Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It means the damage no longer controls our lives.
–Shahkrukh Khan
Sometimes closure arrives years later. Long after you’ve stopped searching for it. You’re just sitting there, laughing this laugh that is unapologetically yours. As it trails off, the corners of your mouth hug your face and it just hits you, “I’m Happy”. It’s just like that. With no fanfare or epiphany. Suddenly you are grateful for goodbyes that carried you to this moment; to the space you are now holding.
-word.honey
This is long overdue, I’m so sorry this took so long but I needed time… time to sort out my feelings, time to heal. Just time… I sincerely hope that wherever you are, whatever you’re doing Dr. XXXXX you are happy and doing well, and know that I am going to be forever grateful for EVERYTHING you did for me.
Dear Dr. XXXXX-
I’m sure you never knew I had feelings about what happened on April 7, 2006. I know I never said anything about it to you. Were you thinking of my best interest when you made that fateful decision? I honestly can’t really think of any other option besides yes, because of how fully devoted you were to my case. Every surgery has risks. No matter what surgery you’re having, there are always risks; but should that stop you from doing it? I don’t think so, because if it is supposedly supposed to make the patient’s life better you have to take that gamble. Were you really out of options? Did you have time to consider the possible consequences of doing that particular surgery? I’ll never know, everything happened so fast, from what my mom tells me. All I know was that you had done surgery upon surgery, revision after revision and absolutely NOTHING was working, nothing kept the pain to a minimum, nothing kept the shunts from malfunctioning. So did I just answer my own question? Were you REALLY out of options? Probably. Was what you did even bad enough to warrant forgiveness if it wasn’t intentional? I didn’t know. Did it ever cross your mind that as my doctor you needed forgiveness because of what happened? Probably not, because I never expressed any opinion about it, but what I know for a fact, was that you would have done anything to see me get better, and to have that night end differently. I will never be able to thank you enough for that. I also know that it absolutely broke your heart to have that surgery come to a screeching halt the way it did. I came to the conclusion that there are too many parts of this entire story that I simply will never know the answers to and I had to make peace with that before I could go any further. There is one thing, however that I do know despite all these unknowns and I’m finally ready to talk about it after twelve long years.
Despite the fact that you took what I then perceived to be my entire future away from me, I’m done fighting with the confusion, and all the unknowns that I believe will always be parts of my story. Was I mad at the time? I honestly don’t think I was, but was I confused? HECK YES, I had different opinions coming at me from every possible angle for a long time, and I honestly think those conflicting ideas are what formed my original opinion about this entire thing.
What is forgiveness? The Merriam Webster dictionary will tell you that it is to stop feeling anger toward ----- (someone who has done something wrong): to stop blaming (someone): to stop feeling anger about (something). I had to truly understand what the act of forgiveness included before I was able to perform the action of forgiving you. I had to understand what you did, the true reason why you did it as well as the most important part, what I was even forgiving you for. But there’s only so much you can gather from reading OP reports. On paper, it looked like I must have needed that surgery, it truly did seem as though you were out of options, and I know you. You would never do a surgery, unless you felt that it was absolutely necessary, and then even when you felt that it was, you would take extra time running every noninvasive test possible to try and get around it, you were just that careful of a person. Those were actually the first words that ever came out of your mouth to me, “You know I am a very conservative guy.” These were all actions, and statements that I had to decipher the meaning of when I was pondering what it would mean to forgive you. So why was this so difficult? It was a few different things. Was it because I was never going to have an objective opinion on the events that led up to that decision? Yes, I think this was my number one problem (even this letter I don’t feel is fully objective even though I tried desperately hard to make it so). Was it because I was never going to know the TRUTH behind why you HAD to do it? Sort of. And one thing that always was just sort of in the back of my head I can’t really tell you whether it truly “bothered” me or not, but it was always just “there” was the fact that I never recovered the way you said I would, and my age wasn’t really on my side the way you had predicted. And one other thing that I never really realized and I'm sure we all have done this, but when you say, "oh I forgive you" it's usually a quick thing because it was something you want to get your mind off of, but I didn't want to do that. I knew this was going to be something that was going to be with me for the rest of my life. So I wanted it to be meaningful. People say those three words every day, and it's almost like they're a piece of gold that keeps getting used over and over again. They slowly become tarnished and old looking the more they're used, but I didn't want this to end up like that piece of gold. I wanted this to be special, but I was still so confused. Then I started coming at this from a completely different angle which I thought would be easier, and would lead me in other directions and hopefully I would end up where I wanted to be at the end. I had an idea to examine our relationship- as a doctor and his patient. I think we can both agree it was so much more than a typical doctor patient relationship, even though I never really said much, I could just tell that I was important to you. You told me multiple times that there was just something about me that made me special.
