Where I'm At

So it has been four days since I last posted and here is where I’m at.

Prior to my surgery I had to have a two-hour phone call with my nurse to go over my medical history. She was an incredibly nice lady who told me all about every single one of her own past surgeries, as well as many other details about her life and family. Near the end of the call I asked her how much pain I would be in / what was the recovery time for my surgery. She wincingly said, “Ohhh,” then spent the next fifteen minutes educating me on the pain I was going to feel. She informed me that I was young—“You’ve don't know what real pain is”— and that I wasn’t going to be able to prepare myself for the pain I was going to experience. She pointed out that I have never broken or sprained anything in my life so I am completely naïve and unaware of real pain. She informed me that eight different surgeries have taught her that pain can be literally overwhelming—Morphine and Percocet are only capable of making the pain manageable. Needless to say, after I hung up, I was a little terrified.

The day of the surgery came and all went well. I got to the hospital by 10, was checked in by 11, and was in surgery by noon. They brought me in to a room where I was told to take off my shirt and immediately five different attendees began applying random medical instruments to my body. At this point my heart was hooked up to the monitor so I audibly heard my heart rate increase rapidly for a minute, but, after a quick mental pep talk, it soon decreased. My doctor was hilarious and literally before I knew it I was waking up in a completely different room.

Once fully conscious, I felt the need to impress the nearest attendee with how coherent I was. We joked around and I asked him if I was high. “I don’t think so, no,” he informed me. After he saw my disappointed look I told him that I had just been looking forward to the new experience. He informed me that the high you get from running is actually stronger than the high you get from morphine. “ISN’T THE HUMAN BODY AWESOME!” I exclaimed, and that’s really all I really remember from that conversation.

After passing in and out of consciousness for the next couple of hours, the nurse finally came in and told me that as long as I could pass the final test I could go home. Challenge accepted. I very proudly (too proudly) aced the “can you pee” test and was cleared to go home only six hours after surgery. I was given two weeks worth of T3s that I was instructed to alternate between them and Ibuprofen every three hours. I took one pill once I got home and decided that was it; I'd been on painkillers for almost two years straight and I was pretty done with them. I fell asleep within a couple hours of getting home and slept 12 hours straight.

Flash forward to last night. It has now been almost four days since my surgery and I have been very apprehensive. I am a strong believer in not allowing myself any false hope, so I have been very tentative about the whole process. My surgeon informed me prior to going under that if this did not work we would just have to try it again. Two years of disappointing doctor’s visits have left me sadly wary.

As I prepared to go to bed tonight I instinctively reached into my pants pocket, expecting to feel the same pills that I have taken every night for almost two years. I suddenly remembered that I had emptied my pockets, and for some reason, everything just hit me then and there:

I haven’t taken a single painkiller since the day of the surgery and have not felt ANY pain.

I was supposed to wait a week before taking off my bandages but they just fell off, revealing nothing but a tiny little hole that is not even sore to the touch. No bruising, no swelling.

I have slept through three whole nights without waking up screaming in pain.

I went from cautiously apprehensive to a bucket of joyous tears in a moment of lucid euphoria. I just lay there and cried, reveling in the phenomenal beauty that was a completely and utterly pain-free leg. Where five days ago I was waking my mother up with screams of aching discomfort, I was now attempting not to wake her with muffled whoops and joyous hollers. Praise God! Despite it being 2 in the morning I grabbed my shoes and ran outside. I tried not to strain my hip, but I couldn’t help but run down my street, embracing the feeling of my feet hitting the wet pavement. The fact that someone could have been watching my sniveling, skipping, lap of victory was completely overshadowed by the fact that I was feeling a joy so pure and a relief so incredibly long-awaited. I couldn’t feel a single stab of pain in my leg and it felt good.

The lyrics of one of my favourite worship songs from last summer immediately came to my mind:

Our God is Greater

Our God is Stronger

God, You are higher than any other

Our God is Healer

Awesome in Power

Our God! Our God!

A tiny, tiny part of my heart still wants me to be cautious. It’s true; this may not be over. There may be more check-ups, more tests, and possibly even more surgeries. But for right now, as I’m lying in my bed typing this, I’m just going to sit in silence and soak in the divine solace that is my pain-free leg. I am blessed.

