The Road to Recovery Is Paved with Good Intentions

We checked into the hospital at 2pm. Here I sit typing this at 11pm and Mark is still in surgery. Remember what I mentioned a few posts back about patience (and how I don't have any). Well I'm getting a nice big helping of patience practice.

But slow is the pace of our lives now. Our schedules are clear. Our days vastly different than they were 3 weeks ago. Our calendar involves very little unless it relates to Mark's recovery. And it is only now, with 9 vacant hours to reflect, that I realize how insane my life has been these last few years. 

I thrived on packing every hour of every day. I could work, workout, volunteer, meet friends for lunch, attend a PTO meeting, drive the kids to cheer, make dinner, help kids with homework, work some more, clean the house (or not) and then head on out to date night all in one day. If I found a spare second, I would plug some other activity in it. It hurts my brain just remembering that life. That life was organized chaos (with less emphasis on the organized and more on the chaos). And it's a life that seems so foreign to me now.

And so 9+ hours of waiting doesn't much phase me anymore. Does it tie my stomach in knots? Sure. Have me pacing the floor with worry? Absolutely. But there's such a strange calm in our lives now (seems ironic to use that word given everything Mark's faced these last few weeks) that glitches during surgery don't freak me out like they once might have. His surgery tonight turned into a "marathon" surgery that involved a blood transfusion. Not exactly the smooth surgery we were hoping for, but the bones are getting fixed nonetheless! Here's a glimpse of their work in progress:

A good bit of hardware that every airport metal detector will love! It's hard to see, but on the bottom left hand image, they put a bone graft starting at the 3rd screw and coming up above the plate (you can see a grayish area on the right where it stops). All bones are reset and plated. All breaks screwed back together. All demolished bones rebuilt. All in all a very successful, albeit long, surgery.

And now the healing begins.