Broken

Three years ago, I developed pneumonia. Not walking pneumonia--the kind that makes it hurt to breathe. It didn't seem to be getting better, so I went to the emergency room as I was having trouble breathing even after a course of steroids. They found a blood clot in my chest, and I was put on blood thinners. During this time, my dad was dying. He'd been in and out of the hospital several times with his COPD and congestive heart failure and so many other things, but this time it felt different like he wasn't going to come home. Because of the blood clot, I had to see an oncologist to find out what was going on--why the blood clot had formed. Test after test, day after day. All this while working full-time as a middle school teacher, trying to visit my dad in the hospital, and keeping my mom from falling apart because of my parents' four children, I'm the one who lived here. Then I had a lot of pain in my lower right quadrant. The oncologist found that I had large cysts on both of my ovaries and fluid in my fallopian tubes. Surgery was scheduled, and a few days later, my dad died. There were people to talk to and insurance to secure and Dad's pension to amend and Social Security to talk to and the funeral to plan and the obituary to write and shopping for a headstone. It was a lot. It was late fall of 2019. A few weeks after the funeral came my surgery. It's called a double oophorectomy. Say that three times fast. It was supposed to be a simple, outpatient surgery. Nope. I ended up with a catheter for six weeks, a week-long hospital stay, and blood clots coming through the catheter causing spasms and blood clots. The pain of giving birth was nothing compared to this. You see, the surgeon had torn the back off of my bladder. I was in surgery for five-and-a-half hours, up in stirrups the whole time. This caused a whole new issue. My adductor muscles were shot. I couldn't move my legs. Christmas sucked. I sat in the corner, looking at my dad's empty chair, wanting to cry because I was in so much pain in so many ways, with a blanket the bag attached to my leg, and the catheter still attached to my body. My adductor muscles had been stretched horribly for a long period of time, and it would take 18 months to get back to "normal." I didn't have time to mourn my dad and I felt like hell and I was trying to take care of my mom and work full time and function in my everyday life and I snapped. I broke. I cried and I cried and I cried. I couldn't get out of bed. I didn't want to eat. I went to my chiropractor to try to get some relief, and she told me she wouldn't let me leave her office until I called a mental health professional and had an appointment for that day. I did what she asked. I went to a psychiatrist and I told him a lot...I mean a lot....going back 15 years to when my best friend committed suicide and I didn't get to deal with that either because I had to help her husband pick out a cemetery plot and plan her funeral and help take care of her children ages 8, 5, and 2. So fifteen years later my brain and body had enough and I broke. And I had to go on disability from work because I would just start crying in front of my students. A week after I went on disability, Covid became a thing, and the world shut down, and I cried some more. I thank god every day that my chiropractor, my friend, forced me to make that call because I don't know if I would still be here if I hadn't started speaking to a mental health professional because when you break and don't have the right glue to put yourself back together, you give up and end up like the friend I had lost 15 years earlier.