Days 5/6 Post-Op: The Blur of Home: Borrowed Blood, Shaking Spells, and the Hands of Sisterhood
If it feels like I disappeared into a black hole over the last few days, it’s because I did.
Coming home from the hospital on Monday afternoon felt like stepping off the edge of a cliff. The last seventy-two hours might as well have been three years; time dilated into a blur of raw pain, sleepless nights, and moments of fear.
It is hard enough to come home when a surgeon has essentially filleted your abdomen and back to rebuild your spine. But the severe blood loss anemia, and the subsequent transfusion at the hospital, gave this recovery a completely different, frightening flavor. The only other time I have ever felt this dangerously depleted was twenty-four years ago after Ben was born, when I also lost a substantial amount of blood. It has left me ghostly pale and weaker than I have ever felt in my adult life.
At home, that depletion hit with full force. My blood pressure would plummet without warning, leading to a frightening moment of passing out in Matt’s arms. Then would come the shaking attacks, episodes where my entire skeleton felt violently wracked from the inside out, shaking and shivering uncontrollably while my body fought to regulate itself.
In the midst of that terror, my village stepped in to physically keep us afloat.
Kim arrived like an absolute guardian angel, hunting down hard-to-find supplies across town and arriving with a massive Walgreens haul. She took over my bedside for half a day, nursing me, keeping the ice packs moving, and holding the perimeter so Matt could catch his breath.
The next day, as another rough afternoon settled in and another shaking spell hit, Kate walked through our door.
Kate is part of my deepest soul-sister circle. We met when we were ten years old, and all through high school, we were glued together, everyone simply called us “KateandErin” as if it were a single word. We were high school gymnasts, danced together, did separate Outward Bound leadership semesters in college, and graduated from CU Boulder together. She has been teaching yoga longer than I have, and over the years has turned her deep, intuitive brilliance toward Ayurveda, the sister science of yoga, mastering subtle anatomy and energetic healing.
Seeing me in distress, Kate reached into her bag for her doterra oils, sat at the foot of my bed, and quietly gave me a foot massage for an hour. In a haze of pain and panic, to have the warm, knowing, healing touch of a lifelong friend grounding my energy back into the earth was medicine beyond words. Her wisdom and presence lowered the temperature in the entire house.
Abby returned again, too, carrying groceries, thoughtful treats, and that effortless, tender care. While Matt tackled the heavy cleanup downstairs after dinner, Abby gently helped me wash up, found my pajamas, and tucked me into bed.
The hardest invisible weight through all of this is that our companies, Five Parks Yoga and Five Parks Life, are run by the two of us: Matt and Erin. With me physically sidelined and Matt running on sheer fumes, managing his own post-shoulder rehab, a back that seized under stress, work has completely ground to a halt. Matt is more tapped out than I am in so many ways, unable to accomplish a fraction of his usual routine, and watching the person who holds everything together struggle under the weight of it all is a heavy pill to swallow.
We didn’t just survive back surgery this week; we survived the crash of the aftermath. And we only made it through because our people held us through it all.
