I had been so looking forward to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, planning a morning in bed with my iPad and coffee. But three days before the royal nuptials, I was admitted into the hospital with a serious infection. And on the evening before the Big Day, I ended up having surgery. When Saturday morning came, I didn’t feel up to watching any of the festivities. I spent a week in room 496 and finally did watch the wedding two days later, while intravenous antibiotics were administered to fight the staph infection wreaking havoc on my body.
Life continues to challenge me and this recent physical illness broke me mentally. It turns out survival isn’t cumulative, but the things we must survive are. Being hospitalized brought back a lot of issues I didn’t even know I had as a result of the last time I received in-patient care after I woke up blind. Like the scar on my ankle from almost 20 years ago, the memory of that first dark week in a too-rated Philadelphia medical center had faded. But also like the plate and screws in that joint, there was still something under the surface. Instead of holding me together as the hardware does, the PTSD fractured my mind and my spirit.
I am home now recovering, finally beginning to feel like myself in my head. The stitches come out tomorrow and I am anxious to put this all behind me. But I now know that just because you move on from something doesn’t mean that it never happened, that it didn’t leave a mark. Instead it dissolves into you like the type of sutures I don’t have, becoming such a part of you there is no way to tell where the experience ends and you begin. It is as insidious as the staph infection I battled and between the two, far more frightening.
I will never forget where I was when Diana’s youngest made his vows to his bride. And I will never forget that, like love, a single week of your life can last forever.
