Recovery at the Hospital

     The surgery at the hospital went very well.  The team removed three cysts instead of just one, and I came home on Sunday afternoon, as planned.  I spent about 25 hours in the recovery room, which by Sunday morning, was very sparsely populated.  I had a lot of time to think and pray, but I don't know how coherent I was at either of those activities, although God has already taken care of the prayer part in knowing before I do what I am praying.
     The coherence of thought, or lack thereof, has been an interesting experience.  With so little to occupy my mind, I played with the breathing part of the monitor.  I could make the squiggly white line do things by just altering my breathing.  I was able to get the breathing rate up to 47 with short breaths, and down to 6 with long slow breaths.  The latter set off some sort of little alarm, so I decided to stop that fun.
     The most interesting things happening were visits from the staff, from my family, and from Karen Goltz who paid me a pastoral visit.  In all these times, I seemed to me to be rational.  However, Doreen told me I had been uncharacteristically chatty.  One nurse reminded me I had met her in the pre-op room, but I needed prompting to recall our pleasant conversation.  There were times when, of course, I did not remember things, but this time, by concentrating, I was able to discover some things that I remembered knowing before I forgot them.
     This all has seemed interesting to me because I am aware of how amazingly frail and vulnerable I am during this whole procedure.  It's not very difficult for me to surrender control to professionals and to God during all of this, but it is a bit unnerving to be losing a bit of my mind, a tad of my personality, and a lot of my personal space.  When an "event" is putting on a jonny, or simply standing up by myself, then I know how far from "normal" I have strayed.
     Now I would like to draw a profound conclusion from all of this, but I don't have one.  Even if I did, I'm not sure if I am just rambling, or if I have opened up a new door to self-understanding.  So for today, I just leave all this as a group of observations.  One thing I do know, however, is how profoundly thankful I am for all of the people taking care of me during this vulnerable time.  If you are reading this, you are probably among them, and so I say "Thank you!"