Body Mod.

When giving yourself to more hurt leads to healing.

My first tattoo, scarified onto me in a storefront tattoo shop in Lebanon NH my senior year in college, is Winnie the Pooh in his guise as the Tao of Pooh/P’u. For three weeks in my conscious life when I didn’t consider myself a Christian, I called myself a Taoist.

Pooh, both aa milne’s and Benjamin Hoff’s, helped me to Chill the F Out and keep things simple when I was a pretty tightly wound type A young adult. (I still consider myself a Taoist Christian). I wanted to keep Pooh/P’u with me always. Hence the reminder on my hip.

I’m headed to the hospital right now for surgery on the hip opposite Pooh today. When I come out, I’ll have a bionic part that should last me for 30 years. They will cut off the head of my flayed femur, jam a titanium spike in the resulting hole, sand down the inside of my pocked and spurred hip socket, fit it with a plastic and ceramic cup, wake me up from the dead, and release me back into the wild—and to my own bed, tonight! Whut?!!

I haven’t been nervous as surgery approaches. Absolutely the opposite. Hip pain and limited mobility have been a part of my life since I was diagnosed with bilateral arthritis 30 years ago. This past year, it got a lot worse. Making this decision instantly lifted the gloom I had been operating under. I was feeling like I’d given my whole life to being a pastor, and worried that by the time I was done working full time, I would be all used up.

But I’m still deeply aware that I’m passing through a significant portal again. The preparations and inner buzz are taking me back to my lung surgery for Ewing’s Sarcoma 15 years ago. I’m descending right now…disappearing from the sunlit world, joining the throngs who today and every day interrupt their perfectly ordinary human lives to submit themselves to being cut open, sawed apart, stitched together and reanimated in the name of being more alive.

It will be an honor to spend time in the surgical suite with other humans facing down much worse diagnoses, people who are truly suffering not just in body but in spirit. And it will be a blessing to ascend again (God willing) back to the world, and my second-floor bedroom, when the day is done.

Our scripture at church this past Sunday was from Hebrews 13:1-3, “Let mutual affection continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them, those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.”

As I head voluntarily into this efficacious and amiable torture chamber, praying for everybody around me, feeling their suffering and lives connected to my own, what I mostly feel today is: so very glad to be alive, in a body, in an age and a nation where the miracle of joint replacement is an accessible quotidien mystery for me and for many.

I know lots of things are getting broken right now that will be much harder to repair than my hip. Our world may forever walk with a limp after all that is unfolding. And also: healing is real and possible, even likely. Eventually.

I’ll give the The Tao of Pooh the last word:

“How can you get very far,
If you don't know who you are?
How can you do what you ought,
If you don't know what you've got?
And if you don't know which to do
Of all the things in front of you,
Then what you'll have when you are through
Is just a mess without a clue
Of all the best that can come true
If you know What and Which and Who.”

Much love,
Molly