Another broken heart

TW: medical trauma

Mom was on the phone with me at 6:30am on a Saturday, telling me to hold off on our morning plans to meet. I’d been in Utah on vacation. And she hadn’t slept well. “It’s probably just indigestion.” But we’d just seen Farideh’s viral video two days before.

So Mom was looking for her Pepto-Bismol when my brother picked her up for an ER check. That hospital immediately sent her by ambulance to a larger facility, where they fixed the worst blockage and planned major surgery.

It took a couple of days to get things sorted, and it was hard not to hold my breath the whole time. I was lucky to be in town. Lucky to be able to take a day off to be with her for surgery on Monday. Lucky the surgery went smoothly. It took longer than I expected for her to wake up, and I’d asked if I could hang out in her room while we waited. They said she might not be herself when she woke up. I understood. As soon as she was off the ventilator, she looked at me and said “I love you.”

And I finally cried, having previously refused to let myself feel anything til I was sure everything was done and she was safe.

The nurse asked if I was okay. Handed me a box of tissues so I’d stop wiping my eyes with a paper towel. “I’m just so relieved.” I cleared my eyes and grabbed my phone to share the news that she’d pulled through.

Then Mom rasped, “I’m sorry.”

Sometimes the best thing I can do with big feelings is to analyze them AND feel them fully, using the left-right-left-right brain patterns I learned in EMDR. And one good exercise for that is to distill them down into 5/7/5. But this little big feeling won’t go in my regular haiku collection:

Silence then chaos
Heart beaten through cracking ribs
To unbreak us all

I’d reached the call button just as the first medic came. He started yelling. I moved to the back of the room, unable to get away. Unable to stop watching, either. Something in me needed to witness them bringing her back. I wish my brain would stop replaying the violence every time a monitor beeps.

It’s been a week and a half now. She’s progressing, but still in the ICU. It’s a lot harder than I ever imagined it would be. She’s discouraged, but trying.

As for me: I keep cycling through regular patterns: robotic productivity to fight the swelling panic, til it breaks into grief that drags me out to sea. I swim back and it starts again. I went through this with Feebee’s heart issues too. I miss her. She was so good at helping me out of the spiral.

But I remembered a good trick that’s helped me: if you find yourself in a PTSD loop, try blowing bubbles. It’s just the right balance of breath work, beauty, observation, and acceptance of uncertainty.

I won’t know where the bubble might go or how long it might last, but it’s beauty I can watch no matter what happens.