escape

I know I have been a sorry excuse for a blogger for quite some time now. Part of it is just that I have been doing this for nearly 4 years and I never thought it could happen, but it would seem I am running out of things to talk about.

Well, that’s not really a true statement. In the course of 4 years, I’ve become more and more picky about what I am willing to write about. My family reads this blog, my close friends and people from work — some openly and some anonymously and it’s the anonymous ones who make me nervous. If I know you in real life and you’re reading this blog and it’s not because you adore me and want to hang on my every word, then you’re not my target audience.

I’ve always been the sort to be introspective and reflective and to spend far too much time mulling over things that other people wouldn’t waste any time over. But now, looking down the barrel of a hysterectomy, I find that I can appreciate why some of the folks I know are so happy to push uncomfortable subjects out of their mind and forget about them as if they never happened.

I know that I am a nurse and I have scrubbed into minor surgeries and observed major surgeries. I know that I have pounded on chests and shocked hearts and saved lives. I’ve ran into rooms dragging a big, red crash cart behind me and yelled, “CLEAR!” just like they do in movies. I’ve pushed vasoactive drugs with an eye on the heart monitor and a finger on the carotid pulse. I’ve done all sorts of exciting, scary, and downright gross and gory things in the name of saving and improving lives.

But here’s the thing: It’s different when I am the patient. Suddenly, it seems so depraved and violent that someone is going to hack some of my major organs out of my abdomen. I think of all the arteries that will be tied and cauterized and I think about how brutal it’s always seemed to me to thrust a trocar through layers of skin, fat and muscle in order to make way for the surgical instruments involved in a laparoscopy–and I break into a cold sweat.

I think about the fact that I will be intubated and a machine will be breathing for me– and my airway threatens to close off. I imagine my muscles lacking all tone and the absence of all reflexes–and panic clutches me.

So, I try NOT to think about any of that. Some very sure instinct of mine tells me that this is not the time to sift through my thoughts and explore my feelings relating to my upcoming surgery. I know too much. And I know too little. And it freaks me the HELL out to think about it for too long.

Instead of getting online and pouring my heart and brain out to all of you in some massive emotional, logical purge, I get online and play Scrabulous with Brenda, Jellyhead, Sharon, and Curly McDimple. I play on Twitter with akaMonty, Redneck Mommy, Kimberly, Leanne, and Melissa. I get on Facebook and match quizzes and have zombie wars and play TV trivia with Sweetie, Jean-Luc Picard, and friends from high school. I read my favorite bloggers’ posts on Google Reader.

And that’s about it. The more escapist the activity, the happier I am to engage in it. I’ll have the ultimate escape this weekend when I spend the weekend with a friend watching movies, eating licorice, getting pedicures, drinking margaritas and laughing. A lot.

Then I’ll come home and I’ll enter the hospital to have the part of me that cradled my babies when they were too tiny and helpless to survive in the real world cut out.

Eight years ago, on February 19th, I was in urgent surgery — necessary because the tiny child inside of me had ceased to live. Fetal demise, they called it. This year, on February 19th, I will be in surgery again — to be done forever with the part of me that failed to keep that little one alive.

It’s scary. And it’s emotional.

No, not something I think I’ll be writing about again for at least a little while.