Selah.

The Dramatic Demise of a Tiny Little Tumor... Hopefully

Today is my surgery day!! It is a day that I have been looking forward to for almost 2 years now.

A little history. It all started at the end of summer 2009 when I felt a pain in my hip that wouldn’t go away. I originally thought it was growing pains, but the fact that it didn’t stop and the fact that I wasn’t growing to be ten feet tall convinced me otherwise. I didn’t actually go to the doctor’s for a while after that because I was taught that unless you are knocking on death’s door, you do not go to the doctor’s. Not that doctors were particularly helpful. But as time went on the pain got worse; it got so that I couldn’t function or sleep through the night without being woken up in stupid amounts of pain. The official stats, over the course of two years are:

·      Over 3000 Tylenol and Ibuprofen pills consumed.

·      Over thirty different blood tests (thank God I got over my childhood fear of needles)

·      Approximately 15 X-rays

·      Six different doctors

·      Multiple trips of driving back and forth between Calgary and Lethbridge to meet with different specialists

·      Two CAT scans

·      One MRI (which are THE coolest)

·      One professional massage (from a horse massager—ugh)

·      One full-body bone scan (I always regret not keeping the image that came from this one—how often do you get to see your entire bone structure?)

Reviewing that list, it doesn’t actually look like THAT much, it was more so that I expected a solution after every test so each undetermined result was a disappointment. Though, with the each different doctor came a different experience, such as:

·      The doctor who sang everything she spoke throughout the entire appointment. Super kind lady, but when she diagnosed me with something and then ten minutes later (after checking Wikipedia) informed me that only female children could get it, I lost a little bit of faith.

·      The doctor who was obsessed with my hypopigmentation (aka, the funny white colouring on my leg). He spent the entire appointment analyzing it and getting his student doctor to feel it. It was kind of like being a camp counselor all over again (except this time I didn’t try to convince the doctor that it was contagious—though he may have actually believed me).

·      The “long walk” incident. Ok this one was my bad. For the first three doctors, after they asked me if I had done any extreme physical labour lately, I told them that I had gone on a “really long walk” a couple months before (referring to my camino). Apparently doctors don’t equate a really long walk to a month-long hike carrying 60 lbs. After my dad sat in on one of my appointments we were able to clarify everything and the doctor had a good laugh at me about it.

So, after a year and a half, last month I finally found out that I had a benign tumor in my hip joint that is called an osteoid osteoma (guess who feels the fanciest whipping that out in a normal conversation). It was so nice to be able to have a name for it and even a possible solution. The most frustrating part of all of this was just not knowing what was going on, because just telling people that "my leg hurts" got pretty lame. This experience has been quite an emotional and spiritual rollercoaster for me though, and I have learned quite a lot.

I have learned that I have a lot of really awesome and supportive people in my life (including, but certainly not limited to, the group of old ladies who met every Friday at my mom’s work and prayed for me). I learned a lot about humility—about acknowledging when I’m in over my head and when I need to ask for help. I had to learn a balance and I had to be honest with myself. At times I would lie to myself and pretend that the pain was more manageable than it was—which was unhealthy—and at times I would lie to myself and use my leg as a justified excuse in my head—which was also unhealthy.

I have learned that God gave us modern medicine for a reason. This one was a hard one for me. Halfway through summer last year I decided to go off painkillers because a part of me thought maybe I just wasn’t trusting God enough. This worked for a time, but it wasn’t long before the pain was keeping me up the entire night and making me completely unable to focus at my job. It took a lot of checking the Bible, checking my heart, and asking spiritual leaders in my life before I came to the conclusion that God does heal, but he has also given us means by which we can help ourselves. He has given us Scripture and faith, but He has also given us reason and technology, and I believe it’s our job to find a middle ground amongst the two.

