January 2. New Year’s will probably always now remind me of January 2.
There’s a whole lot I didn’t write in that post a year ago today. I didn’t say it was an emergency colonoscopy. I didn’t say how the doctor wanted me to get some blood tests run, too, but after he saw what he saw he made a point of telling Richard to take me straight home afterwards and not put me through going to the lab that day. He was hoping all that bleeding he’d wanted so much not to see would quiet down enough to make it easier to go in the next day.
It was all downhill from there.
We got a letter in the mail, that, fittingly, arrived today of all days: announcing the new company that would be handling our by-mail meds, which, were I still on it, would have applied to supplying my Humira–you cannot just walk into a pharmacy and buy a biological Rx off the shelf.
So now we know. Caremark has been kicked out. YES!! (I tell myself I’m not bitter. And yet. It is still true that had they done their job I might still have a colon. Had Blue Cross honored their commitments on time I might still have a colon, not to mention points south requiring that second operation. They did not.)
But a year later, looking back… All of that is honestly a very small part of the whole.
There is this sense that I can handle anything now.
There is this sense that I can be there for anyone else now.
There is the knowledge that there were people who were there for me through anything and everything, including, to the best of your abilities, so many of you from wherever you were. You let me know I was not alone and not bereft in that hospital room all those weeks with needles in my arms and itchy plastic anti-blood-clot machines working on my legs day and night, that my mom and my husband keeping watch there and my children who were away weren’t facing this alone either. I cannot tell you how important your presence in the comments and by your prayers were during those days, the squares that were knit, the afghans that were assembled, the cards that were sent, the Thinking Good Thoughts that got thought. Thank you.
There were doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, even that housekeeper, who made me feel it was important to them that I had passed through their lives and thereby gave meaning to what I was having to go through. In the process, they, too, strengthened my then-tenuous hold on my own. How close I came–not that there was any doubt–was brought home to me when I got word two months ago that someone my little brother had grown up with had just had the same liver-inflammation complication of his own Crohn’s; he had not made it. My heart goes out to his family.
I am intensely grateful to be here with my own family still. Amazed at the things I can do now. Intensely grateful at having had our kids home for the holidays. Celebrate? Oh, honey, there are no words to say how much. And it’s a whole new year!