The Body Remembers

March 26, 2010

Last Friday after work I cashed in on my birthday gift certificate from Jeremy for an hour long massage at The Lotus Center. As I lay there on the table, I started to worry, Should I explain all the scars on my legs to her? I did explain the bruises on my arms from the shots I got during my recent hospital stint. I didn't want her to think I was being abused (or that I was an IV drug user!). No Abby, just relax. I'm sure she sees scars all the time. This isn't about what happened. This is about taking care of yourself now. Just relax. So I did. I relaxed, but, silly as this sounds, it took a little work to relax. At one point I got kind of choked up thinking about all my poor body has been through and how good it felt to do something kind to it. So after the massage as I was leaving, I decided to schedule an appointment for another massage next month. Time to shift the balance on the scales for my body!

Since then I've been thinking a lot about my body. I feel so disconnected from it sometimes. I realize how little control I have over it, not just with my health issues, but with aging too. Sometimes I feel like it's just this shell I've been given to carry me around in this world. But other times I feel incredibly connected to my body physically. I feel grateful for all that it does for me, the pleasures it can bring me, the places it takes me. I think this is one of those areas that I need to find some balance between the connected and disconnected feelings. Maybe. Maybe this is exactly where I should be.

I have had two very strong body memories this past week. Strangest thing. One was when I was talking with one of my closest friends who is pregnant. I was asking her if she had felt the baby move yet. And then I told her about feeling Harper move for the first time when I was 16 weeks pregnant. "It was like my heart was racing, only in my stomach," I told her, a smile immediately on my face as I remembered. And I could feel her then. I could feel Harper fluttering away in my stomach as I told her. And then I began crying. "I smiled every time I felt her move," I said. It was a beautiful thing.

I have another friend who recently had her colon removed and then just two weeks ago had her j-pouch construction surgery. She's been having a hard time since then, problems that I had too at that stage of the game. That's when my bag leaked all the time and I got a skin infection around my stoma and was hospitalized again. My skin was so infected I couldn't keep a bag attached to me. I stopped eating as much as possible. It was horrible. And she's dealing with all that now. I called her yesterday to listen and help if at all possible. When I hung up the phone, I felt my stoma begin to output. My hand instinctively went to the side of my abdomen to feel it, only there was no colostomy any more. It was the strangest thing. A phantom colostomy. Wow. I had actually experienced that phantom colostomy for a week or so after I had my takedown surgery (the surgery where my colostomy was taken down and I was totally reconnected and sewn back up), but that was over a year ago.

Who says the body doesn't remember? It sure does. Boy does the body remember.