Everything’s Coming Up Roses

Let me tell you a story.

Up until this point I’ve kept an outwardly sunny, positive outlook on surgical recovery. I think it’s key to healing well and fast. It’s not a façade, but it’s also not truthful to tell you that everything about recovery has been easy.

I had a meltdown today and I want to tell you about it. It started brewing yesterday at my first post-op doctor’s appointment.

This visit was with one of my surgeon’s PA’s, not the man himself. And let me tell you, if my surgeon is super liberal about recovery, this gentleman was as conservative as they come. This was Maddow v. Coulter stuff.

The PA said my scar was looking good, despite a reaction I’d been having to the surgical strips. I told him about some new and concerning nerve pain I’d been having in my legs. He said it was probably just an irritation as things settled and healed, but there was a possibility that a piece of hardware had jostled and was poking something it shouldn’t be.

This possibility was NOT something I wanted to hear.

Mr. Coulter also said that if he was in charge, I’d be in “time out” (my modified life) and in my brace 24/7 for 6 MONTHS. This sentence was a far cry from my surgeon’s claims of “you’ll be running in a week! Totally healed in two!”

As with all extremes, I’m sure the truth lies somewhere in the middle. I’m sure somewhere between 2 weeks and 6 months is the sweet spot where my spine will fuse and life will open up again for me. I’ll be freed from time out and mom will give me all my privileges back.

But until then, a bit of a grey area.

Here’s something I wish I would have known prior to my surgery that wasn’t fully explained. This may be of assistance to anyone in a similar boat as me.

I was under the impression that the fusion I was receiving happened ON the operating table. That the spacers and the screws and the stitches would be drilled in and we could set it and forget it like a spinal crock pot.

Not so. The fusion happens NOT on the operating table, but in the weeks and months following. It’s happening right now as I sit braceless (sorry Coulter) in this chair. It’s happening while I walk around NYC. It’s happening while I eat cookies and fumble through auditions and watch my friends soar in their summer shows.

The bones were broken, and they need to heal and grow AROUND my hardware and ON TOP of my hardware and BETWEEN my hardware and every other preposition you know.

The metal puts everything in place, and then the bones take over. In fact, after the fusion is complete the hardware is useless, and can even be removed! (More on that later)

This process can take a few months. It can take six. It can take twelve. I’m young and active so I’m probably on the shorter end, but you don’t want to mess this up. It’s a weird, silent healing. I feel pretty great, but I can’t plow forward and risk damaging the work.

This leaves me feeling kind of lost. You know me; I’m a control freak, I’m a planner, and I don’t like esoteric prognoses. (Remember the whole naming thing?) So I stepped back and made a list of the things I did know following my visit:

The good news: no more bandages, full freedom to shower as usual, high heels are ok unless they hurt. (Clearly Coulter has never worn heels. They always hurt.)

The bad news: at least four more weeks of “time out”, as much back brace as I could handle, an unlikely but tiny possibility of nerve damage from an out of place piece of hardware, and a round of steroids to manage the irritation with hopes it will go away.

Steroids. I hate them. I understand their use and *wow* are they powerful, but if you’ve joined me on this journey you know that the steroids prescribed for this kind of neurological pain are NASTY. Dexamethasone makes me a Hulked-out monster with no control of my ever-vacillating emotions.

***Note from the peeping editor in 10/2020: see Dexamethasone re: Trump and his COVID-19 medications. All of his hysterics made complete sense to me for that week. And that week only.***

I’ve been on them four times and every time it’s the same. I emerge from a cloud of ashy haze at the end of the taper week wondering what horror movie I was just a part of.

So, ready to hear about my breakdown?

With the PA’s words ringing in my ears and the steroids coursing through my veins, I began facing the fact that a longer recovery than I anticipated was in my future.

Here’s the vain thing I need to admit about recovery; it makes me feel awful not to be feminine and sprightly. I hate needing to ask for help. I hate not being strong. I like to be a sparkly girl who can also carry her heavy boxes and scoop the cat litter.

I feel ugly and bulky in my brace. While my cane is AMAZING and I’m overjoyed to have it, the fact that I’m unsteady, stumbly, and ungraceful wears on me.

My scar is small, but the surgical area is raised, like a small hump. It may go down, but part of that hump is my hardware. And because there’s not much stuff between my spine and my back, the hardware may POKE OUT when I sit or bend in the future.

