Having received a request from a good friend, I would like to address the topic of suffering.
We all experience pain and suffering at some point in our lives – it’s simply part of the human condition and experience. It’s there to remind us how fragile, and how human, we really are. HOW we move through it is a personal choice.
Through my transplant experience, I suffered from two different kinds of pain – physical, and then emotional. The physical pain started when I developed blood clots (hematomas) in my abdomen, followed by the most intense pain I had experienced until then.
My organs were dying.
The severe physical pain continued for a year and a half, though the nature of it changed as my organs were removed, I spent four months in different hospitals in Michigan (who placed me in hospice) and in Indiana (who put me on the transplant list), where I ultimately received seven new organs, and had multiple surgeries.
The physical pain was all-consuming and to a level I had never experienced. It kept me from sleeping, but it also made me continually pass out. My body needed to be strapped down because it was bucking uncontrollably – for months. I didn’t know how much worse it would get, nor how long it was going to last, and the doctors didn’t know either, because apparently, I was the first person to undergo such an extensive transplant surgery. This not knowing made it more challenging for me, but I somehow knew that my first step needed to be acceptance. Once I was able to accept the pain, I did two things that helped me cope with it. First, I was able to take my mind and my spirit out of my body, out of the pain. I left the pain to my body and took periodic breaks from it by practicing meditation to my favorite music, American Indian chanting music, to achieve a sort of euphoric state. Second, I offered up my pain and suffering as prayer.
The emotional pain I experienced was equally challenging and diverse. I didn’t know who the doctors had created , and my body felt foreign to me: I realized that in order to survive on this plane I was going to have to re-create myself, at the age of 48. I had been looking forward to returning to the home I had built, and that anticipation provided me with a certain level of comfort, but unfortunately that was not to be, not for long. While I still had open wounds that were healing from the inside out, I was forcibly removed from the home I had built and I ended up losing everything I had worked so hard for.
I also experienced judgment and discrimination, which was strange and surprising to me. People presumed I had a contagious disease and were afraid to be near me, or let their children be near me, and my scars were apparently very shocking to some, so much so that I remember being asking to put my shirt back on when I was at a beach. The whole experience exposed me to an ugly side of humanity I had never experienced up until that point in my life, and it was not a favorable one – human beings are really good at judgment.
Every dark side has a bright side. The gifts I gleaned from all of my pain and suffering were humility, patience, empathy, and living in the NOW.
