I'm like every other person on this planet. Stuff happens and I have to cope, move on, get over it and create something new so I can put my difficult experiences behind me. I have to mull things over, figure them out and then re-define my life based on what's happened. I remember when my second daughter was born. It was a pretty dramatic time for us. We knew as soon as she was delivered that there was something seriously wrong. When she was five days old, some doctors came up from Philadelphia to diagnose her and the news was not good. Back in those days I was asked if I wanted to take her home. My answer was of course I do! But, the following years would be some of the hardest (but happiest) of my life. It was difficult to recover from the news of my daughters medical and developmental difficulties, because there always seemed to be another crisis. But what got me through was the fact that I adored my children and was determined to make the most of our situation. I felt like I was up to the challenge of raising both of my girls and I was a willing learner. There was a popular song that I loved and one line said, "In every moment there's a reason to carry on". I took that to heart and stayed determined to live my life looking for those moments. When I'm recovering from any kind of a setback, it's important, but certainly challenging, for me to keep that positive outlook.
We frequently associate the word "recovery" with drugs and alcohol or from a surgical procedure. We don't typically think about recovering from life's most difficult events. In the instance of substance abuse, recovery is seen as an ongoing process, as in "I am in recovery". Recovery from a medical procedure is typically given a time frame. Knee replacement has you back to walking comfortably in a month to six weeks. For bunion surgery it could be from six weeks to six months and from cataract surgery, you'll feel fine within two weeks and your eye will be totally healed within six weeks. (Seems like six weeks is some kind of a magic number for the body to heal). But recovery isn't ever just about the body, especially when recovering from a complex illness or a terribly difficult situation. Highly emotional experiences like divorce have a more open ended recovery time, with each individual healing and recovering at their own individual pace. Healing from surgery has a beginning a middle and an end, barring complications. Alcoholics mark their recovery with anniversaries because their recovery starts on a particular date, so they get to mark thirty days, ninety days and then each annual anniversary with a celebration. Those markers help in re-framing a person's life.
Those of us dealing with a chronic condition don't get any kind of structure or timeline for our recovery. We don't know if we're in the middle, the end, or right back at the beginning again. There is no steady progression forward and no celebrations to mark our journey. We are in a community but we don't meet to tell our stories or share a cup of coffee afterward to sooth the wounds that get re-opened after a setback. Regardless of our wound, recovery is a unique journey for each individual. The physical aspect is just one piece of the getting well process. The dramatic life events we experience don't have a set timeline and it may be years before we feel that the worst of it is behind us. Part of the definition of recovery is to "be in a process to help us return to a normal condition or to restore what was lost". It may be that recovery for those with long standing conditions or problems needs to happen more on an emotional and spiritual level than even the physical. Coping, accepting, dealing with, and then moving forward in spite of that fact that recovery is still in progress, is a serious challenge. And what if the physical aspect of the recovery will never return what was lost? Then the recovery process must focus on quality of life and finding meaning in a new way of being.
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