When the pain subsided, I couldn’t tell if it had been real. I’ve been laying here, blinking my eyes in the dark of my bed for several days now, calculating the feasibility of it all having been a dream.

The last memory I have of reality, before it all went blank, is of coasting on my longboard. I remember panicking as it began to pick up speed on an unexpected downhill slope. I remember glancing over at my son, riding his bike to my right. I remember the wind on my face blowing harder as I picked up speed. I remember thinking that I needed to get off this thing somehow. I might have tried to step off, though I’m not sure. 

Everything after that is blank. I remember nothing about the ER that night, all the different places they rushed me to for scans and checks and cleaning up / draining the blood. 

I’ve been home for three weeks now, lying in bed with my broken body. Prescription bottles lay strewn across the dresser, my daily sustenance. The pink bedpan J ordered from Amazon that he used as a cowboy hat just before I had to use it for the first time. A walker in the corner, the kind that clutters nursing home dining halls. The pain has a mind of its own, like a swarm of bees set loose in a dark honey cave. (What’s a honey cave?) It shifts from my head, to my back, to my leg, to my jaw, to my ear. Sometimes my lower stomach. I use the walker to help me to the bathroom and have made two trips out of the house, not counting hospital trips, with its help.  I’ve never appreciated fresh outside air as I now do. I thought by now my memory would start coming back but sadly, it’s fading even more rapidly now.

So I write. It’s hard to write with a broken brain.

J’s been telling me bits to fill in the holes my brain is unable to recall. I guess the hospital stay was pretty terrible. I broke some bones in my skull and my inner ear and suffered a brain hemorrhage that required scans and monitoring during my admission. I had cerebral fluid dripping out of my nose. My clothes and coat had blood stains on them. I was in a lot of pain all the time so I was pumped up with meds and flung swear words around like a sailor (yikes).  I didn’t know any of this before being discharged from the hospital. I don’t even recall being discharged. 

It’s all been so hard.

My short term memory comes and goes, and my sense of smell and taste are gone. My hearing on the right (where the broken bones are healing) is diminished. The pain pings from my head to my hip to my back to the next like a never-ending pin ball machine. I have incredible, sanity-breaking vertigo every time I move while laying down or tilting my head down. I can’t open my mouth wider than 2cm.  My face is swollen and lop-sided. I feel like I have marbles in my armpits and my breasts hurt in a weird way, which of course has been sending me into bouts of panic. 

Thankfully, I’m recovering.  I am in a much better place than I was 3-4 weeks ago. At least, that’s what they say. It’s weird, because while I know this as fact, it is only because of what my husband and doctors and modern medicine tell me; I have no experiential understanding of this truth. I have no independent recollection of the horrors and pain I suffered through that first week in the hospital.

I am continuously being told that I am doing much better than I was…but I don’t feel like I am. Every day, especially in the evening and night, I suffer. The dozens of meds I’ve taken since my discharge have done little good in easing my pain and vertigo. I’ve been trying not to tell my family about the extent of it all because worry does no one any good. I’m doing my best to just breathe and relax but it is impossible. I am filled with thoughts and worry. And guilt. 

I felt like this during my recovery from my cancer procedures.  Like life was moving and busy and leaving me behind. Friends, family, politics, days, seasons.  Everything was moving and shifting and here I was laying still, in bed, every day, watching the light of the sun grow in the morning and from the very spot watching it fade at night. I spent nearly half that year in bed, wondering how I became just a blob that takes up space and sucks up air that others need to take care of. 

And here I am, morphed against my will into the same blob I fought so hard to shed, weighed down by this unrelenting guilt of being a sucker fish to the people I love most.

When will I stop being a liability and burden to others and able to get to a place where I can actually offer something to the world? To the people I love? 

When will I stop being at war with my body and mind and be at peace with the circumstances God has allowed into my life? 

When will I ever feel close to normal again? 

Will I ever be the mom my son needs, the wife my husband deserves?

It’s all been so hard.