Recovery Is A Lonely Pursuit

Recovering from surgery is a lonely pursuit. No one can do it for you.

I am Day 9 post surgery and I'm still too weak to get up and spend any time on my feet.

But I saw an old photo of mine this morning of a beautiful French restaurant on the island of Corsica—this romantically simple place with a blue door and just eight tables inside—and I decided I needed to get up and make a simple dish of roasted vegetables.

I love the way the French cook, letting something like vegetables shine on their own, and only adding enough olive oil and a few herbs to enhance the dish.

This kind of simplicity appealed to me this morning—that life and maybe recovery could really be this simple. All it takes is a dash of oil and a few herbs and a hot oven.

But i scurried back to bed after fishing the vegetables out of the drawer of the fridge. I don't have the stamina yet. Even simplicity is beyond me.

I'm not sure how recovery happens, and why for some, it is fraught with little progress for so long. I hadn't felt well for many months before surgery and I suppose that is a factor now.

We reap what we sow. I cannot call upon a weary body to get well any faster than it is.

But what I know is that I must do this alone. Good friends and family grow weary of you—even the most stalwart. They are busy with the tasks of living a full life: work and kids and appointments and relationships. And that's how it should be.

And they cannot know your pain anyway. Nor would you want them to.

So you are faced with the idea of recovery as a solitary pursuit. You must—perhaps for the first time in a long time—go within to battle the loneliness, the pain, the uncertainty. You must baby yourself, curl up with the softest blanket you can find, coax yourself to walk to the bathroom and get yourself showered, and even find something tempting to eat that will shine a little light on an otherwise dreary day.

And what I'm doing is finding memories stored somewhere in my sluggish brain of good food, of little restaurants I have stumbled upon and feasted in, of fresh strawberries served in mason jars, and peonies bending at their stems across my table.

The idea that I will travel again one day becomes my mantra—the thing that gets me up and cutting vegetables in the kitchen.

And what I know is that I must be patient. And beyond that, I must have faith. It's hard to see that beautiful world outside the window and know that I cannot yet join it. That for the time being, it exists as a memory.

I've become grateful for the blanket, the family dog for company, the pink Tylenol tablets on a tray near my bed.

And for those memories that inspire me today, because one way or another, I will roast those vegetables.

That's how we get well. Perhaps it's inspiration that brings us there.