She Is Held
A therapy exercise exploring what I'd have said to myself in the hard moments before and after surgery.
She sits behind the wheel of her car, hands shaking too hard to drive away from the doctor’s office. When she calls her mom, she doesn’t even say hello. “Mom, they don’t believe me. They don’t believe me and I don’t know what else to do.” I sit in the passenger seat beside her. “Just come home,” I hear her mother say. “Come home and we’ll figure it out.”
When she hangs up and lowers her forehead against the steering wheel, sobs racking through her body, I reach out and smooth my hand over her hair.
“I believe you,” I whisper, pulling her into my arms. “You’re not crazy. There is something wrong, and you won’t figure it out for a few more months, but I believe you.” And I hold her tight until the tears stop flowing and the shaking subsides. I hold her as she takes deep, calming breaths and a car somewhere behind her honks because the driver wants her parking spot. I hold her until she has the strength to go home, to smile for her friends and play games with her dog and pretend for just a little longer that she is okay. I can’t offer her solutions but I can offer her this—my arms, my shoulder, my time.
In this moment, I am there.
In this moment, she is held.
#
She lies on an operating table, and she feels like a racecar in the pit lane. Doctors and nurses and students swarm, talking over her and beside her and around her but never to her. One pulls open the front of her gown to tape electrodes to her breasts. Another clamps the heart rate monitor onto her fingertip. Someone near her shoulder slides a blood pressure cuff over her arm, saying something about inserting a more accurate meter into an artery after she’s unconscious, and someone by her legs wraps big cuffs around her shins. She feels them compress and release, compress and release, compress and release to keep her circulation moving, and she wishes her breaths could be as calm and steady.
She stares up at the ceiling’s blinding lights and bites her bottom lip. She promised herself she wouldn’t cry today, but all she can think about is that she’s scared. She’s scared, and a doctor in a white coat told her yesterday there would be happy drugs to make her calm, but no one has offered her any. He told her there was a hugging machine, but no one is hugging her. They’re touching her, moving her, manipulating her, but they don’t talk to her or really look at her, and she’s not even sure they can see her and she just wants those damn drugs.
I stand beside her, watching her face, seeing her, and when the first tear falls, I grab her hand. “I see you,” I whisper, my lips close to her ear. “And it’s okay if you need to cry, because you’ve never been this scared before.”
The man who slid the cuffs over her legs is the first to see her crying. He grabs her other hand, talks to her in a low, soothing tone. “Hey, hey, hey, what’s wrong?”
“I’m a little scared,” she admits, squeezing her eyes shut.
“Yes,” I say as they swarm her again—this time to comfort, console, to hold her hand and rub her arms. “See her.”
Her eyes find mine as they inject the sedative, and I smile reassuringly until she falls asleep.
#
She presses the call button next to her hospital bed for the seventh time that night. I sit beside her as she waits for the nurse to arrive. They wrap the thick cloth belt around her waist, and she feels a little like a dog being put on a leash. Her legs tremble as the nurse helps her to the bathroom.
She knows she should be embarrassed. Her hospital gown hangs open in the back and she’s naked beneath, but in this moment, in every moment, she’s too exhausted to care. She shuffles to the bathroom, IV pole rattling beside her, and sags onto the toilet. She has to catch her breath before she can reach for the toilet paper. Has to pause again before she has the strength to call the nurse to help her to the sink.
This is the hardest part, standing here, washing her hands, no break between that and their slow shuffle back to the bed. She struggles onto the mattress and doesn’t protest when the nurse pulls the blankets back over her shivering body.
“I’ll be back in twenty minutes,” the nurse says with a gentle smile, because that is the longest she can go before she needs to relieve herself again, her body flushing out steroids and sodium and all the other things that have poisoned her for so, so long. She holds her head very still, because if she turns the nausea overtakes her. She closes her eyes, but she does not sleep. Her stomach is rolling too much to rest, and she needs to wipe the blood from her face again.
