I sit with my daughter the night before my bunion surgery, giving her the Coles Notes again about what will happen. “But your foot will stay on?” she asks, wide, curious eyes fixed on my left foot. “Yes, honey, my foot will stay on”, I tell her, aware of the fact that the only other surgeries she’s heard about are her grandmother’s hip replacement and Miles’ amputation. Her only context for a foot surgery is one that ends in the foot being removed. She somehow doesn’t seem overly worried, accepting my answer and moving right along. I love this about 3-year-olds.
The morning of my surgery, I have a fair bit of anxiety. It’s all too familiar, creeping in like an insidious dark ink. This feeling, though, is just a small sliver of the intense anxiety I felt the morning of Miles’ surgery. That morning, my lip was bleeding from picking it, and my breath came in sharp, shallow draws. I had to continually slow my breath, pull my mind back from worst-case-scenarios, and focus on the fact that this surgery would be one step closer to him being cancer-free. When we walked along the stretcher wheeling him towards the OR, I lifted my fingers to feel tears streaming down my face, having not been fully aware of the deep grief spilling over from within me. I knew that although this surgery was a necessary step forward, his life (and our lives) would be forever changed. He would no longer be a fully able-bodied child, navigating this world without a visible disability.
When Miles came out of his surgery and his sedation wore off, he beamed up at us from his bed. I sighed a massive sigh of relief that he was ok and covered his face in what felt like a million kisses. I wasn’t prepared for the first time the nurse pulled back his bedsheet and we saw the bandaged end of his leg. Staring at the foot that was no longer there – even though we had touched it just hours before- felt so incredibly jarring. In the hours and days that followed, I began to truly picture our new reality. It wasn’t that I hadn’t done so before, but seeing his residual limb sparked a new set of worries. At first, the flashes into the future were anchored in fear, images that gripped my heart and left me breathless. The one with Miles struggling to learn to walk in his tiny prosthesis that he would be fitted for post-surgery. The one with Miles starting daycare and school, kids staring and asking questions. The one with Miles as a bigger kid, suffering as he learned to stand in the shower or ride a bike. The one with Miles as an adult, wanting to excel in high-level sports but being limited in doing so.
Somehow, gradually, these images changed and gave way to new ones as the weeks passed following his surgery. Ones that were lighter, and a whole lot less scary. We watched Miles, at 10 months old, begin to stand with his prosthesis and even jump in his bouncy chair. We watched him play completely unbothered by his new leg. I started to picture Miles as a kindergartener, running with his classmates in the field at school. As a bigger kid riding his bike, totally unencumbered by his prosthesis. And as an adult, proudly staring down at us from a podium.
We didn’t get to see Miles move through life as an amputee. But watching him come through his surgery and recovery with such grit and resilience has forever changed me. As I clumsily hop around after my own surgery, I think of him. I think of his beaming smile and how he pulled us through those weeks and months, somehow saying, “Don’t worry mom and dad, I’ve got this”. Being mildly limited in my mobility has given me a window into some of the challenges he would have faced, ones that many amputees and people with injuries face. I know that my healing and recovery are a fraction of what he was up against, and I remind myself of this in moments of frustration. It’s because my sweet boy exemplified so many of the qualities I aspire to, such as courage, tenacity, and spirit, that I can tap into his calm– into the voice that says, “I’ve got this.”
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