Too Much

So to update you on my last post, my brother was supposed to have a dye test but opted out of it because it is hard on the kidneys ...and so they'll keep him on blood-thinners and have him do a stress test on Thursday.  They gave him something last night to calm him down and help him sleep, and he had a good day - was even sitting up in his room watching informational videos when I called the nurse's station today.

When he had the heart attack, he had been having a few 'episodes' of fluttering in his chest, and the more stress he was under, the worse it got.  He was in a situation he hated, enduring the toxicity of attitude of someone on whom he would be relying on to get to a doctor's appointment - and his body couldn't take it anymore. That his artery was blocked only provided the ideal atmosphere for such an attack to happen.  It had been building for years.

There's something really revealing about having your life reduced to a bunch of numbers and squiggly lines on a screen and hearing that beep-beep-beep of a heart monitor.  

It exposes - in real time - all the stresses, all the secrets you've been keeping from your loved ones: increased heart rate, shallow breathing, high blood pressure, poor lung capacity.  Things you store up inside yourself, feelings you push down because they're not "acceptable" or "Christian" to feel - these are the things your body screams out loud when hooked up to the machines that reveal oxygen saturation, breaths per minute, electrical activity in the skin, fast or slow heart beat, and the most revealing one for stress levels: blood pressure.

The body is like a sink into which is poured all kinds of "non-body" things: emotions, experiences, circumstances, thoughts, beliefs, the list is endless.

If there's an outlet for all that, it's all good.  The body can handle all those things and leave room for more. But when yesterday's built-up stuff is clogging the drain, then it's not about today anymore.  It's about the clog - because life still happens: circumstances, other people's stuff, the economic climate, world events, family upheavals, work (or lack of it). If yesterday's stuff clogs the outlet, then there is only so much new stuff that the body can take before it spills over into one big mess.

The process of healing is first admitting that there's a clog and that we can't clean it out ourselves - NOR can we turn off the tap of stuff that keeps happening.  We admit that we need help.  We ask God to be that providential plumber who gets His hands dirty and unclogs the sink.  But it doesn't stop there.  We identify those things, one by one (in specifics) and give them to Him.  We do it in specifics, because until we do, we will never admit to ourselves that it's there.  And we'll never be fed up of our inability to do anything about it, at least not enough to want to change, to want to have God remove those things from us.  

Honesty is key to the process of healing.

And once the clog is cleared - it's important to keep it from clogging again, to express our feelings in a safe way, and live one day at a time.