Who knew that a month after surgery I’d still feel like I was run over forwards and then again backwards by a Mack truck! Yes it’s been about four weeks since the surgery and there’s still a long way to go. The mental battle that I’ve had to face through all of this has been huge. On more than one occasion I’ve had to tell myself not to give in to fear, or any other distractions that I’ve come up against along my path to recovery. On Wed I faced yet another obstacle as I ended up heading into the ER because things took a turn for the worse. After not being able to get ahold of my neurosurgeon or my GP I was advised to head down to the hospital to get things checked out.

When I got to the hospital I knew I was in for a bit of a wait. Nothing unusual for a hospital ER right! The doctor came and did a few tests as they always do, and then ordered a few more things to be done and told me that it would be a few hours before we got the results back. So I did a little more waiting and grew a little more tired, before a nurse came and told me they were moving me to another part of the ER. I felt like I was being put in isolation with nobody around and nobody coming to check on me. Under normal circumstances this quiet place would have been great for a person with CRPS to wait. On this night however it was too quiet giving my mind to much of a chance to think, and all of a sudden the pot boiled over and everything just came crashing down on me. I couldn’t put on that brave face anymore, and the tears started to roll down my cheeks as all the stress started boiling over. Of course the timing was perfect because just then the doctor walked in and she could see the emotion all over my face. After talking to the doctor for a bit longer, not only could I hear it in her voice but I could see in her face that she could understand the pain I was in. I could see she really understood me!

There wasn’t much that the doctor could do for me to help me and although I left the hospital after a long night frustrated that nobody could help me, looking back not everything about the evening was negative. After the fog had cleared and by that I mean the frustration and everything that boiled over that night I was able to look at things in a much more calm and realistic manner. I needed that alone time for everything to come up to the surface. If you keep pushing everything down then it builds and builds leaving you like that earthquake or “the big one” waiting to happen. If that were to happen then everything around you would come crashing down around you crushing you in the process. Isn’t it better that we let off pressure every once in a while so that it doesn’t build and build until we can take no more.

As I sat in that room that night letting my frustrations come to the surface saying prayer after prayer I knew that there was a reason this was happening. I may not have realized it then but when I think about it all now it makes perfect sense. It was time for God to hear my thoughts, prayers, and all the frustrations that I needed to get off my chest. Once again when everything seems to be be getting to be too much, and just when I start to doubt that people are listening to what I’m saying He shows me that there is someone listening and that someone cares. In dealing with an illness where it can be hard to get people to listen, over and over He shows me that no matter where or when He will be there. As is the case with the team of people that have been put together to form the staff at the implant clinic. I really believe that God placed each one of them in their position for a reason.

Sometimes you just have to do a lot of sorting out of all the garbage! Ask yourself is everything in all of this bad or is there a lesson deep down beneath all that trash? Or quite simply do you just need to let it all out because God listens even when it may not seem like nobody else is!