- Share This Post
- submit
- 3
-
Sparkle (0)
A few days after my last post our lives turned upside down. My partner suffered a terrible kidney stone attack and as a result needed to pursue medical care at the local hospital. We endured a rather terrifying ER (if you can call it an ER which in the middle of the night with no doctors on duty would be kind of a stretch) visit that finally resulted in us learning of a potential underlying medical problem. Plainly stated, after 24 hours of waiting the MD there suggested he had cancer and said that if we had a way to get back to the States we'd be better served by the technology there. Dazed and confused we left the hospital unsure of what to do and what this meant for not only our lives right now but for our future.
Not wanting to hesitate, we immediately looked into travel arrangements and within 48 hours put our jungle responsibilities in the safe hands of kind neighbors and flew back to the US, where my partner endured 3 weeks of tests, needles and surgery and a whole lot of pain. Three weeks spent sitting both idle and in motion, in fear and in awe, in gratitude and in humility. Three weeks of waiting finally resulting in the best possible scenario possible. There was no cancer and there was no further surgery required. And the pain was gone.
Hallelujah. Seriously. It was scary and now it's over and we feel so very blessed.
So it's time to go back. In two days we'll rewind our lives and head back to the jungle, a Groundhog Day sort of moment in our lives where we went and came back unexpectedly and after a month are going back again. But this time it feels different because now I know what to expect, I know how hot it is and how the bugs are fierce. I know that my daughter will need to check her shoes before she puts them on and that I will be hypervigilant. I am not learning these new things as much as heading back into it, something that both excites and exhausts me,
It's almost as if I can't quite smell the new car scent any longer and the whole thing needs a bath and at the same time I feel stronger, like I know what's coming and I don't need to waste time this go around trying to figure out what I already know and instead can get down to business, things like putting in a garden and working on a literacy project and also and most importantly, digging deeper into the mystic, uncovering who I am and who I want to be: mother, partner, participant, seeker.
Wish me luck this time around.
Related posts: The wisdom of illness, la familia mazunte and the merits of eating worms and gargling pee
