17 April 09 - 23:56
Good Friday Pain and Easter Gift
An update on my exercise program: For six or seven weeks, I have been diligently getting in at least four substantial workouts a week, two thirds of them over 40 minutes long. I've been stretching myself, doing heavier weights, harder cardio, workouts I haven't done for years because they were too hard. I've been seeing results, too. The first person at church came up to me and said that the minister had lost weight. (I know it's not all about weight, but I'm enough a product of my culture to feel flattered.) About an inch has come off my waist. And I haven't been huffing and puffing so much when I've walked up the hill at the kids' school.
Things were going great right up until the Saturday before Palm Sunday. I had done a 40 minute yoga session the night before that seemed pretty normal, but when I woke up the next morning, it felt like I had strained my lower abdominals. Great, I thought. The lower abs are part of the core muscles that everything else is connected to, and I can hardly roll over in bed without them, let alone work out.
After a few days, they felt better, so I did a couple more workouts. So far so good. I even managed a step workout on a six inch bench. But that might not have been so smart. Because the next day, Maundy Thursday at about 3:30 in the afternoon, at the mall trying to finish my Easter shopping, I got up from my food court seat and I could hardly walk. It was so bad that I went home without getting a White Mocca from Second Cup on the way out the door, because I wasn't sure I could juggle it and my bag from Sears without hurting myself further. (My hubby was particularly alarmed when he heard that part.) I went and did Maundy Thursday service, tried to walk straight, and hoped it would all be better the next day.
The next morning, Good Friday, I could hardly get out of bed. Things definitely were not better. So with our Good Friday cantata three hours away, I got my doctor to look at my belly, which by this time could hardly be touched. He poked and prodded and looked concerned by how much I was wincing. He said that the problem didn't seem to be muscular at all, that he felt a mass on the left side, and he thought I should go to Emergency right away. I didn't get much past the word "mass." And not the Good Friday kind.
I drove home in a bit of shock. I knew I was overreacting, but all I could think about was my friend, Sandra, who died just two weeks before after a courageous battle with ovarian cancer, and she was diagnosed after she thought she had strained her abdominal muscles bellydancing. But no matter what I feared, hubby and I had to go sing the Good Friday Cantata. With only a ten voice choir, we would be missed, and my voice was still fine. Not only that, but hubby was playing Peter. So we went, and we sang. Actually, we sang marvellously, from a wonderful score, to a larger house than I was expecting. A lot of tears were shed as we told the story of Jesus' passion through Peter's eyes, and maybe one or two of them were mine.
For a long time, I have believed that the Easter story, far more than being a story of a particular man in a particular place and what God did for all of us through him, is actually a story with mythic force about the ordinary lives that we all lead. We all go through experiences of death and dying, where we lose a loved one, or lose our health, or lose our self-image, or something else that is precious to us. We can't imagine our lives without that person, or that thing, or that state of being, and our fear overwhelms us. But somehow, once we've lost what we love, once we grieve the loss to the fullest and face up to the fact that we can't get it back, we find on the other side of that loss, new life. Sometimes that life is even better than the life we had before, because new possibilities for living are opened up that we'd never considered while we were still clinging to our fear of loss.
I don't want to claim too much of this power for myself. My story is pretty little compared to people who get real bad news from their doctors. Let me assure you that after eight hours in Emerg and an ultrasound, we're pretty sure that the pain had to do with an exercise induced injury to an old surgical scar, and it was inflamed scar tissue that my doctor was feeling. (Oh, and I have a gallstone. Which has nothing to do with this story, but promises future fun.) I am feeling much better now. I even managed a very easy 20 minute walking workout last night, and I'm still fine today.
But in the hours between when I first heard my doctor's scary words and when I got that word from the Emergency Room doctor, I sang a cantata about Peter grieving the loss of his friend Jesus. And in the singing, I realized in a powerful way that there was nothing any doctor could tell me that would be worse than what Jesus went through on Good Friday. The burden was lifted off my shoulders, along with a few other burdens I have been carrying, past mistakes, regrets, fears. And that sense of serenity has gone with me all this week, as I am trying to rest my body and not take on again the cares of the world. Not sure I can stretch it out for another week, but it was my Easter gift, unexpected on the other side of myfear for my health.
Blessings, Heather.
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