A Modern Day Miracle

As I recovered at home, I found that sleeping presented to be an unexpected challenge. My first night home, I recall lying down on my back then being startled as I felt that I was having trouble breathing. Until this day, I don’t really know what that was about. Anxiety? Pain? Fear?

I hadn’t had a good night’s rest since the surgery. While in the hospital, there were nurses visiting and monitors beeping. I would doze off for a short period then wake up for one reason or another. When I went home, my expectation was to sleep but it didn’t quite happen the way I planned. Instead of sleeping in the bed, I found myself on the sofa positioned with my feet perpendicular to the floor and my upper-body strategically slouched to the side. Make no mistake about it, I was still in an awful amount of pain and incredibly uncomfortable, but I’d resolved that I wasn’t getting back in the bed until I felt some type of relief.

On the fifth day of my recovery, I guess my body had just had enough. It was a Tuesday. I was still in a lot of pain and didn’t have much of an appetite. I’d been eating just enough food to “coat my stomach” while taking ibuprofen around the clock and a pill of oxycodone here and there. This day, I was hurting and exhausted. My mom had had enough of me complaining, and pretty much made me take the oxycodone- reminding me, once again, that being in pain would delay my healing.

At this point, I didn’t have it in me to put up a fuss and did as I was told. What followed was about 5 hours of sleep (on the sofa) with one interruption to attempt to eat a sandwich. When I woke up, like a true miracle, the 8-to-10 out of 10 pain that I’d been experiencing was gone. Gone! I remember waking up, sitting up, then realizing that I wasn’t in pain. I sat there in confused amazement waiting for that deep muscular pain to rev up again, but it didn’t.

Don’t get me wrong. I was still very sore. I was still moving slowly. Still swollen. But THAT pain never came back. This was a lesson learned (the hard way) that sleep is essential to the healing journey. Take this from me so that you won’t have to learn as I did. Sleep allows rest for your whole body and mind. It makes way for stillness and restoration. And on that day, it gave me hope that the hardest days of my post-operative journey were behind me.