The Blood and The Bones

I shared it on my instagram over the weekend. I ended up in the ER.

A woman I follow on Instagram shared a post a while ago where she talked about being vocal in her pain as a way of processing, and its something I’ve always related to strongly. Especially as I’m navigating this season of post surgical recovery, and complications, I’m finding the truth exists most obviously in metaphor and story. It speaks loudly through my body, and in allowing it breathing room I am often chasing the tail of the thing.

It started as a brunch date, the vitality slowly creeping back into my life after the surgery which left me sidelined for weeks. I started to feel the twinges after breakfast, and I thought I’d eaten too much. My stomach still growing in size after over a year of being malnourished, it wasn’t until I was hunched over low to the ground in the middle of a store that I realized the problem might be more intense than I’d originally thought. My husband and I handled the unexpected change in plans the way we usually do, my head against his leg until the wave of pain subsided enough for me to stumble to the car. We pretended to be looking at things on the shelf as not to alarm anyone passing by, and I resigned myself to the fate of not being able to do the things I wanted to do in the name of listening to my body.

It wasn’t until I got home the situation began to intensify. I spent the next hours in bed, taking pain medication that didn’t even touch the edges of the thing, and the sensations neared the same level as they had when I had somehow navigated the first few hours post major surgery unmedicated. It was late afternoon when we made the decision, after multiple unsuccessful attempts to numb the pain, to go to the hospital.

Let me tell you about the doorway, how I made it a few steps from the bed before collapsing to the ground, how I lay there on the carpet beside a pile of dirty laundry and a puke bowl when the paramedics came through the front door of my home. Let me tell you about how I screamed, the most primal expression of pain I’ve ever heard come from my own body, and I tapped into this feral, untamed energy which became what I needed to survive. I blacked out, hearing only snippets of my husband on the phone with first responders, and my only focus became surviving.

Let me tell you about the back of the ambulance, when the paramedics whose names I cannot remember but who showed up like angels in my bedroom, pushed medication after medication in an attempt to dull the pain, all of which I was unresponsive to. I heard them say the word critical on the radio as they called in my estimated time of arrival.

Let me tell you about the hospital, how they wheeled me into a room almost immediately, how I was still blacking out, how I had so many drugs in my system I felt spacey and out of control yet so deeply connected to my primal body, and still able to feel the pain coursing through my body. Over 10 hours after my pain began, it finally began to dull when they started me on antibiotics for what had come back as a kidney infection.

In eastern medicine traditions, the kidneys are associated with vital essence, magic, the very roots of life. The kidneys play a role in blood, in urine, in the nervous system.

As I lay there in that hospital bed, I began thinking of the ecosystem of my body, the way everything works together. How my first thoughts raced to my liver, to internal bleeding relating to my most recent surgery, and then it was my kidneys and of course it was. Of course one part affects the next, and my very root system had been disrupted.

In plants and trees, the root system can become damaged through destruction to the soil, threats to their ability to receive oxygen, water or nutrients, or direct cutting of the roots. There is a scar right through the core of me, an attempt to prune away the threat of inability to receive nutrients and environmental destruction, and despite every conscious knowing this was for my good, my body still felt deep the cut of that scalpel. The body holds memory, the blood and bones of the thing pulsate with felt sense, and my body sounded the alarm. Something has happened to our eco system. Something has been disrupted, an outside force has come in to level ground.

In storytelling, in honouring our fears and our body truths, we play into kidney energy. On a cellular level, we are restoring roots, strengthening systems that feed into the body as a whole.

I’m home now, listening to the stories of my body and giving it what it needs to rest and recover. I am listening to her wisdom, replenishing the roots. My body is an ecosystem, each part feeding into the next, and as hard as modern medicine tries to convince me there is no dividing up the whole into parts.

I’m brewing herbal teas and drinking them slow, moving lymph in my body in order to let it go, warming myself under blankets and by heaters while the sun outside the big living room window rises earlier and earlier, signalling a coming back to life of sorts, a return to vitality I wish not only for the ecosystem of the world but the ecosystem of my body. I am telling my stories, allowing them to exist outside of me, giving them breathing room. Untold stories live in the body, get expressed through the body, and I think of all the stories my body is done holding.

I am returning to the blood and the bones and the roots of what it means to be human. I’m met with familiarity when I see the primal in me, the wild in me, the parts of me that mirror nature. It’s like looking in the mirror with a deep sigh of relief, “Ah, there I am.”

Returning to my body. Returning to the body of the world.