This time of being off painkillers turned out to be incredibly helpful though. Prior to stopping, I was taking 8 - 9 extra strength Tylenol to get through the day. During my time off of painkillers, I discovered that I had pericarditis (an inflammation of the sac around your heart). The prescription for pericarditis was ibuprofen, to keep the swelling down. Turns out, ibuprofen was 100x more effective at dulling the pain in my leg than Tylenol, and I was able to limit my pill intake to only 2 – 3 a day. If I had continued increasing my Tylenol intake it wouldn’t have been long before I had completely screwed over my stomach lining, so it turned out to be a really good thing.

I didn’t sleep at all night last night partially because I had to be off painkillers prior to the ablation (that’s the technical term for how they’re removing the tumor), and partially because I’m just really nervous/anxious/excited/whatever the word is. A lot of me is also scared because the doctor didn’t guarantee that this would work, but I’ve (optimistically/possibly foolishly) allowed myself to put a lot of expectation on this. If this doesn't work than the doctor said we're just going to have to try it again. Like I mentioned earlier, I have a lot of really awesome people in my life who have offered a lot of prayer and support (including a special shout out to my mom for putting up with my manly pain-grunts all night for the past five nights). Also I have entertaining family members:

Dad: “Happy NOOBB Day Son! (Nuke Osty Osty Bad Boy Day)! Go slay that ornery weasel, eh."

Kari: “Break a leg tomorrow! Oh…….”

Fun. Anyway, wish me luck!


PS: Somebody suggested that I might be able to pick a song to listen to on my iPod during the surgery. I seriously doubt this is actually true, but the thought of it excites me. What genre would best accompany watching your innards being cut open? My first thought was to listen to the Inception soundtrack, but I feel like the doctors wouldn't appreciate the racing heart which would result. Perhaps some Jack Johnson or Joshua Radin to lighten the mood. Perhaps a lyrically-fitting, emotional rendering of Coldplay's "Fix You" on repeat. Or maybe just something completely unexpected like "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy" just for the ironic and postmodern implications. Oh the possibilities.


PPS: I still don't know if I'm getting local or full anesthesia, so this question is probably moot. Scratch that, it's most definitely moot. But as suggestion to all you doctors out there: surgery soundtracks could be a great market.

On Politics and Love

Current events news flash: Canada just had a federal election! Crazy, huh! Michael news flash: I’m actually incredibly interested in old men bickering! I’ve always known I’m a little obsessed with current events (see my last post), but I didn’t actually realize how into politics I was until this election. Last year I was super bummed because the federal election was on October 14^th, inconveniently exactly one day before I was legal to vote. (That makes me feel really young…weird). I really wish that the one Poli Sci class I took in my first year had been a better experience because I feel like I would have really enjoyed going further into that field. BUT IT’S OK, because that’s what the Internet is for. :)

In order to get a better understanding of who my MP candidates were I attended the “Indecision 2011” event that my university hosted. It was super interesting to say the least. It started off quite unpromisingly with the host asking each of the candidates a generic question about how they were trying to engage the youth vote. The candidates awkwardly attempted to answer how they were each engaged with youth (one candidate mentioned how he was in a youth group when he was a youth… not really sure how that… yeah, ok) but it wasn’t long before people started lining up to ask questions. It became pretty apparent that the audience was going to run the show so the host gave up the floor to the open mics and tried his best just to keep the MPs from rambling.

And man, were there ever some good questions. I was impressed by how many people were informed and passionate about the questions they were asking. Perhaps Internet forums have jaded me but I expected to hear a lot more below the belt remarks and derogatory name-calling.

Let me break the candidates down for you: (Side note: I desperately wish that the Green candidate had been able to make it but apparently she was sick that day. Considering she is a 19-year old first year with blue hair, I was incredibly intrigued to hear her opinions. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be):

On the far right was Mark Sandilands, NDP candidate. At first, I approved of his choice of raunchy wool-knit sweater, until I realized that he was not wearing it ironically. A quick encounter with him before the debate (where he handed me a hand-grip-jar-opening-thingamahinkey—which, I must add, stated “Get a Good Grip on Government, Vote NDP—mmm, delicious) revealed that he had a very vacant stare. He didn’t actually look at me but through me into my soul, so I started off with a bad vibe. But, as the night progressed, his answers proved that he was not as spaced out as I had originally assumed and he did a very good job of stating his position.

