“Be So Careful” Sucks
I am so grateful to my ego.
Hot pokers jab into my low back and left hip hard through the night. 3:33, 3:49, I can hardly move. My back is aching from the strain. Be careful. I can’t get comfortable. Be careful. I feel the urge to stretch. Be careful. Bodies need to move. Be careful. How much more careful do you want me to be??? I retort at myself in anger.
What?!? I cant even move in my bed to get comfortable? Every time I want to do more. Walk more, clean, do the dishes, it’s take it easy, you shouldn’t do that, give it time. I know his heart is in the right place, I know he is just looking out for me. I know he’s right.
This experience has been humbling to say the least. Every friendly reminder is met with a polite and thankful smile, yet inside, I cant help but secretly take the stance of my 4 year old. Cross my arms and pout. I’m not allowed to do anything! Slump myself down on my chair.
Right now, I’m not ready to be mature. I don’t want things to change. I like who I am. I was just coming out of my shell. I was just starting to experience a whole new world of possibilities. Now this? Now I have to stop, to slow down. I feel like I have been sitting on the bench just waiting, pacing the sidelines ready to go. It’s like I finally got a chance to play, I experience getting AMAZING GOALS and then got taken out by the defense men, laid out, out of the game. For how long? No one knows for sure. Best hope 4–6 weeks.
Even when you are being so careful, a back herniation is a tricky injury. One that recovers slowly and in a way that ebbs and flows. One day you think you are ready to run for home, then one wrong shift, simply getting your self out of bed is met with a surge of the pain you were just starting to entertain forgetting.
Stubborn pride gets me out of bed pain or not.
I will not be set back, This is just in my head. I AM getting better. I can drive myself. The pain builds and peaks until walking feels more like a sword jamming into my hip and up my back.
My husband helps me down the stairs. I swear to him, I am being careful. I just lifted my bottom to get out of bed. I attempt to walk away and show him I am fine but by the time I get to the counter, I am heavy with a limp and need to use the table to support myself cause I feel as though my back would not.
Tears erupt. I am so angry and frustrated. I remind myself I have no right to complain. I have no right. Things can be so much worse. I’m not used to being vulnerable like this. I am at odds with my ego. Trying to tame it enough to not hurt myself more but letting it push me to keep trying to get up, to walk to push past the pain, to make myself do things that are hard to do.
Pain will sober you. It will tame that ego and teach it humility. The ego has no choice but to adapt and bide its time and step back and let humility and gratitude take a stride to practice patience and remembering to breath.
Like my ideas about growth and learning, I think about healing as a linear process, well, that’s what I want it to be. That’s what my ego wants to push me to expect and do. I would get googling how to’s and research about back herniation and therapies and stretches to help. My husband saw me trying some of these stretches and in wide eyed horror asked:
“Did Frey say you should do that?”
“No but I was looking it up and it…”
“Please ask Frey first, I don’t think you are ready for that, but ask him.”
So at my next decompression therapy appointment I asked him,
His expression mirrored my husbands horror “No! No no no” shaking his head to emphasize the point in a dramatic whisper he adds “Just leave it alone. Let it heal.”
Defeated and reluctant, I submit to their pleas.
Being careful sucks, but when I remind myself why I am here in the first place is because I wasn't careful, I was careless. So now my challenge is: how do I make careful fun?
How do you make Careful fun?
