February: The Wanderlusting Mind

Fall 2007, in my UCSC dorm freshman year.

Winter 2010.

At our favorite Santa Cruz cellar, summer 2010, soon before the accident.

Disneyland, February 2011.

At a frozen yogurt place with friends, about a year after the accident (summer 2011).

Summer 2011 at an Adelanto park.

 Back in Santa Cruz, 2012.

A few days ago, February 2013, nine surgical procedures and a prosthetic eye later. 

"You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. 

If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better."

Anne Lamott

November 6th, 2012. I am lying on a hospital bed in a paper gown with paper slippers. Something awful is flickering on the television screen mounted on the wall in front of me. I am reminded of my hallucination from just over two years ago, when I was in a hospital bed blurred by pain management drugs and saw a green leafy plant on the television screen. Flash to another night in the hospital, King of the Hill is on Adult Swim and I am crying because my sweet night nurse is reinserting my incredibly uncomfortable trach tube into the one inch slit between my collarbones. Flash to a third night when I am unable to sleep, Dirty Harry is on AMC, and I am nearing the end of my initial hospital stay. I have a nurse in her late twenties who is wearing a Sleater-Kinney button pinned to her scrubs and is staying in my room overnight because the woman I am sharing a room with warrants constant surveillance. Sleater-Kinney is my favorite band. I attempt to talk to the nurse about it, to be the me I was before, but the words do not come.

...but I am lying on a hospital bed in a paper gown with paper slippers and, now, a paper shower cap. I am ready to undergo my eighth surgical procedure - this one a cartilage graft from my other ear to hopefully raise the bridge of my nose to something aesthetically satisfactory, to something that vaguely resembles my nose before.

I am having plastic surgery performed by an otolaryngologist, a doctor who has previously been in an operating room with me twice.

Another plastic medical bracelet. Questions, various interns, needles, an IV drip. An anesthesiology intern comments on my seahorse tattoo and administers a shot into the blue vein at the crook of my left arm for that initial wave of relaxation before my hospital bed is wheeled into the bright white room where my face will, once again, be entirely in the hands of strangers.

Today is my brother’s 30th birthday. Today is the US presidential election.

Today I am afraid because the last time they tried this, it didn't quite work.

January 10th, 2013. I am sitting in the waiting room of my surgeon's office, nervously contemplating the lawsuit that has developed as a result of the accident. I feel like an object. I feel both swollen with significance and gutted of my selfhood.

I am uneasy. I am mentally preparing myself to have surgery performed on my nose while awake.

The last surgery I underwent in November left an irregular bump, just as the nose surgery before it did. At least this time I won't have to take my clothes off. 

The assorted injections of local anesthesia pierce my nose and surrounding tissue and make my tear ducts water. My surgeon has begun to play music from his iPod, a playlist exclusively comprised of songs I can't enjoy. My eye is concealed by a blue surgical covering that doesn't do a sufficient job of blocking out the bright lamp light hovering directly over my face.

He slices into my nose and the pressure is unreal. I can hear them cutting into my cartilage. I can feel prickles of pain at the tip of my nose. I want to be anywhere but here. I am overwhelmingly uncomfortable and can feel every tense muscle in my body.

Half an hour later, I am bandaged and prescribed antibiotics and escorted back to the waiting room. I am told how to care for my wound only after I ask the nurse for instructions in the hallway. She explains everything to me so quickly that I barely have enough time to absorb the information.

I feel like disappearing. I feel like I have disappeared.

January 24th, 2013.

My boyfriend thoughtfully drives me to Redlands for an ocularist appointment. My prosthetic eye is finally "finished" and I am told not to come back to the familiar office for another six months.

January 25th, 2013.

I return to my surgeon's office for a postoperative exam. I wait an hour to see the doctor for less than five minutes. He smiles at me, an expression like looking at mold growing on a forgotten loaf of bread.

I will most likely never see him again.

//

I have mentioned recovery before, but I find myself at the beginning again. I turned 24 years old on January 17th. My face, 2.5 years and nine surgeries later, has been deemed "complete", "done", "finished", "restored" by medical professionals. I currently have no future scheduled appointments. I have been discharged. All medical solutions have been exhausted. All the physical/medical remedies are supposedly over.

Since this accident began, I have looked forward to "the final product" - to having my face back - with absolute angst. I have thought Well, maybe then I'll feel "whole" again. I equate my surgeries to refeeding when a person is in recovery from an eating disorder: once an ED sufferer's weight is restored, it doesn't mean the disorder has been conquered - now that my medical procedures are over, it doesn't mean that I am reclaimed. I keep thinking to myself, anxiously, compulsively, I am not recovered, but I will be.

Where is the "me" I'm supposed to find in the mirror? Where is she? She is fleeting, but she is there. I may have a face that children stare at for the rest of my life, and I have to accept that. People will look at me funny and eye my scars and my prosthetic. I have to stop hiding half of my face with my left hand while staring at my reflection, searching for who I used to be.

I realized that I never really wanted to go to grad school for poetry. I mean, poetry means a lot to me -but, moreover, going to grad school was a post-undergrad plan that was seemingly available to me as a replacement for the inevitable meandering through doctors' offices and skimming through dispassionate job postings. It was a solution that sounded good but wasn't quite the passion I wanted to pursue; I chose Feminist Studies as a major over Creative Writing for a reason.

Then what do I want to do? How do I feel like "myself" again? Some of my recurring ideas: Adopt a cat. Write more. Try to get a job with Planned Parenthood. If that fails, try to volunteer. Find work that inspires me. Finish reading and watching the Harry Potter series. Move in with Keith. Get rid of old paper journal entries about sadness. Eat more pizza. Read books to children. Play my guitar more. Get rid of "things" and cherish gifts. Stop obsessing. Show people I care. Be kind to strangers. Ask for help. Listen to Beyoncé on repeat. Spend more time outside. Share information I think is important. The urgent list of things, tumbling over in my head, that I think could help me feel better.

"The Wanderlusting Mind" signifies a drive to be mentally, emotionally, physically, and intellectually well. I  have previously focused so much on food because it posed as a distraction from, and an indulgence of, various preoccupations I didn't feel ready to confront. I have been avoidant. I have felt absent.

Self-care and the desire for recovery and/or personal growth is nothing short of absolutely necessary. I use "wanderlusting" as a qualifier/modifier for the mind because of its implications of endlessness. "The Wanderlusting Mind" always wants, needs, and strives for more; the perpetual movement forward toward a fuller sense of gratification, contentment, fulfillment, and happiness.

...and so I persist (and hope to benefit some readers along the way).