I dreamed yesterday that my surgeon did an impromptu MRI and made an unexpected discovery: there was a baby dragon inside me.
“This has been the source of all your pain,” he said, pointing to the diminutive dragon on the screen. “And it won’t go away until we get him out.”
The strangest part was that I was not surprised by this announcement, or even disturbed. Rather, I felt profoundly validated. Relieved. Seven months post-surgery, and I have not lost the persistent feeling that there is something not right with the left side of my body. In the real world, my surgeon glances at my X-rays and says they look fine. My PT listens better, then twists and pushes and pulls. “The joint is fine,” he echoes. “You’ll get there.”
The problem is that I don’t want to get there; I want to be there. I want to run for more than two minutes at a time. I want to get out of a car without staggering like a crone. I’d really like to get up one morning and not be immediately aware that I have a left side. I want a day in which my body fades from my consciousness like an out-of-town friend: dependable and trustworthy but not making its presence known at every turn.
“Maybe,” a friend suggests wisely as we hike beneath leaves that are just starting to turn. “Maybe the dragon is actually your impatience, your discontent. Maybe that’s what you need to get rid of to feel okay.”
I think about her words for the rest of the day. I remember the few seconds I had with the surgeon in the pre-op room. I was sterilized, gowned, and already drugged; there was no going back now. When the surgeon asked if I had any questions, I asked simply, “Will it hurt?”
Probably it would not have been better if the surgeon had said frankly, “I’m going to cut off the top of your femur, ream out your hip socket, and drill screws into your pelvis— yes, you’ll have some pain.” But what he did say was not very helpful either, which was something along the lines of “The arthritis pain will be gone.”
I went into that surgery a little too nonchalant. Hips were easy, everyone said, and I was so young and fit. I’d be back to my old self in no time. I took to heart a text I’d received from another of the surgeon’s patients. She was four months post-surgery and already playing pickleball. I’d be like her, I thought, or better. There was no doubt in my mind that I’d be ahead of the curve.
But at four months I wasn’t playing pickle-ball; I was still staring daily at the scab on my not-yet-healed incision, trying not to pick.
I paused for a long while after writing that sentence. Yes, I’ve had an “atypical recovery,” as my PT says. My incision developed eschar and was very slow to heal, not fully closing until almost five months post-surgery. But there is so much that I can do. I can hike and bike and even run a little. I can cook and teach without pain, the two things that were the most painful before, with all of the small directional shifts that they require.
Maybe I am grieving my old self, the one that could bike a hundred miles, run a marathon, carry a fifty pound pack. Maybe the baby dragon represents the birth of a new, middle-aged, less bad-ass self. It makes an odd kind of sense: here’s this new version of me: leathery and wrinkled and kind-of cute in its own scaly way. Maybe my pain won’t go away until this self is fully born, and I can love an Erica that is content to hike a gentle four miles with a friend and not an epic 12-mile ridge.
Can I? Last weekend, I biked twenty miles on the tour de Candler and my legs were so tired afterwards, both that day and the next. I felt disappointed with myself, to be so sore after such an easy ride. But maybe that is the dragon that needs to come out. Maybe I need a gentler voice now, one that will say, wow, Erica, that’s great! Twenty miles at seven months? Of course your legs are a little tired! Perhaps the day will come when twenty miles doesn’t feel so taxing, or perhaps it is my own impatience to get there that is the true source of my own pain.
I can hear my inner writing critic, telling me not to mix my metaphors. How can the dragon be both the new self waiting to be born and my impatience with the time it is taking to get back to my old one? Do I get to be okay by getting rid of the dragon or by giving birth to it? But maybe it’s not such a paradox after all. Labor is not so different from surgery, really, its own kind of exorcism. Maybe it is only by birthing this gnarled little guy that I will find the patience for whatever comes next, be it mountain summits or 10Ks or something else entirely.
