2 years (and everything has changed)
As this is posted, it is the middle of the waiting period between my first and second liver transplant. 2 years ago, my life changed forever because of 2 donors, and the months that followed have been about reorienting myself with death, sickness, joy and what it means to be alive.
No one told me it would be like this. Prior to surgery, I was given extensive notes on what recovery would look like (it didn’t go according to plan), and my follow up care consisted of making sure lab values were in the correct range and going over the copious amounts of medication I would now be taking for the rest of my life. If I’d been in charge of making that take home binder, it probably would have included more than a few pages on mental health, living in a world that doesn’t make sense to anyone who hasn’t experienced it firsthand, coping with survivors guilt, feeling like you’re losing your mind, adjusting to living in a new body and the amount of meds that list anxiety as a side effect that are just passed on like that doesn’t mean anything.
That is work I’ve dedicated my life to ever since I could return to work post surgery. I spend my days talking to patients and their loved ones, coordinating care plans that extend beyond surgical recovery, providing information and validating very real concerns. You’re not crazy, you’re not alone, yes its like this for everyone.
Organ transplants are a strange field of medicine, I find, where the struggles aren’t talked about nearly as much because you’re supposed to be better now and grateful.
I’ve been living, working, breathing, existing in this space for 2 years now, which has given me a lot of time to work through my triggers. But here’s the thing about pain: it demands to be felt. And when I say my 2 year anniversary absolutely blindsided me with how hard it was, I mean it.
Intense waves of grief for the life I didn’t get to live, the life my donor never got to live, the way that every part of my future is forever altered.
I remember it was like that, too, when P died. On his first anniversary, I was fine. Sad, but fine. The second year absolutely blindsided me. And i think a lot of that has to do with the emphasis on the firsts. As a culture, we put a lot of focus on surviving that first year, the first milestones. And what we fail to realize is after the first milestones, they still keep coming. Every birthday is another one without my son. Every August that passes is another one where I am alive because someone else isn’t. My body remembers the trauma even if my concious mind does not, and I feel the emotion well up inside bone and vein and cells before it ever touches the surface of my thinking brain.
In the past 2 years, everything has changed. I’ve had to reorient myself to self, to what having a body is like, to who i am and who i want to be, to the world of medicine and career and relationships. It’s a combination of being extremely grateful I get to do this, and the intense heaviness of finding a new way to navigate the world. My body has been through hell and back, my mind has been through hell and back. It’s the both/and, walking the line and not being consumed. There is an intense duality in this life and I’ve learned the only way through is to feel it.
So on the 14th, the day of my first surgery 2 years ago, I held myself through the remembering. I let it rock me, let it roar with intensity. I let myself feel all the things it wasn’t safe for me to feel 2 years ago when I was still in such acute survival mode, with the knowledge that healing is about feeling all those things you were never able to feel then, about rewriting the story and shifting the perspective from victim to victor. I looked in the mirror, studied my reflection that looks a lot different than it did 2 years ago. Healthier and more full of life. And I said the same words I whispered to myself into the selfie function of my phone, holding the phone inches from my face because I was still so drugged I couldn’t see straight. They are words I’ve said many, many times since then.
I’m here. I’ve got you. I am not leaving. I will not abandon you again.
The poet Andrea Gibson has a poem where they say “when it comes time to love yourself, it may take a good solid year to stop crying about all that you have to let go.”
And its like that, except the tears didn’t stop after a year and thats ok. Transplantation was a journey into loving myself well. It was me choosing me for the first time in my life, and also being chosen by someone else (my brother, my first donor, who underwent surgery and recovery because he loves me, and my second donor whose family chose to gift life to a stranger in the middle of their own grief. Neither one of these heroic acts has gone unnoticed).
Everything has changed, and it’s ok that that still hurts sometimes. It’s ok, and safe, to navigate this new world with shaking hands. Because I’ve got me. And I’m not abandoning myself ever again.
