I had the amazing opportunity to observe surgery last Friday. One of my clients is a foot and ankle surgeon and invited me to observe one of his operating days, when he had a set of cases that were varied and interesting. My day started at around 6am, scootering to the surgery center in the rain.
You can find videos of this stuff on youtube, so I wont’ get into the gory details of surgery much here. I’m only about 2 years out of Cadaver lab, and I still remember a lot about that experience. The layers, tissues, joints, that kind of thing. The surgeries themselves were compelling and interesting, though I found myself most struck by the simplistic humanity of what I witnessed.
How amazing is it that we can cut into living people, while they are awake, and perform excessively invasive procedures on them, chisel away hunks of bone, tie off and cauterize veins, snip through layer upon layer of tissue, not only without killing them, but in a manner that eventually leaves them more efficient than they were before? Watch someone perform a bunionectomy and let me know. I think it’s pretty fucking unreal.
The eventually part of all this is what hit home with me, once the dust settled and I had some time to integrate what I’d experienced. By about the 3rd surgery of the day, it struck me that I was witnessing a physical representation of what I do to myself every time I sit down in my therapists chair, or read about dismantling and remapping my psyche. I’ve lived my life expecting not to have to be in a cast after that, or in a walking boot, or to have to wait a year to get my mobility back. I expect to tear into myself and rip fused, vital parts of my structure apart and not be injured or have to pay my dues.
Over the years, I’ve started gaining trust in my body. Recently, when I realized my skin sensation was dulling, I chose to change my perception from being broken, weak, and hobbling on the brink of collapse to being resilient, strong and capable. Because, let’s face it, my body is amazing, weird tweaky things and all. I am able to do astounding things with it, even when not taking into account the damage I’ve done over the course of my life.
So what about my emotional body, then? I’ve gained compassion for my limbs, my digestive system, my aching muscles, my wrung out connective tissue – as inconvenient as all that is. I’m fast running out of reasons to resist having compassion for my aching, heavy little mind, too.
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