A few thoughts: “Be kind to yourself” she said. And her intense blue eyes meant it. In the days leading up to the day100 marker, I had to do a series of tests. One of which was a neuropsych evaluation. I had taken this elaborate IQ test before the transplant to establish a baseline level of performance. The young psychologist with the most intense eyes I had ever lost myself in, sat across from me to administer my test. She kept offering breaks as I was visibly struggling. I constantly refused. “I’ve done this before!” I thought. With that I pushed on from test to test until it was over. After sixty minutes of drawing shapes and memorizing random numbers it was finally time to go. My frontal lobe was already in pain. I came out of that feeling the worse than when I took the first test. Except the last time, the test was three times longer. By the time I got home, I was completely and unexpectedly spent. I landed on my bed face flat….and remembered thinking, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I just passed out like this? Feet hanging off the bed and all.” I woke six hours later, completely loosing my balance and rearranging my medicine cabinet in an attempt to find my feet. Both my legs had fallen into deeper sleep than I had. I assumed that my mental readiness would result in matching physical ability. My ambitions to stand met falling. I can’t really account for the rest of the day but somehow a few hours later I was again grappling with sleep. This time though, I was kept awake by a simple question my mother had asked earlier that day: where is your excitement? Its usually the simple questions that wake and sometimes keep us up at night. Where was it? I had looked everywhere. I searched the past when I wondered when I had ever even felt emotional about the new blood flowing through my veins. The only thing I could find there was exhaustion. Then I searched within to see if there was some complex emotional masking that covered my true feelings. Not here either. I eventually gave up looking and resigned to finding it somewhere in my future….someday. Like how things have a way of resurfacing only after the search as been abandoned. I did find traces of it a few times in a place that I would never expected anticipate. My dreams. I would dream sometimes of regaling a room full of motivation hungry people with tales from my transplant and subsequent recovery. It’s the goosebumps that always woke me. For a split moment, my waking mind would try to grab unto quickly fading moments of emotion but just like the dreams that wrought them, would eventually become a memory’s memory. A shadow’s shadow. You can’t dance with shadows without losing sense of what is real. Over the next couple of weeks I hid away in a bout of depression. For a little while it seemed like I had lost my identity. So many things in my life revolved around my condition. I had developed a Stockholm syndrome of sorts and fallen in love with my captor. Suddenly I was free and not sure of myself. I occasionally caught myself stammering in an effort to make basic conversation. Questions I would have unequivocally answered yes or no, met an unsure response. One of those nights, had dreamt about undergoing a total body transplant. In the dream, I answered the door to receive some mail and realized the delivery man was not talking to me, he was talking to the man he could see in front of him. I wondered if he would have related to me differently. I remember looking in mirror seeing a face and body I could not recognize. My name was different too. Was I the reflected image or the viewer. I woke up in a cold sweat as I felt my mind shattering into a million pieces as it struggled to reconcile both identities. A few weeks later, the results of the test were ready. I sat nervously in the pediatric psych unit watching the children play with colorful toys and take tests on computers. My ocean-blue eyed shrink came out and curtly asked me to follow her. I took a seat in the room and we sat quietly waiting for her PhD student assitant to arrive. She had striking eyes too. Probably enhanced by her choice of dark and generously applied eye liner. Once everyone was settled, she smiled and pulled out my folder. “You performed about the same on a few of the tests but on others that required your processing ability, you were four times slower. It took you 20 minutes where you previously completed the same test in five minutes ” Basically I had become more stupid. She must have noticed she took something away from my already disheartened self because she quickly added, “Your accuracy was the same. Your speed just fell slightly. This is what we expected. By the time you do this again in a year, you should be back to your former self.” I sat quietly as she waited for me to react. I could not really think of what to say. I was not speechlessly shocked, just slightly disappointed in my performance. “You are theoretically better than what you were before but your body and mind need time to heal. Be kind to yourself!” Her last words were gospel to me in that moment. I realized I had been hurting myself with my expectations. I thought that I would be completely back to normal and in full of energy by day 100 or shortly after. Whenever I benchmarked with old standards, I disappointed myself. Eventually I decided that it was time to put aside everything I thought I understood about my limits and explore my freedom. I would require mental and physical rehabilitation. I would have to be my own therapist. So I set small goals and went about achieving them. Walking half a mile, reading two pages of a novel. At the end of a week I was walking two miles and reading ten pages. Then I started to run….slowly at first, then faster and faster. Eventually I started to meet my old limits and break them. When I started to consider what my new limits were, it dawned on me that it was completely up to me. Everyday from this point on would be another record broken, another day without pain. Then it happened. I found my excitement. Who will I be without my pain? A question that I once asked in apprehension now resonated with possibilities. Where do I go from here? I don’t know, but it bleeds yellow with the sunlight of kindness.... dayhundred.tumblr
Posted on: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 06:27:39 +0000
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