In the 4,015 days (yes I’ve been counting-4,015 as of April 7, 2018) since that night, I have had more than my share of bad days, more surgeries, more infections, but I like to think I’ve had thousands of good days. Yes, I admit it, I said that you ruined my life, totally crushed all of my plans. But that was because I refused to see the great opportunities that were sitting right in front of me, and that they were the same opportunities that were there on April 6th 2006, except I now saw them with brand new eyes. Looking back on it now, it was exciting, but I was scared to death, at the time. It was like looking through a foggy pair of glasses, when the future you saw before was in perfect focus, and now no matter how much you squinted or contorted your vision, or tried to clean the “glasses” you could never bring it completely into focus, you just had to blindly walk to an amorphous future that you now knew very little about. It felt like everything that was an absolute in my future had been transformed into an “if then” statement. I didn’t like unfamiliar things, and to think I was going to have to do EVERYTHING differently for an indefinite period of time absolutely terrified me. I was so confused, that all I could think to do was blame someone and the easiest person to blame was unfortunately you. I blamed you for tearing my life into hundreds of pieces, for messing up all of my plans, but as time went on, I realized that things could have gone in the opposite direction that night and I could have lost my life. I recognized my life was already full of small miracles, and not just big tragedies. I had the revelation that the broken pieces of my life could be recycled and turned into an abstract metaphorical painting that could end up more beautiful than the original. I saw that “ruining” something and “losing” something have more differences than they do similarities.
Like every teenage girl, I wondered what my purpose was in life, why I was put on this Earth, and this experience showed me that even though I wasn’t sure what my purpose was yet, there was a definite reason why I was still here; I was born to be a fighter. You told me that I was one of your favorite patients. That I was the ONE PATIENT out of hundreds that you were going crazy about, and couldn’t transfer hospitals and go over a thousand miles away until I was with someone you trusted. You will never know what that meant to me.
What happened forced me to look at life in a completely different way. Yes, having a stroke changed my life, I think it alters everyone’s life in however much a way as you let it. But not everybody is a scared 17-year-old just growing into her own skin when they have it. I think that worked for me, but also against me. Because I was so young, I realized that I had so much of my life left to live, and so that should have been a catalyst to do well in therapy, and for a little while it was, but I admit I was sort of spoiled, I never really knew what it was like to struggle at something so much to the point where I had to repetitively do it for DAYS, WEEKS, even YEARS seemingly with no improvement, and it made me very discouraged, especially when everyone around me was saying that things were getting better but I couldn’t see them. It just felt like I was going to be stuck in this position for the rest of my life. Not being able to voice my wants and needs, made it very clear to me that unspoken words and actions were forever going to speak louder than spoken ones. I got to sit back and observe, and to be honest, I learned more doing that than I ever did participating.
I hope you know that I will forever appreciate everything you did for me, both as a person and as my former doctor. I think it was because of this silent admiration that it was absolutely incomprehensible for me to think you could have overlooked something that seemed so important. I think that was part of the reason why it was so hard for me to make sense of it all. It was almost as if I unconsciously glossed over the part that would have been considered to be “your mistake” because I refused to believe that it happened. My parents were upset, but I think most of the reason for their anger, was they didn’t know the entire story either, it’s like trying to put a story together, that you only have 3 out of 7 pieces to and the three pieces you did have, you weren’t even 100% sure if those were correct. It was like the two hemispheres of my brain were constantly battling each other because neither side knew the entire story, I’m still not sure that I do. It was like one side said one thing but the other side said the opposite. I knew what I wanted to believe, but I had no clue if what I believed was what really happened. My mom asked you, “How is she supposed to rebuild her life,” and at the time I would say your answer was flippant, but now I look back on it and call it not exactly flippant, but extremely revealing. I’m glad you said it this way because it gave me a window to look through to your life and see how unbelievably hard it was and how much you had to sacrifice in order to do your dream job. You said, “I can’t even figure out my own life, I don’t want to be responsible for telling you how she lives hers.” Right after I heard that you said that, I thought, “No, I’m important to him, he wouldn’t ever say that,” but I now realize the pain you were going through. Spending sometimes eighteen hours a day at the hospital. It was really true what they said in medical school, you have to give your entire life to this job, and you did just that. I always felt like in your mind, it didn’t matter how long it took, you were going to make me feel better, you were going to figure it out. And you weren’t going to stop until you had done just that. You didn’t have to prove anything to me Dr. XXXXX. They always say actions speak louder than words, and in those four years, you embodied that statement to a T.
My mom told me that night at about 3am, you simply came out of the OR tired as can be, you sat down next to my parents, and told them, the surgery was semi-successful BUT. No one likes it when there’s a BUT, especially when you’re telling them how their child is doing after surgery. You said you talked to me after surgery, I wish I could remember it, but unfortunately I don’t. I was really depressed for a long time, because as I said I had been lucky and never really knew what it was like to struggle, but this has been the most painful, supremely beautiful journey of my entire life. I may not know where I’m going, and twelve years ago, that would have made me crazy, but now it’s what makes life fun. I never could have developed the attributes that people say I now have unless I went through something this life changing.
