In 11 days, I will plant a stone marking 20 years since I last rolled under the blinding white lights and into the chilled, antiseptic air of an operating room. Two decades without a daily reminder of what’s always waiting in the shadows, ready to strike. 240 months spent tetherless and free. 7,300 mornings not wondering if I’d end the day how I started it.
Sometimes it gets harder to remember…really remember. I suppose I should be thankful for that visceral absence, but the persistent big-picture long-term impact of wirewalking above a sea of hungry sharks never sits far from the surface, and the shrapnel left in the wake of a detonation is almost impossible to completely clean.
Still, I wander through middle age as curious and confused as ever, albeit without the nasty neurosurgical albatross adding even more unmanageable weight to an already struggling neck.
The monster may not be lurking in plain sight, but he’s always under the bed, plotting and planning.
Real repair has proven to be an elusive, moving target. An endeavor filled with far more hope than tangible solutions. One step forward, a thousand steps back.
An unambiguous, inconvenient conundrum stubbornly stands in my path as a wedge to sustained emotional health. How do you rewire all the fried circuitry without losing the solid soldering?
This has always been the question…and the problem.
I am beyond grateful for the privilege of no longer spending countless nights cursing my station and desperately sprinting down blackened tunnels in search of a distant glimmer.
But with that freed hard drive space comes a bevy of compulsions, neuroses, and the itchy sensation that there’s never a big enough broom to gather the broken shards. Still, I sweep…and sweep…and sweep.
Twenty years is a long time. But those falling calendar pages have also accompanied far too many internal deep dives into the dark.
I’m immensely proud of the courage (and maybe recklessness) it took to roll the dice on a procedure that had the potential to stop all others, even when the prior swing at the same pitch resulted in a mega miss. I was ready to risk losing all my chips at the table if it meant I could have my life back.
My surgeons, nurses, therapists, and support circles were beyond belief. So many pieces had to fall perfectly into place, and that took a tremendous amount of planning, strategy, and preparation. It’s still surreal to think about the number of spinning plates sitting at the top of some very lofty sticks.
Modern medical miracles of science met human aptitude and artistry.
Regardless of all the rough edges still in desperate need of smoothing, it was a feat of unimaginable skill, capability, and compassion.
I was a lost soul without any hope of being found. At least I now have the time and opportunity to continue the search.
Solitary Alignment 