By: JANA GREENE
Ever since I had surgery and anesthesia earlier this week, my pain levels have been OFF THE CHART. Last night was night 3 of agony. I don’t know which of my alphabet-soup acronym conditions is causing this flare – I suspect a combo of EDS, MCAS, CLL, and POTs. I suspect a lot of all. First thing this morning, haggard and exhausted, I told Bob, “Yeah, I can’t do this.”
That’s the thing about catastrophic, chronic illness. You so badly want to carry it with grace.
I want so much to be calm, and stoic, and ladylike, and inspirational about this.
But I’m not.
I’ll take it and take it, and hit a wall like a crash car dummy, and dissolve into disappointment in myself. So-and-So handles adversity sooooo gracefully. Why can’t I seem to?
I think that’s maybe the axe that came down in my faith walk and the church. As a Christian, you’re supposed to be healed. People lay hands over you, spouting nonsensical “language,” and tell you if you just believed harder, if you trusted God more, you’d be well. YOU are the impediment to your own healing, silly, so get it together, already. We’re getting tired of casting out “demons,” get busy faith-ing harder.
But why speak in the lofty tongue of angels, when plain-speak would have been a comfort, human to human. My human-to-divine ratio was all wrong for them. The metal in my broken ankle did not “turn into bone.” Cult, much? It’s amazing what you’ll believe, when you’re out of ordinary hope.
So here I sit today, 3-day bun way past “messy,” oversized t-shirt, systemic inflammation RAGING under my skin. My bones hurt today.
I wasn’t wrong – I cannot do this. Not one more day. But since that’s all any of us have got, I’ll let Jesus sit in the hole with me, like he has done as infinitum, just for today.
Because I have been through a LOT my whole life. I’ve had to fight from childhood for that comfort – the presence of the Holy Spirit.
It has to be enough. If I cannot “pick up my mat and walk” in ‘healing,’ I’ll invite Jesus into my pain, and he – perhaps tired of Righteous Gemstones / Binny Himn histrionics himself – will help me through it.
Thanks for listening to my vent.
I’m trying so hard to be positive, to find some glimmer of positivity in all this.
