Letting In The Light

This drawing was done last week after a stressful three days that left me exhausted, but tight with unreleased energy. Summer was here and we had begun dancing, but I found my self moving over to the easel where this was released. I never really stopped dancing. Neither did Summer... 

I think the drawing speaks the unspoken, perhaps the unspeakable. Wordless energy telling a story needing to be told. But I can't really explain the drawing anymore than I can explain my reactions to certain situations, other than that I have honed the sensitivity that makes my creativity possible, the vulnerability that opens me to the life I am meant to live. Yet the world I live in is rarely sensitive to my intense reactions.

This week, from Monday afternoon until Wednesday night, I was in the hospital. By the time I left, I wondered how anyone survives such a stay. Especially people who are truly ill.... I was not ill. I was there for a routine colonoscopy, being monitored due to past experiences with the prep done at home. I expected to be home by the next afternoon. I was cheerful when I arrived. I enjoyed my first encounters with the nurses.

Then... Due to a late start, I was up all night doing the prep. And in the morning was told my procedure would start at two. I had last eaten the morning before. At two-thirty I was taken to "holding", and waited in holding - fighting off anxiety with brief bouts of meditation - until holding closed for the night. I was moved, along with another patient, to recovery where my procedure was done at 6:30, but was unsuccessful. (I won't go into that). Taken back to my room, I started another prep at eight-thirty, this time with an IV attached to my arm to avoid dehydration. I had to finish drinking the gallon of Miralax by midnight. I was up and down to the bathroom for most of the night. Each time I must drag the IV machine with me. If I did have a moment of dozing off, my door was opened by a nurse. Sometimes for a reason... 

My second procedure was done at two on Wednesday. I was back in my room by three-thirty very much the worse for wear, and desperate to go home. My daughter, Moira, waited with me for the doctor to come and tell us of findings and to release me. He was supposedly on the floor... Meanwhile, my daughter and I caught up on a long overdue visit. We were both feeling positive; the ordeal was over. By six o'clock, we were not so positive. We called the nurse and discovered that the doctor had gone home. He told her I could go.

Back home, and wobbly as a newborn pup, I felt like I had returned to paradise. And for the last three days, I have been resting and slowly recovering. Trying to release the worst of my experience, trying to remember the kindness of nurses, trying to recall the tiny moments when the light came in...