Teetering on the Edge of Surrender

Take a deep breath, wiggle your toes, then step forward. It only feels like falling for a moment. Then? The fierce swoop of the Great Lifting Save charges in.

I hope you’ve had a truly blessed Thanksgiving weekend. I want you to know that your caring enough to read the words that I write, to follow my story, is no small thing to me. For what is a storyteller without a listener or a writer without a reader? It’s haaarrrd to write thinking that no one cares to read it. You have shown me you are interested in the stories I tell. And for that, I am filled with gratitude.

If you are here for the first time this is part thirteen of a story about the healing of my fibroids, the entrance of a long lost love, miraculous meetings and new life gifted. I give you lots of links to catch up but you can still start below. If you like starting stories at the very beginning then you’ll want to head over the The Agent of Change. Please stick around and subscribe!

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Teetering on the Edge of Surrender

One of the things that ended up in my possession among the bric-a-brac that arrived in a slightly tortured worn water-stained boxes along with the sonnets was an old brown glass bottle filled with water topped with a rusty tin screw cap. The bottle was reminiscent of what you might see in a doctor’s cabinet - in the early 19th century. Stuck to the front middle of this bottle was an old gummy fabric style swath of tape in which was handwritten one word.

Lourdes.

For you, who may have no idea what significance this funny word could have, I’ll give a quick – super quick – tutorial.

Lourdes, France, is the location of a well-known and quite infamous apparition of the Blessed Mother. She was sighted by St. Bernadette Soubirous, a young, sickly peasant girl. Dear Bernadette fell in love with Our Lady in the Grotto of Massabielle as they prayed the rosary together in 1858. Short tutorial shorter, a spring was sprung. The watering kind. And from this spring of fresh water many miraculous healings took place – the first being a desperately ill child, near death, known as the Bouhouhorts child. From thence, the stories of healings throughout the decades have continued.¹

My great grandmother traveled to Lourdes and brought back this spring water in a dark glass bottle with a silver tin screw top and marked it in her handwriting on gummy tape.

That was what was in the box upon my arrival in Austin.

It sat for months on a shelf in my kitchen more or less as a symbol; something I wasn’t about to toss but didn’t quite know what to do with.

Until I became desperate.

One night – honestly, I cannot remember if this was before or during this whole domino miracle process – I took that little bottle to my bedside. I lay down on the bed, belly up. Oh the sight of it! The small burgeoning mountain top, even beneath my covers, always and ever reminding me there were no longer flatlands from this point of view. I lifted my top over the not-a-baby-bump. I opened the bottle thinking, Well, if it’s going to be used for something other than watering the plants, this has got to be the best reason, and poured the entire contents of that water on my abdomen.

And that was that.

Well, that, and some more begging God to heal me. Yep, desperation makes us do crazy things. But this kind of crazy wasn’t hurting anyone – and frankly this is the first I’ve ever spoken of it. So surprise! Crraaaazzzzyy Laaayyyydeeee!

So now to bring us up to date: The surgery was scheduled for May, I had just gotten engaged to my first love who I hadn’t spoken to in twenty-eight years prior to moving to Austin, I’ve miraculously been led to the Catholic Church before this reunion to the man who was Catholic the whole time – which was a key factor in keeping us apart (whole other story). Through teaching music to toddlers I meet the family who leads me to a doctor that can make this whole thing a BIG FAT MEMORY, and through my classes for Confirmation (at a parish I decided I attended after making a switch from the church next door), I meet the man who happens to be president of the hospital, a man who knows those doctors, and who will also make sure I can afford an $80,000 surgery by “driving the costs down”.

Remember when I left everything? Acting career… all of it? Terrified it was the end of life as I knew it?

It was the end of life as I knew it.

And this is the part where I began to learn what I means to praise God.

The very best thing for me was for my life, which wasn’t very living, to end as I knew it.

But I had to be the one to say “enough”. I had to be brave enough (I wasn’t) to drop it all in faith (I didn’t know that’s what I was doing) and trust (trust?) that something would work out.

More than something was working out. I was about to get a whole new life. But I wasn’t through the valley yet.

Mayday came. The day of surgery came. A day I didn’t know would ever happen and a day I wasn’t sure, entirely sure, what the final result would be. I had been told that the doctor was fairly confident he could get it all out.

Oh, that word.

Not “confident”.

“Fairly”. Fairly before confident isn’t what you want to hear. But when you’ve come to the edge of surrender, with the tips of your toes primed over the crag, you’ll take “fairly”.

“Fairly” was enough confidence for Fleur.

In a typical Myomectomy (here I go using the medical terms) there are many things to consider. Just where are these beasties located? Are they hanging out at the Bump Ball alone? Singular? Touching each other? Or are they play wallflower…melded within the lining of one’s uterine boundary?

All of it.

All. Of. It.

Dramatic Histrionic Unrestrained Abstract Hellion Art. Dr. Goodman was about to bring on the reckoning.

He told me I would have those tiny, dotted incisions atop my abdomen and because of one Mama Boulder, the oblong grapefruit hanging out stage left, he might (probably would) have to make a four-inch incision beneath my abdomen to take that – I’m gonna say it – bleepity-bleep – out. And when I say that, I mean it in the worst serial killer murdering kind of way. Take him OUT.

Bang-de-Bang-Bang.

The surgery, usually a two to two-and-a-half hour procedure might take a little longer – most likely three hours. But I’ll be out that day - most likely.

“Most likely.” Close cousin to “Fairly”.

Annie and a close family friend would hang out and wait because we’ll all be out by lunch time.

Pre-op went great without a hitch. Just before they were going to give me my dozing drugs Dr. Goodman paid me a quick visit to give me a last-minute update.

In brief: someone had just sued the hospital for using the mechanism (another word for “thingy”) that drills out the fibrous tissue – sort of spins it out backward. Which would have been fine except that the tissue turned out to be cancerous and that thingy spattered cancer cells all throughout the patient’s body.

Well, that was my feeble understanding of it. The gist of this for me was that Dr. Goodman would decidedly NOT be using the drilling “thingy” on me and would indeed have to make that fun lower incision blah dee blah blah.

Did I tell you they were pretty sure these fibroids weren’t cancerous?

Pretty sure.

Most likely.

Fairly.

I had graduated into a supreme state of surrender and trust. The great cry of capitulation.

From that moment, all I remember was being rolled into this large super bright white room with two lovely nurses on my right and left. One man and one woman with their heads in puffy shower caps. They told me I wouldn’t remember them before they instructed me to count backward.

I remembered them. But not the counting.

And then?

All was silence. Until…

THUMP.

And then….

I awoke. Slowly. To the most wonderful statement. The mostest bestest thing I could have ever heard from Annie’s lips…

1. I highly recommend The Song of Bernadette by Franz Werfel