Steeling Home
I thought this would be easy.
The doctors assured me that hip replacement is pretty basic—way easier than knee replacement. It’s outpatient surgery—about 2 hours of recovery after a 90 minute surgery. My surgery was scheduled for 10 am on June 21; the nurse said I would be walking—yes, walking—out the door by 1pm. 2 at the latest.
I remember being wheeled into the operating room and turned onto my side. The doctor gave me spinal anesthesia to numb my body and then an IV push of something that was going to “sting a bit” to make me fall asleep. It stung more than a bit, but not as much as being awake during surgery would have.
Surgery over, I woke up in unrecognizable pain. It wasn’t a pain I could locate—it wasn’t the pain of incision or the pinch of needles. It was a full-body trauma response to having the top of my femur sawed off, a metal ball on a spike pounded into it, and then being stapled shut. I remember saying over and over to the nurse, “it hurts.” The image that kept running through my head was of sand—red and blue, flowing sand. It was the pain that coursed through me—infinite phantom grindings of my bone that would not stop moving.
I tried to form the pain into a solid shape—to visually meld the sand with steel or gold that would give my body strength, but I couldn’t grasp the pain. And I was shaking. At one point, the particulates of trauma became millions of stars viewed through a thin and parting atmosphere. And from the sand and stars, an iridescent whale formed and led me away from the beach I was trying to hold. It turned me around and led me out to sea.
At 2 pm, I attempted to walk. While the geriatrics in the adjoining recovery areas were prepping for their square dance, I was breaking a sweat in trying to put one foot in front of the other. Instead of a walk to the bathroom, I got ginger ale and a bed pan.
Finally, at 4 pm, after a trip down the hall and a grueling 3-stair ascent and descent, I was in the car on my way home. While I could move my feet, my surgical leg was still numb, and the sand kept coursing.
Enter Camp Summer
The week before my surgery, I hosted a workshop called Camp Summer in which a group of thoughtful women came together to discover a summer symbol and theme and talk about how that theme fuels and informs their decisions for the season. Essentially, we talked about how to make the most of summer.
In this year’s workshop, I made elaborate plans for a 5-star convalescence. I packaged my recovery as a kind of staycation complete with activities, special events, guests, and a detailed itinerary.
My theme, pre-summer solstice surgery, was Downhome Sun in the Uptown City, and my symbol was an peachy-orange straw hat. I knew I would need to stay close to home after surgery, so I planned a simple summer of ease under the protection of a fashionable hat to pass the time while my hip healed. I would be like one of those early 20th-century ladies of delicate disposition who gets wheeled to the seaside in her wicker chair for healthy air and tiny sandwiches. I would read and write and receive the occasional visitor while my children sat with me and read novels aloud until I dozed off (okay, I didn’t think the last part would happen, but it rounds out the idyll.)
I genuinely thought I would write and post a blog on the Wednesday after Tuesday’s surgery. I was sure the 6 weeks of recovery were more of an indulgence than a necessity, I had no doubt that my sister coming to Chicago for the week would be helpful but mostly entertaining.
Now, a week and a day out from surgery, what has surprised me the most is how wrong I was and how hard it is to think when your body hurts.
Pain is a mind-fuck (oh dear, the tiny sandwiches!).
Between surgery and today, I’ve written almost nothing. Even my well-established morning pages routine has just fallen away. I’ve filled perhaps two pages with notes and snippets of dreams. The white noise orchestra of the fan, air conditioner, and the hip icing machine whir me into a cottony sleep until the pain wakes me again just in time for more Tylenol.
The reality of my pain has allowed me to understand the fantasy of my summer if not through a new lens, at least through a new filter.
I still plan to have a Camp Summer of activities close to home, but my symbolic whimsical straw hat has been replaced with a sturdy umbrella and my lighthearted play on “fun in the sun” has become a more substantial theme of Steeling Home.
We will have vacations and baseball and ice cream this summer, but in light of my theme, these events are not just lowkey entertainment; they are in the service of strengthening everything that makes me feel safe: my body, my family, and my writing (my Work). My summer of Steeling Home has a subtitle: reinforce our foundations and balance our additions. Let’s remember who we are, accept the new parts of us, and make it all work together.
Without my Camp Summer workshop and brochure, I would not have consciously recognized and planned for the healing summer I wanted. And without the clarity gained through the pain of my surgery, I would not have understood what it meant to heal.
On my Camp Summer bucket list is “have a movie marathon.” Movie marathons are always a to-do over vacations and holiday breaks, but they rarely happen. Even on vacation, it’s almost impossible to get my family to just hang out and relax into hours of movies that we’ve seen before just for the sake of hanging out and relaxing.
But in the last week, my daughter and I have watched 7 of 8 of the Harry Potter films. New and interesting themes keep popping up—missing body parts in film 3, fear of the truth in films 5 and 6, and the reality of bodily effort vs the unreality of magical results in film 7.
We watched the films not as a way to lazily pass time but as a way to steel home.
Before my surgery, I thought healing was a destination and planned my summer as an entertaining wait for it to magically arrive. My body reminded me that healing is a journey of effort and rest, of discomfort and wonder that pieces us back together.
A week out from surgery, the particulates of pain have largely calmed into new “bone” in my hip. The beach that threatened to strand me has been covered in water. And the safe and solid homes of body, family, and Work I thought only to rent for the season, I will steel.
