Total Knee Replacement surgical recovery is a grueling, wearing, painful (in so many types), exhausting (both physically and emotionally), often torturous process/experience.
While I don't want to diminish the purely physical aspects too much, and say they aren't traumatizing, I believe that the worst of what I went through after my surgeries are the ways in which my mental illnesses and disorder(s) added additional difficulty to the already excessive pile of what I was enduring, fighting, and dealing with.
These are the things that brought me close to suicide before my second surgery. One of these things is the thing I think about when I'm trying to build my confidence, and tell myself, "Hell, if I could deal with THAT, surrely I can handle this other thing I'm not wanting to face." These are the things that I think of when I think of the hardest things I've ever done, that don't directly involve other people (My husband and daughter, obviously, were highly directly affected by my surgery, but here, with "These are the things", I'm referring to the extra issues and struggles my anxieties, etc. added to my experiences with my surgical recoveries, I'm referring to the personal, internal struggle with these things.)
I've been meaning to write a series of posts for quite some time about it, including ways in which CBT was helpful in dealing with some of these things, but . . . the worst experience, that I had to face and beat repeatedly, has been something that I've not found the words to adequately describe, yet. Crippling, overwhelming, monstrous, encompassing dread, is a beginning to describing it . . . the fear of fear itself, is another, but . . . as I say, I haven't yet been able to describe it even halfway satisfactorily, and what I've just described doesn't do the job either. Still, it's what I"ve got, so far.
You'd think, having faced this monster that I dealt with daily for a couple weeks after the first surgery, during the second half of the first month of recovery, that approaching the second surgery I'd have some sense of efficacy in having (mostly) successfully dealt with it. However, it was something I just . . . bringing yourself to face something so . . . difficult doesn't begin to describe it, either, well . . . I just wanted to die, rather than go through that all over again. It was enough, by itself, that I just couldn't see doing it again. Ultimately, I did, and that's one reason why it is what I think of when thinking on personal strength.
I did, eventually, tell myself as I got ready for the second surgery (about 4.5 months after the first) that "Hey, you repeatedly dealt with this monster last time; you can do it again". However, this only reduced how difficult it was to deal with by about 10-15%; not insignificant as any reduction was helpful, however, given how hugely monstrous in scope this felt like to deal with, it sure didn't feel like much as I faced it again. Also, I'm generally used to get much better reduction of distress when using CBT; on a few occasions, now, it's been much less. That doesn't mean it isn't useful, it's just not a be-all-end-all.
Anyway, I'm sorry if I sound so mysterious about what I faced. I just don't want to attempt to describe it more in a way that really sounds . . . stupid, until I feel I can describe what I experienced more satisfactorily. Maybe I'll never get to that point, I don't know.
However, it does make me feel better about myself to stop beating up on myself for being so traumatized by what I went through, when I realize that much of the trauma was from the ways in which the mental crap/issues/illnesses I have to deal with, when I realize that it is the extra challenges they added to the mix, is where much of my emotional trauma came from. Maybe I'm not a wimp traumatized by a bit of pain, after all. Even though what I dealt with involved alot of fear of pain, it was the fear, and the fear of fear, etcetera, that were what I hated most, what were the most distressing things.
*While dealing with the leg machine that would move my knee through varying degrees was awful, and the anxieties etc. associated with that were part of my difficulty, this isn't what stimulated the worse mental/emotional struggles/trauma.
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