But in the middle of this hope, I’m longing for a place with people around me :) So I have decided, to stay a little bit at someone’s place in the community I lived at before I moved to my house in February. Back to the Maria Austriastraat I go…
This last week, I went to my house again on Monday… and then I thought on Tuesday, “Boy, is it weekend yet?” Unfortunately it wasn’t, although the week was notably shorter due to ascension day on Thursday. But I realized that perhaps, I should accept the fact that living on my own right now is tough. It might’ve been tough before the operation, if I had stayed longer… I don’t know. In any case, it’s tough right now. My energy is quite low and worse yet, I still have pain since the operation. I’m not sure if the latter will disappear… but it’s very good to know I don’t have to try hard and be positive about the pain (smile, see last blog), but instead I can know there’s hope in this. A hope that God knows what He’s doing, that (I’m experiencing that) He’s teaching me a bunch on this dark road, and that the best is yet to come!
But in the middle of this hope, I’m longing for a place with people around me :) So I have decided, to stay a little bit at someone’s place in the community I lived at before I moved to my house in February. Back to the Maria Austriastraat I go…
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The other day I had gone somewhere nearby with my crutches and as I was hobbling back I happened to come across the postman We struck up a conversation. Crutches make one very approachable... they're not as good as a walker, but still. I was told to "stay positive", a noble thought Hare Krishna had also actually managed to come up with many years ago. Staying positive is part of my personality and I don't get hugely discouraged very easily. But when you take two painkillers and stop weeding in your garden after 15 minutes (you feel you can't take it and you're starting to feel pain once again), when you're trying to decide whether to take the walker or the crutches to the fysiotherapist, when you're almost two months past an operation about which you're totally not excited... the words "stay positive" feel empty, without meaning, denying the world you're in. Stay positive? Why?!
"But as for me, I will always have hope" Words I listened to this morning, words out of Psalm 72. In my opinion, having hope is something different than staying positive. You can have hope while you're in a very dark valley, when you're thinking many gloomy thoughts and when you don't feel like there's a way out anytime soon. But you know there's a God out there who cares! Who will not allow your pain and suffering to have the final word. And you can feel filled with hope knowing this is true... even though you don't feel very positive. Today I was asked for my legitimatie bewijs, my identification card, to prove that I’m 18+. For the first time in over two months, I went to the supermarket today. It felt like an enormous hurdle: mounting my carrier bike and going there, using the crutches to hobble in, getting a cart and grabbing the four groceries I thought I could manage for starters. When I arrived at the cash register, I could feel I had broken out in sweat walking around and exhaustion was pretty near. Then I noticed the cash register lady staring at me intently. I checked the contents of my shopping cart, thinking, “There’s no way she could possibly know I had a hemorrhage three years ago, or an operation two months ago! Maybe she likes my shirt.” But no, it wasn’t my shirt. “Sorry, could I see your ID please?” One of the things I had bought was wine, and 18 is the age for all alcoholic beverages here in Holland. I’m not sure if getting this question at 27 should make me feel honored or offended. I chose the former, but now at home I’m feeling the latter…
I'm at my parents' again! It was very good to be back in my little (barely moved into) house a few days, and I'll go there again next week. But for now, I'm happy I survived three days. I'm happy I managed to find vital things such as coffee and clean underware. And I'm happy I got to see a few neighbors. Yesterday I went to the neurosurgeon again with my dad. We waited a long time in the hospital and seeing as my energy is so low, I plopped myself into a hospital bed to wait for the appointment. The appointment was a "six weeks after the operation to see if all is ok" appointment. And all was ok. Well. Ok, besides the fact that recovering from this operation is taking SO much longer than I anticipated, probably will still take long, and has given me pain in my upper leg that I'm still dealing with. I don't know, was it worth it? It brings up a radical question: is pursuing a medical solution (even if it has an extremely remote possibility of success) always the best idea? It was good for me to do this operation, for different reasons. But it has also been really hard. When, for example, nearly falling somewhere that I know before the operation, I would have had no trouble with.
To end this on the bright side, it really has been very exciting to be able to move back into my house again this last week! It's great to feel myself able to do more and more, and I've learned a lot in the last weeks. So it's absolutely not all tragic, it's just that the fighter in me is sometimes a little weary... Almost seven weeks after my departure out of my little house in Amsterdam, the time has come... I'm going back again tomorrow! The weeks here at my parents' have marked a dramatic improvement from lying in bed all day, to walking half a kilometer outside (with crutches). It's been very good here, but it's time to move on. Living at your parents' at my age... :) heehee. We're trying it a few days. I'm heading over tomorrow with my mom, she'll be staying over one night. Wednesday and Thursday I'll be on my own, Friday I'll be going back after the appointment we have with the neurosurgeon who operated me. It sounds pretty reasonable and I think I should be able to cope. But well, it's still a little scary.
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Mattanja OosterhuisHaving grown up in diverse places on earth, I suppose I've learned to make the best of what comes my way. Such as a hemorrhage. After this bleeding in my head occurred in dec. 2010, my life has come to look different. On my blog I write about some of this. Archives
March 2018
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