They won’t figure out her nausea is motion sickness until tomorrow, when she’ll start managing to keep water down, then ginger ale, and then a single cracker.
Tonight she’s afraid that if she sleeps, she’ll wet the bed.
“It was supposed to get better,” she whispers when it’s just her and God, shivers making her teeth chatter.
I lay down in the bed beside her, wrapping my arms gently around her to share my warmth. “It’s going to,” I whisper, because I know the not knowing is worse for her than the sickness. “It’s going to take a long time and every bit of your strength. It’s going to take your independence, and your dignity, and most of your sanity. But it will get better.”
And I hold her through the night until morning when her parents gather at her bedside once more.
#
She falls to her kitchen floor, holding back a scream, but the sobs tear through her throat anyway. A dish hits the ground beside her, and her breaths are ragged, gasping things. She clutches herself, trying to slow her breathing, burying her face into her hands to stifle the sounds.
It is her first panic attack, but it won’t be her last.
When she’s quiet, lying motionless on the ground, I sit down beside her with my back to the cabinets and lift her head into my lap. Her dog creeps into the room and presses his small form against her legs, wary brown eyes fixed on her exhausted face.
I brush my thumb back and forth over her shoulder.
“You’ve been trying so hard,” I whisper when I think she’s ready to hear me. “You have taken care of yourself, and your little family, and your house, and your job, and your friends. You’ve done the best you can with the information you have and while your body fights you for every step.” Her hand is cold as it clutches my wrist. “I know you’re tired. I know you’re scared. I know you’re terrified that if you admit you aren’t okay, if you ask for help, then things will never ever go back to normal.”
Her dog comes closer, pressing his face against her neck.
“I need you to listen to me,” I say. “At your next appointment, they are going to tell you that you did everything wrong. They’re going to tell you that you can’t do this on your own. And you will hate them for it, but they’ll be right. They won’t give you credit for how hard you’ve worked or how far you’ve come, and you’ll hate them for that too. But you will go back to your parents’ house. You’ll let them help you. And it will take months but you’ll make it back to this little house one day. And that won’t be the end of it, not by a longshot, but it will be a start.”
“I can’t do this,” she whispers.
I nod. “I know you can’t. But you will anyway.”
We sit like that for three hours. I feel her shoulders rise and fall with her sigh, and then she pushes herself up, drying her face on the back of her sleeve. She looks at her dog.
“I’m sorry I scared you,” she whispers. Then she lies. “Mommy’s okay.”
He licks her cheek in response.
#
She stands outside the therapist’s office, eyes fixed on the logo painted on the door. She hasn’t told anyone she’s here today.
I stand beside her, my hand on her shoulder.
A million thoughts run through her mind—What will people think what if it doesn’t work what if I’m just crazy what if I can’t afford this what if I’m unfixable—but I know they won’t quiet until she takes this step.
I take her hand and open the door for her. “This is going to help you,” I whisper, leading her down the hall to the room with plush couches and gentle lighting and a woman with kind eyes. There’s a round door on the far side of the room, glowing with warmth.
Her past selves sit all around the room, in sweat pants and work clothes and hospital gowns, and they smile at her arrival.
We’ve been waiting, those smiles say.
“Who are they?” she asks me, green eyes wide.
“I rescued them,” I tell her. “They were trapped, but I went back for them and brought them here. Just like I went back for you.”
“Are there more?”
“Yes,” I answer. “I just haven’t found them yet.”
She eyes the other door. “What’s through there?”
I think of a room with big round windows and thick, plush chairs, lined with bookshelves and kept warm by the fire in the hearth. “A place for you to rest.”
“I can stay there?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “For as long as you want. As long as you need.”
I watch the others step forward to take her hands, smiling as they tug her through the doorway. They guide her to the chair and press a book into her hands. I see her smile for the first time in a long time. I stand there with a hand pressed to my chest, a little more of the tightness that’s been there so long finally loosening. I stand there until they gently close the door behind them, safe in our peaceful place.
I take a deep breath.
I turn.
And I go back for the next one.