The Ponds

In life, much is a matter of perspective. This weekend, when my surgical site started sloshing around and gurgling like a pond had formed in my breast, it was scary, to say the least. However, when I called the surgical "on call" team to report this distressing development they said, "Oh, we often hear that." Today at my follow-up surgical appointment, the surgeon went so far as to call such sloshing "normal." Apparently, when the surgeon removed the problematic tissue creating what she called "a rather large cavity", the body "naturally" fills that space with fluid. It should go away in a couple MONTHS.

She also said the enormous swelling, redness, pain, and heat at the site are all "to be expected" because of the radiation last summer. She said we couldn't expect it to act like normal tissue since it had been radiated and would, from then on, respond differently. But from her perspective, the site was healing nicely. The swelling "should get better each month" with the hardness taking 4-6 months to heal. So I have a new normal.

The pathology reports came back fine. All scar tissue--no recurrence of cancer. The doctors had guessed that during surgery since they were unable to completely numb the site--apparently scar tissue that's in pain has raw nerves that are hard, if not impossible, to numb.

Thanks to a gift from a clergyman in Indiana, who I went to divinity school with some 17 years ago, I've been listening to Mary Oliver reads Mary Oliver At Blackwater Pond. She's one of my favorite poets and one I had never "heard" before. On the way home from the doctor, as I reflected on my new lopsided, fluid-filled, nervy reality, I heard her poem called, The Ponds, in which she reflects on the beauty and perfection of water lilies in a pond. She says this:

But what in this world is perfect:
I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided--
and that one wears an orange blight--
and this one is a glossy cheek
half nibbled away--
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled--
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--
that the light is everything--that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

While at the hospital, I visited a parishioner who carries her own pain. I suppose everyone carries some kind of pain, or imperfection, or flaw. All of us live in the midst of our own unstoppable decay, but this day I choose to cast aside the weight of facts and float a little. Tomorrow, maybe I'll expect to be dazzled and look into the white fire of a great mystery. Since I'm heading to annual conference, along with 1,000 other New England United Methodists, anything is possible.