Breathing again

Alright, just to let y'all know, I'm breathing again. It was a very bad weekend, and I anticipate with the stressful schedule I have ahead of me that it'll be quite a ride the next two weeks, but breathing is good and I'll take every break I can get.

Before the craziness ensues, I just had to share with y'all the other thing God did for me at the hospital. I'm trying really, really hard to focus on the positive right now and this was a major paradigm shift for me into the positive. I don't know that I can do the situation justice with words, but bear with me while I try.

The last procedure I went through at the hospital was a colonoscopy. Yes, it's as scary as it sounds. The procedure itself wasn't so much because of the anesthesia but the anticipation was aweful and the prep for it was killer.

It was the night before, the pharmacy was late bringing up the stuff I was supposed to drink in order to "clean me out." Because of the belly pain, I was already not keeping things down. Because of the unknowns, I was already stressed and emotional. Enter nurse with gallon jug of stuff that tastes like seawater and feels like ipecac syrup. My job: to drink, and keep down, an entire gallon of this stuff while pooping my guts out - in less than three hours. Challenge: do it without pain meds because it's already very late and they make you sleepy and you can't fall asleep until all of this stuff is swallowed. Fast forward through the nasty parts FIVE HOURS later - spewing everything every which way and having pain that I swear I'm going to die from and no one will care. I swear they'd outlaw this stuff at Guantanemo Bay... So I'm sitting there, shaking, empty beyond empty, alone, exhausted and feeling so humiliated and violated - and the same empty, violated feeling hits me hard from the night of the rape - and it occurs to me that all of this suffering is because of him - because of the choices he made to treat me that way. The IBS that they blame the abdominal pain on that is stress induced. The flashbacks. The nightmares. The physical ramifications. The emotional fallout. The abuse. The rape. All of it. I finally saw things as HIS fault instead of my own.

From the outside, it's like, "Duh!" but for me, this was huge. The guilt that lifted in that moment was larger than there are words to express. Of course, I spent the next hour or so hysterically crying, scaring the nurses, waking my best friend so she could help me pull myself back together... I never slept that night, but it was worth it.

Even not having any answers on the physical pain, just being released from feeling responsible for all of it is worth what I endured that night. It's huge.

I've decided to post a picture of "little Angie" for y'all. This is is how old I was when it started. This is the child I've hated for 30 years. The one who did nothing wrong to deserve the hell she got. The one God needs to heal. We're on our way for that now - letting her go is huge.