Whilst at a party with friends the other night, drinking amaretto sours, we reached the point of being confident — read ‘tipsy’ — enough to say what we might not otherwise have said in the cold light of day (which is also often the point at which one voices what everyone else is thinking!):
“Your hand looks wonky!” my friend exclaimed. “Are you sure they’ve put the cast on correctly?”
I responded by holding my hands up to my face and opening my eyes wide, because the one advantage to this skew-whiff cast position is that I am perfecting a mean meerkat impression!
My friend was right: it did look wonky and she wasn’t the only one to say so. In fact, the other commenters (including a couple of friends who are health professionals) had been sober and measured when they mentioned it, so there was enough concern raised that doubt had crept its way into my mind!
I was familiar with this feeling of doubt: it had reared its head before! It was there after my hernia surgery, when I was still experiencing intermittent pain weeks after the literature had said I should be ‘back to normal’ and able to start exercising again. I definitely didn’t feel ready to go back to pilates, and worried that I had somehow damaged the surgical site, or perhaps re-herniated elsewhere. I whiled away hours with Dr Google, but the resounding advice was just to watch and wait, and sure enough, several months later I realised I hadn’t experienced any pain for weeks. My body had done just what it was supposed to do — heal itself — but in its own time. I just needed to trust the process.
Or how about when my daughter lost the end of her toe after an injury when we were travelling around Italy (see Lessons From Travelling With Young Children for more on that!)? We took her to three different emergency departments for reviews over the six weeks we were away, but other than give her some antibiotics and dress the wound daily, we just had to wait it out until we got back to the UK. Ultimately, the mountains of texts with gross wound pictures that I sent to my health-care colleagues for advice, and my (unsuccessful) efforts to get her seen quicker by the plastics team once we were on home turf, made no difference to her outcome. Either way, her toe healed beautifully, and much of my panicking was for nothing. I should have just trusted the process.
And so, it is with this gift of hindsight that I now feel confident to trust the healing process with my broken wrist. Though the cast looks a little crooked, my reading up on it suggests that the technical term for it is ‘plantar flexion’, and this is a recommended cast position for certain fractures. The cast was applied by the plaster technician after discussion with the orthopaedic consultant and so I have faith that the correct position was chosen! What’s more, my wrist seems to be improving: it’s (generally) comfortable, the pain has reduced, and the strength and mobility in my hand is increasing. This, plus my past experiences, has led me to conclude that as a tried-and-tested treatment has been implemented for my wrist, all I need to do now is trust my body’s healing process.
I realise that my worrying/googling/advice-seeking texts are just a way for me to try and gain some control over an otherwise uncontrollable situation. My body has shown me she has healed before, so why doubt that she will do so again? Instead of wasting time and energy trying to control something I don’t need to control, I’m doing my best to just trust the process.
This lesson — to trust the process — has cropped up in other areas of my life, too. Earlier this month, out and about I spotted patches of bright yellow daffodils, but in my garden many of the bulbs I’d lovingly and painstakingly planted had yet to make an appearance. Like-wise, my potted hydrangea was only showing purple buds, whilst the hydrangeas planted in the ground on our bank were showing off a plethora of green leaves. I was concerned that the bulbs were damaged and that I’d pruned them too early, but my husband calmly reminded me to trust the process. He’s right: every year I am dismayed when the plants don’t grow when I think they should, yet every year they bloom, but only when they’re ready. (Lo and behold, those daffodils are now peeking through!)
And it’s not just nature’s processes that I’ve learned to trust. There are others too. Last month would have been my mum’s birthday, and I have a go-to process that helps me remember her, and grieve, on that anniversary. I know that if I play ‘Tompkins Square Park’ by Mumford and Sons, and read one of the letters she wrote to me before she died, then the tears will come, and that feels so good and important and sad and cathartic. I am so grateful that I can trust that process.
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Before I end, I feel I need to recognise that sometimes we may have been let down by a process — which, in fact, may be better defined as a system — that we have been told to trust. Maybe something was misdiagnosed, and so we didn’t get the treatment we felt we needed, or we didn’t have the confidence to push back against a decision a professional made for/about us. The results of being let down by someone or something we’ve put our faith in can be devastating. In light of this, I want to highlight that the process I am referring to within the health experiences I’ve shared is the body’s healing process, having received an appropriate treatment that I’ve felt satisfied with. There have been other times when I — or someone I care about — have received treatments I haven’t felt happy or peaceful about, and in those cases I haven’t blindly trusted the system. Our bodies need to be given the correct help in order to mend well, and only then can we trust the healing process.
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So, there’s a couple of weeks to go now until my cast is removed, and in the meantime, I’ll just trust and wait, albeit looking a little like a meerkat whilst I do so!
Time for Tea 