It may poke out so much that it needs to be removed. Like reverse the drill and take it out. Spackle it up and hang a new picture.

I can’t work out, I feel not in charge of my body, and I’m emotionally eating. I’m not always eating because I’m hungry, but because I’m sad. Or angry. Or bored.

I woke up early this morning to get some work done before I went to an audition. An audition I really didn’t want to go on.

It wasn’t the project- it was for a theater I’d be overjoyed to work for and a role I love, but when you’re feeling emotionally unstable in your bathroom it’s super hard to imagine being vulnerable in front of strangers for an audition.

The last thing I wanted to do was put on a dress, do my hair, and present myself as a person I really don’t feel like right now. It felt inauthentic.

I was wheel-spinning through those emotions this morning in the bathroom while I reached for my steroids, which I have to take. As I reached, I tripped a little. Because I’m unsteady. And when I tripped my hand slipped. And instead of grabbing the bottle, I slapped the glass shelf in our medicine cabinet and it flipped forward, shooting all of its contents into the sink.

I surveyed the damage. The steroids were fine, my contact case was fine, Trey’s brush was fine, but my brand new bottle of Chloe perfume, one of the FEW things that brings me feminine joy right now, was shattered. $75 of brand new perfume was draining down the sink.

A tangent about the significance of the perfume: for my birthday last December I asked Trey to get me a new bottle of perfume, his choice. Instead, he chose six little sample vials of scents he thought we’d both enjoy and gave them to me in little envelopes listing the notes, name, and ingredients.

I was to use one vial a month for six months, then on my half birthday I’d tell him my favorite and he’d purchase the bottle. What a gem, and so fun to try a new perfume every month!

When the six months were over, I selected Roses de Chloe. It was a rose-heavy scent that stuck around but wasn’t obtrusive.

We both loved it and he gave me the bottle (a little late) on my opening night of Legally Blonde at Cortland Repertory Theater; June 18th, 2019.

It was late, mind you, because Amazon lost his package. He had ordered it to arrive on time for June 4th, but one of those freak delays happened and the box was nowhere to be found. He rushed to Sephora before we opened and bought a bottle to compensate for the Amazon drama, for which he was refunded.

So I’m watching this lovely gift from my husband, a symbol of my femininity, pour down the drain while the bottle sits cracked in two. The perfume got ALL over my medication, which seemed like a terrible joke. Now every time I took a pill that I didn’t want to be taking in the first place, I’d smell my Chloe and remember this moment.

Well this was finally too much for the Hulk (me) and I broke down. I cried over the sink. I cried feeding the cat. I cried getting dressed for an audition I didn’t want to go on. It was ugly.

On the way out, back brace on and cane in hand, I said goodbye to Trey, who was still in bed. He could tell something was amiss. I was running late and didn’t want to risk more tears on my freshly made-up face, so I said we’d talk about it when I got home.

I went to the audition. It was good. I saw some friends there who really made me smile.

I got coffee with a friend on the way home. It filled up my tank in a lovely way. I had a snack, which we all know is the only thing that really cures a breakdown.

I got home and told Trey the story of what had happened. I naturally began sobbing again, telling him how cosmically unfair it felt to have one of my last vestiges of femininity literally pour over my steroids and down the drain. That was too poetic for even me. I was so tired of feeling like a lump, and so scared of not knowing when I wouldn’t.

Trey listened, wiped my tears, and then disappeared into our bedroom. “Well, he’s finally quit,” I thought.

Instead, he emerged with a small white box. Of Roses de Chloe.

The lost Amazon package had randomly arrived with no explanation or fanfare the DAY before my breakdown. Trey had picked it up from the doorman and hidden it away for a future birthday present.

He gently put the box in my hands. An immediate, free replacement of the femininity I had washed down the drain. A sign that all things come back around in their time. A notion that the universe is always looking out, even when you’re at your worst.

He helped me throw away the broken bottle and we put the new one back in the cabinet. Like nothing ever happened.

Through tears and emotions and drugs and questions, if you keep the faith and hold the course, trying to be as authentically YOU as you can, and honoring the moments when you can’t, the universe and its sweet (sometimes Amazon) angels on the ground will take care of you.

So I’ll keep taking my rose-scented steroids and keep living with rose-colored glasses, because that is authentically me. For now.

Oh, P.S.- I got the job.