Live with Purpose

Four weeks ago, I almost died.

I went to the ER thinking I was having a heart attack.  It turned out that I had a perforated ulcer on my intestine the size of a quarter.  It was leaking air into my abdominal cavity.  The doctor kept asking how long I'd been having symptoms, amazed that I'd felt nothing until that day. He said most of this type of perforation are the size of a dime, and patients are in excruciating pain.  Why didn't I feel it?   I was in emergency surgery within 2 hours of leaving work that day.  Had I waited one more day, the results would have been very different.

I have a freakishly high pain tolerance.
I've trained my body to not feel any thing.  Emotionally or physically.
Call it a coping mechanism.

I have complex PTSD.  To deal with all that "stuff", I learned how to just shut down.  That means blocking pain and emotion, good and bad.  As a kid, I actually forced myself to not be ticklish in order to avoid attention. I learned to deadpan, to not allow my face to show emotion.
Just absorb it.  Just get through.
Just don't feel pain until it almost kills you.

I spent a week in the hospital.
I have an incision from my sternum to belly button that needed 25 staples to close.
I've been home, recuperating, for 3 weeks and I still feel like a bus ran me over.
Sleep is my only escape, but that's becoming harder to do.
I'm malnourished and dehydrated.  All my plumbing has been re-routed and it's not happy about it.

Up til now I've been too busy trying to heal to even begin to deal with how close I came to dying. This week, feeling a little better, has given me more time for reflection.  I've come to believe that the excruciating pain I felt that night, the pain I could not ignore, was the finger of God.  Stay with me.  I know not everyone believes this way, but I do.  He could have let me just continue to ignore whatever was going on inside and die.  Or, as he did, put me in so much pain that I had to pay attention.

There has been many tearful moments this week, realizing how close I came to not being here.  I guess I've been kept here for a purpose.  Strangely, that brings a lot of pressure.  It also brings clarity.
No more just coasting through life, hiding from the hard things, believing the lies people told me just to hurt me, neglecting the gifts I have been given.  It's time to live with purpose.

It's time to feel again.