On the opposite side of the table, was the Christian Heritage candidate, Geoffrey Capp. He looked exactly as you would expect a Christian Heritage MP to look, basically. He actually did a lot better than I thought he would. Originally I had written this party off as a single-issue fundamentalist group, but the more he spoke the more I was actually impressed with his ideas. Granted, he was able to say a lot of really great things because he will never actually have to hold his promises accountable, but for the most part he was articulate and to the point. He even took on a polite question from a lesbian lady who asked how his party could represent a secular society, and answered it quite gracefully.

To his right was Liberal candidate, Michael Cormican. I actually almost forgot he was at the debate because he didn’t really do anything. He answered almost every question by reading straight from the party’s platform. Props to him for showing up, but I assume he understands that the chances of him getting voted in to a constituency that’s been conservative since the dawn of time is not very likely. He really just spent the vast majority of his time just reveling in the train wreck which was Hillyer.

And that’s exactly what Jim Hillyer, Conservative MP, became. When he began the debate, I was excited because he was the only one who looked even slightly close to my demographic. He was sporting a leather jacket that screamed, “I’m young and relatable! I’ll represent all you university students as I bring your issues to Parliament in my new Suzuki GSX-R1000!” Unfortunately, the hip, cool look only lasted him approximately 15 minutes before he realized that almost everyone in the room was opposed to him. Over the course of two hours his answers degraded from strong promises to weak defenses to ensuring that he was, in fact, not the devil incarnate. Like I said, the questions were informed and appropriate, it was just impossible for one man to defend the errors of essentially the entire parliamentary system.

And that’s where my lesson of the day came in. As the night progressed, it was easy to see that the government makes for a wonderful scapegoat. As citizens, it is incredibly easy—almost expected even—to blame issues in society on the government, but I think we need to give them more credit than we do. After a barrage of particularly biting questions, one man stood up and pointed out that, at some point, we as citizens need to take responsibility ourselves. We can blame the Canadian government for being so irresponsible with regards to the environment, etc., but we have to consider that are just as much a part of the solution as they are. It was hard to hear, but a refreshing change of perspectives.

The man who went up after him was my favourite questioner. He pointed out that Canadian campaign tactics are beginning to degrade to the level of America’s, full of smear campaigns and hate ads. He noticed in particular that NDP and Conservatives were constantly pointing out each others’ flaws. So, in order to counteract this, he insisted that the Conservative candidate say something nice about the NDP, and the NDP candidate say something nice about the Conservatives. I wanted to give that man a hug. It was enlightening to see these 50+ year old men being forced to resort to tactics that my mother used to stop my sister and I from bickering.

I read this wonderful article (shown to me by Kerry Precht) which points out the advantages of a minority government. I’m not going to lie, I’m a little disappointed that the election did not end in a minority government, but I’m praying that the Conservative majority will result in a more efficient government. I don’t intend this to sound trivial and demeaning, but as a whole, I think Canada’s Parliament—citizens included—needs to learn a lesson in cooperation. As a nation that prides itself on its peacekeeping capabilities, our government is not a reflection of this.

After three hours of great discussion, the debate was over. As I was walking home and contemplating everything that I had heard, I noticed that the couple walking in front of me included the lesbian girl who had asked the question. This girl is also in a couple of my classes and we’ve talked before. I listened in on their conversation for a bit and heard them talk about the Christian Heritage party and how all they wanted was to be treated as equals. The more I listened, the more my heavy my heart grew. I felt called to go up and talk to them, so I swallowed my pride and approached them.

After introducing myself as a proud, passionate Christian, I stammered out a sincere apology for any hatred or resentment they may have ever received from the Christian community. After my rambling apology they thanked me and then did something I wasn’t expecting: they apologized for if I had ever felt hated or judged by the queer community. I thanked them and mumbled something else, then uttered a quick goodbye and left.

What a refreshing conversation! As I was walking home I reflected on how much power there is in treating others with love instead of with division. My good friend recently showed me this interview and I couldn’t agree more with what Tony Campolo has to say:

I've already seen a lot of division result because of this election. Regardless of who we voted for in the election, I think it is our very strong duty to support the government that we now have (whether we wanted them or not) with our words and with our prayers.