s happening with that bypass, and that not knowing frightens me.

There are other things going on that I can reference but not really know about. My PSA was just a smidge higher at the day of the operation and then it had been at the last one. But until I have healed from this at least enough to start focusing on that, it’s also something that I know something is going on but I don’t know what’s going on.

This is not the first time in my life I have had to get on with things, unsure what was going on. Honestly, that’s a large part of the human experience. It’s just that it is so much more somehow intimate when we’re talking about these small and scattered structures and cells of my body. That intimacy makes it somehow more poignant, more acute.

just to get on with it requires hope. It requires a sense that there is something to enjoy, something to be blessed by, at some point in the getting on. I could say “when it’s over,“ but until we see the Lord again it’s never really over. So, there is hope that there is value in getting on with it. Easter helps with that. It was an interesting Easter, engaging online from my bed. It was in its way lovely. I watched the vigil in one church and Easter Sunday morning in two others. They were all different, and they all also reinforced hope. I am not alone in this. We are not alone in this. There is a promise beyond “just getting on,“ and what is promised is good.