A miracle in action

Get down on that floor

Hello dear community,

I am sharing today’s post with a relentless level of exhaustion in my system as I am processing seismic information about my past and future. A miracle is in action in my life, and I am overwhelmed. About 10 days ago, I returned from a life-changing visit to Ruidoso, NM, where I found a doctor who specializes in treating the lasting effects of severe brain injuries that not only disrupt the neurological system but distort the body’s architecture. He works with the dynamic, interlocking exchanges of scaffolding and wiring that, when dysregulated, elicit symptomology like chronic pain, fatigue, anxiety, memory loss, blood sugar issues, nutritional gaps, and basic sensory-motor malfunctioning. This is not his only offering, but he happens to have a unique expertise in this arena that is precisely what I need.

It is not such a simple thing to find what you’ve been seeking (or what you didn’t even know to seek, or what you didn’t even know was possible) after 14 years of struggle. It is relief. It is gratitude beyond belief, awe, and reverence. But it is also activation, upheaval, upset, frustration… It is the multiple contradictory coexisting truths that appear in any great initiation.

I want to share more about this experience with you all, but I need to share the context first. The story is long and as I mentioned in this post where I shared the first excerpt (please check back if you’re new here to track the plot), I have been working on an essay for 3 years that I am still not ready to share in full. But clearly, with this serendipitous emergence in my life, this story wants to be told. My injury was forced into the recesses of my attention out of necessity, until the pandemic prompted me to revisit all that was left unresolved in my being (of which, this was just one matter for review). I am gradually cracking open this monumental part of my life again after many years of holding it close in.

Thank you for your loving awareness here. This substack is a refuge. I can see who opens these emails, how often, etc and every single gesture of engagement is nectar to my currently very weary yet eternally optimistic spirit.

With deep heart, from beneath extravagant New Mexico skies,

Rachel

(P.S. I have been featuring fewer artistic integrations lately just out of sheer energy preservation. I hope to bring back more curated posts, weaving the pieces (photographs, paintings, poetry, drawings, etc) by other creators in the future!)

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“I’m going to tell you one last thing before you go, and if it’s the only thing you remember out of everything I’ve told you these last few weeks, I’ll sleep just a little easier with you out in the world again.

I don’t care if you’re in the dirtiest bathroom of the nastiest bar in Mumbai or Shanghai or Chicago, if you ever feel this way again, I want you to get down on the ground and lay there until you feel better. No excuses.

You cannot fall like this again, ok?

I don’t care how disgusting it is. You get down on that floor.”

His eyes softened with the faintest fluttering of tears threatening to seep into the pool of his eyelids. Microscopic measures of restraint cascaded through subtle shifts in his gaze, and suddenly all moisture was reabsorbed. God-forbid he be seen with wet cheeks. Vulnerability too dangerously indulges cracks in a doctor’s necessary armor, something I knew all too well.

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I still remember how stunned I felt receiving this unexpected message at discharge from the neurosurgeon who had overseen my case for the last three weeks. This remains one of the kindest things anyone has ever said to me, and as it echoes in reverberations over the years, my heart still swells thinking about it.

The level of care in his heart exceeded professional requirements and extended into the worthiness of my life. It reached beyond the hospital walls and into the unfolding and emergent future formation of my journey – and the trust that this future would take me once again to far-flung places, on adventures, toward the fullness of life that felt devastatingly out of reach as I emerged from death’s grip and was about to be released on to a long, long, long road of recovery (that I’m still walking 14 years later). I was beautifully, tenderly heartbroken by the idea of returning to the unpredictable, intimidating, captivating world opening back up to me that his words spoke to, this time wisely buffered by paternal potency. Fathering can happen in peculiar places, and I have learned to allow in as many trusted, reliable, supportive fathers (and mothers) as possible throughout the course of my life as sustenance, as fortitude, as a tapestry of resource that cannot come from just one person alone.

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I can’t remember his face but the way he feels to me in memory is that of a combination of quintessential, capable composed, competent, confident male figures rolled into one, and also deeply available in his humanity. Perhaps I was projecting onto him, but I perceived a subtle fear in him as he navigated the uncertainty of my situation – not because he was inadequate for the challenge, but because my injury was catastrophic with a high degree of mystery in how my brain would respond, demanding constant monitoring and continuous iteration. I couldn’t process anything he shared about my case to the only person who stayed by my side the entire time — my mother – who was herself exhausted from contorting her body between two blocky, wooden hospital chairs, straining for sleep. Yet, I felt and perceived in other areas of my being that this man had unfurled the map in his mind with rigorous strategy around all possible response plans – should I need to be rushed into surgery, should I have a seizure, should I fall back into coma, should my brain swell beyond my skull’s capacity. I kept my eyes locked on him from the second he entered the scene.

My entry into and through the hospital’s emergency ward was harrowing for countless reasons, one of which was the potentially fatal miscalculation to call for a taxi to the hospital instead of an ambulance. I regained consciousness on the bathroom floor of my college apartment after the force of my lifeless bodyweight collided with the edge of my ceramic bathtub, concentrated onto one singular point on my occipital bone, my brain ricocheting back and forth like a ship against rocks. When I awoke nearly an hour later to excruciating, intolerable head pain, I was utterly confused as to why I was on the floor and why my head hurt so badly. The two seemed disconnected. I knew I needed help.

Arriving in a cab led the ER staff to assume I was just a hungover college kid, bumping me down in triage, further delaying me from the CT scan that was the first step in saving my life. I sat there slumped in a chair, unable to do anything but struggle to breathe through the agonizing pain radiating from my skull to my toes. I brought three things with me to the hopsital: my wallet, my phone, and my phone charger. I had no clue what I was in for.

When I finally got admitted, then submitted into the metal tube, forced to rest my head onto a sharp protrusion in the exact spot of my collision, then guided into a room and left alone to wait and wait and wait, the pain accelerated and rolling panic attacks overtook me. With each passing minute, my body pushed my spirit out of the way as some form of preservation, shutting down into primal survival mode.

The last thing I remember is a nurse gliding into the clinic room where I sat shivering in my gown from cold, fear, and pain simultaneously. Her detached demeanor and balletic gestures stung my suffering with perceived betrayal, pushing me deeper into misery. She kept the door open behind her. Her angelic curls, bathed in fluorescent light, had only just settled against her neck from the breeze of her dance when she gently reached out and rested porcelain fingertips almost imperceptibly on my shoulder. “Honey…” – her eyes locked on mine with a barren gaze… “....you fractured your skull.”

The words that tumbled out of her mouth felt like shattered glass, and then she immediately flitted out of the room. I looked down at the shards in my hands. My spirit leapt entirely out of my body.

“Fractured my skull??!” The words didn’t make sense.

And yet, I was certain she had just given me a death sentence. The otherworldly level of pain caused by the crack ripping my skull apart, my swelling brain pushed it wider, tearing me into pieces was unsurvivable. There was nothing more to say, no next steps, no more scans, no hope. I was completely alone and I was going to die. I was tethered to reality by increasingly fragile threads. This realization of certain death slashed through all of them. Then the whole world went black.

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I’ll pause here for now. More on this story as it wants to come through. Thank you again.

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