because secrets lie in secret places
I just had two more arterial surgeries…bypass of my coratid to my subclavian (around a bubble/aneurysm/dissection) and a bypass of my coratid to my vertebral artery. For those of you unaware of what your body is comprised of, there are two main arteries to the brain: the coratid and the vertebral. The vertebral snakes off of your subclavian and goes up your neck, quite close to the coratid. The dissection actually appeared very close to that vertebral connection, so I ended up having to get it bypassed as well…since having half the amount of blood going to my brain wasn’t my idea of a big party.
Then we did the other side…my arteries are all twice the size of a normal person’s…so why not do all of this shit preventatively so we can avoid the internal explosion to end all explosions.
Now these two were in prep for the third surgery, which would be numbers 4,5, and 6 in my lifetime to repair fucked up artery/aortic connections.
The thing that I wonder is: how is it that people think they are somehow traumatized more than you are to have to “be with you” throughout major surgery. It really pisses me off that I have heard, “this is not my world, you don’t understand what it’s like, la la la”. Like I somehow popped into the world with some kind of omnipotence about surgery and what it was like to be a “sick” person. I keep saying the same thing over and over, “don’t be so selfish…I’m the motherfucker lying in the hospital bed, I’m the one who cannot leave, I’m the one unable to live normally, unsick, complete and without fear”. You get to experience watching me be ill, true, you get to feel powerless, you get to be sad, then you get to go home. What about me, who gets to feel all of this and then not get to go home, not be allowed to forget, left not only with the emotional aftermath, but a flurry of scars etched haphazardly across my body in memoriam.
This is one of those times in my life where I wish I did not have tattoos. Because people look at me, and they assume these scars I have across my chest and belly and clavicles are the result of self-inflicted injury, or demarkation. Scarification has been given such a national platform of acceptance that for people who actually earn, who actually scream and bleed and lie in hospital beds and get the consolation prize of a scar..that we are taken as a joke, as someone who decided to burn or cut into their flesh…for nothing more than aesthetics or…as I have come to know, to materialize the pain in their own life.
What about the people who would give their scars back, who never wanted them in the first place, the people who had no choice, who didn’t go to the man with the knife or the branding iron…what about them?