I’m telling you that regardless of how the past twelve years have gone for me, I’m finally at a place where I am happy with who I see looking back at me when I look in the mirror, and more importantly, I recognize her. I couldn’t recognize who I saw staring back at me for the longest time; it was like looking into one of those mirrors at the carnival, and it absolutely petrified me. Yes, you made a mistake, but you helped me in so many other ways, in the two years after that fateful night. In those two years, you did everything possible to figure out the genesis of my now constant pain. You treated me like your own daughter, you took my story to every neurosurgery conference you went to, you even gave me a copy of the PowerPoint that you showed doctors from all over the world. I still have it. When you went to conferences, you weren’t worried about people judging you for your actions, all you cared about was putting the best minds in the world on my case. I will never be able to thank you enough for this. You may think that because you weren’t able to figure it out you failed. You didn’t fail. You kept me alive for the five years I was in your care. You will always be my favorite cowboy boot wearing Elvis look-alike. Does this mean I would change the way my life has been? That’s been hard question to answer, because I’ll admit I was angry and confused for a very long time, and yes are times where I want my leg, hand, and arm to “work the way they used to,” but I think the ultimate answer despite all of that is No. I’ve learned way too much. Do I think this 100% of the time without fail? No, I don’t, but I needed to ask myself some questions, number one being was it hard? God yes, this has been the hardest never-ending test of my entire life. Question number two would be is anything that’s worth it easy to accomplish? In most cases no. There must be more good things I’m going to gain from this, or else I would be 100% by now. That’s the way I see it. The way I’m feeling now is that even though a stroke is obviously devastating, it was the wake up I needed to realize that life is hard. It took me every bit of strength I had to take a deep breath to say a sentence. I realized that in order to achieve things, you must try your absolute hardest, and put 150% in everything you do and to never give up. I fully believe I will be recovering every day for the rest of my life, April 8, 2006 was just day 1 of this incredible adventure. And so back to that question, would I take it back? No.
I’m infinitely positive you would never purposely hurt me, that’s the reason I put all my trust in you. You know I loved you like my own father. Heck I probably spent more time with you than with my own father during those two years that I was my sickest, I probably saw you more than anybody. The thing I discovered about myself is bigger than you will ever know, and without the terrible events of April 7, 2006, I don’t think I would have ever discovered it. It seems so simple and I think that is the reason it’s so very often overlooked. I discovered that I had the power to forgive you. No one else has the power to forgive you for the tragic events of that night except me; no one can take it away from me, I have the power to use it in any way I want. Why does this seemingly effortless action have so much power? I’ve been asking myself that question for twelve long years and this is the answer I came up with. Forgiveness is as much for the giver as it is for the receiver. It allows you to acknowledge that the action happened, but it also enables you to say, yes this happened, but I’m not going to let it have complete power over my life. I never really realized how much this was weighing on my heart, until I came to the conclusion that I wanted to forgive you. Just then I felt this 1,000 lb weight was lifted off of my chest. But, the fact remained, that if I forgave you, it was all going to be permanent was looming over my head, and so I had to decide if I was truly ready to do this, especially since my complete opinion of this hadn’t really changed in 12 years. You can’t just take something of this caliber back after you say it (especially on a blog that everybody on earth has access to). This was something that I had to come to terms with. And after twelve years I am finally ready to say it. That in spite of everything I just mentioned, all the heartache, all the nights of crying in Comer, looking out the window of the 5th floor family room at a world that that looked so incredibly foreign to me; a world that I really didn’t feel a part of anymore, all of the weakness and everything that happened on April 7,2006-- -I forgive you.
One mistake should NOT erase the six years of successful surgeries I had with you. Your job was to keep me alive for however long I was in your care and you succeeded, it wasn’t without bumps and bruises, but life isn’t meant to be easy. You and your former team have saved my life countless times, and that will never be forgotten. This experience helped me find myself- it helped me realize what true strength is, it helped me to see that just surviving until the next day, can make you feel strong even on your weakest days. As the years passed, I was slowly coming to terms with the fact that nothing I did; nothing I wished would ever make this go away. I had to turn it into a learning experience. I had to turn this into something “good.” Knowing you the way I came to know you in the six years you were my doctor, I know you would have never purposely put my life in danger. The last thing you ever said to me was the one thing I remember most about you. It was that if you ever had a daughter, you hoped she would be like me- petite with an aura of quiet confidence, then you said you were really going to miss me and Good Luck, and that was the biggest compliment I could have ever received. We never got to have a REAL chat, and for that I’m so sorry. I would have loved it; I honestly don’t think I ever said more than three words to you at a time. Forgiving you doesn’t erase the past, but it makes way for bigger and better things to happen in the future. I have you to thank for giving me a future to prepare for. I’m sorry you couldn’t fix me Dr. XXXXX. But know this- I will be forever indebted to you for everything you did do for me!
You know who this is from.
