Recoverying the Heart

Once home from the hospital, 5th open heart surgery completed, the time came to heal. Due to the intense, long recovery ahead, I had not enrolled in college for the semester. It would take at least six weeks to begin to feel strength return.
At the time I lived at home, my two younger siblings still attending High School, and shared the 'tall' bed with my younger sister. It quickly became apparent that getting in and out of a high bed post chest surgery would not work. My mom transferred me to the lower bed.
For more than two weeks my mom would dress and undress me. Shower me. Poor my milk in my cereal. Help me to lie down in bed and to get out of bed. Basically, everything I did was with assistance.
I remember thinking that lifting a gallon of milk wasn't such a big deal and so with my 'Hulk-like' strength I wrapped my fingers around the handle and began to lift the jug to pour. The gallon felt like a 50pound anchor super-glued to the counter and I dropped the gallon, spilling milk everywhere. My grip strength wasn't even strong enough to hold on. My sternum stretched and seemed as if it were on the verge of ripping in half. I stayed away from proving my strength, or lack of, and tried to heed the doctors orders from there on out.
In the evenings and sometimes in the nice afternoon, my dad and I would take little walks up and down the sidewalk moving at a record slow, even for a snail, pace. "We went further that time, dad." I would say. He would nod, "you're doing really well, Shel," and then with exhaustion I would turn around and go back in the house where I would slowly lower myself into the chair.
The doctor put me on anti-depressants for after the surgery, and I thought such a thing was ridiculous. Until I realized the trauma. The heart is many things - literal and figurative. It is the VERY heart of the body physically, and it is figuratively the HEART of the body. It is the Soul. With the trauma of physically handling the heart, there comes a lot of emotional trauma.
The blues set-in with such heaviness at one point that I found myself staring for hours at the walls, wanting to go on no more. Life had no meaning. Here I was almost like a baby, unable to take care of myself. My mom would set up a lawn chair out on the patio before leaving for work (my dad was home during the day) and say, "When I get home I will ask you if you went outside and got sunshine. You better say 'yes'."
So...doing as mother told me, I would trudge outside and ever-so slowly lower myself into the chair and stare at the sky. I suppose it was better than staring at the walls. In all honesty, I did not handle recovery well emotionally.
There was one of the wires inside that began to poke from beneath the skin. The cardiologist advised that there are cases where a wire has come loose and poke through the skin. Around the wire, the skin became translucent and it frightened me to think that the wire could come through. Still to this day, if I lay on my belly on a floor, the wires closing the sternum are so close to the skin that I can feel them against the flooring. Putting a pillow between myself and the floor seems to help.
When the body began to rid itself of the extremely heavy doses of medication, my body went in to a withdrawal. The headaches came on gradually, until one day the throbbing was beyond any headache I had ever known. There are people that suffer from debilitating migraines, and I honestly do not understand how they cope. The pain of this headache debilitated me and then intensified so quickly that I began vomiting. With each heave, I held the bowl with one hand and placed the other firmly against my sternum. The seams of my freshly glued skin felt as if they were tearing.  I had a priesthood blessing for the headache and within minutes it was completely gone.
At night in my sleep, my sister later told me (post recovery) that most nights she would wake-up to me crying. She would look over and see that I was still asleep, yet I was crying and muttering, "It hurts. It hurts."
I don't remember the exact pain anymore, just the vivid thought over and over, "if I ever have to do this again, I think I would rather die." To say that the pain was the worst pain experienced by the human body would grossly exaggerated, however, it was enough to bring me to tears many of the days.
During this recovery my voice was also greatly damaged still. Most of the time my voice was a hoarse whisper, and when I tried to use it too much, it would go away completely. I tried to communicate by writing but got very impatient and ended up hurting myself worse by trying to force the speaking. I got in to a habit of taking tiny sips of water, holding it in my mouth, then preparing and swallowing. This was to avoid immediately vomiting the water back up as it would go down my wind pipe if I wasn't careful.
After about 4 weeks I started attending my parents church family congregation, then around 8 weeks started going back to the Young Singles Ward with my fiance.
I am not sure how people go through a procedure like this, or similar, without the support of family and without the support of the Lord. It was, up to that point in my life, one of the most difficult and painful experiences.
Now as I look back, I know that the physical pain of the body can never compare to the emotional pain of the body. One thing that amazes me is how much our Spirit can hurt, badly enough that at times feels as if our heart is breaking.
This pain of the spirit and emotional heartbreak would come later in my life, but not much.