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Heart Broken
A blessing. Yes. Ten years ago, this is where Steven slept while I was broken open and put back together. It took longer than I remember. Days in the ICU to get me stabilized. Then another week in the hospital after this. This was the morning of my surgery. The end of the beginning.
What I find most challenging about this disease is the way it defeats any possibility of belief in my own power to change and redeem my past. It’s in me. It has been there, in one form or another, lying in wait, since birth. It was exacerbated by the way I was treated as a child and a young woman. My attempts to ignore it and rise above it only created more and deeper damage. Delay made damage. Even the delay of the ambulance in arriving at the loft did some damage. I can’t reverse this damage. I didn’t cause it and I can’t erase it.
But this is a photograph of a miracle. My slumbering husband, in my private room, on an excellent cardiac care ward in an excellent hospital, covered by my newly acquired insurance (thanks to the Obama administration and Deval Patrick) The sun is rising and I am going to be okay. In fact, I’ll be closer to perfect than I had ever been before. This photo was taken on a morning when, for the first time in my life, the people closest to me and the doctors who saw me were interested in really getting to the bottom of the problem and fixing it. I took these photos to make sense of it all…
