After Surgery

As some of you know on Friday I opted to have the colon surgery and I am now a new machine with a bag on the side of my waist called a colonoscopy. I thought long and hard about this decision and each day was a true test of my endurance and possibly of my faith.  As I pondered this decision I could feel my tumour growing and getting more pronounced.  The message started to be clearer to me and that was that I was so do something soon.  I felt each day as though someone was holding me up by my neck with my back up against the wall.  It was an awful and desperate feeling.  And so I will spare you all the ugly details, the pain I have survived and the emotional quest as well.  For now to many details are likely too painful for me to repeat.

I still remain of the belief that the surgery was short of barbaric but unfortunately it is what was available to me and in the end I did it.  I cannot go back now and retrieve that parts that were cut out of me and disposed of.  I cannot reverse the surgery ever and the only thing left is to embrace who I am now and the fact that I am missing some parts that needed to come out.  I can only accept that fact and move into a place of newness and of a new type of wholeness.  I refuse to consider myself damaged although some would say that I am and I am OK with that.  For many of us not having every single original part of our bodies is reason to believe we are damaged.  But then I have been damaged in other ways and to this day I am still in the process of dealing with that damage and accepting my reality.

As an abused child I fought long and hard to survive in every way I could figure out.  I would sometimes go to my fantasy world and pretend I was someone else.  I sought relief in negative and positive ways, sometimes damaging myself further because I just did not think I was worthy of anything else.  Because of my history it would be easy for me to go there now.  I have decided that this will not be the case and that in fact I will strive for the latter.  I will strive to move myself to believing that I am worthy and that the old story is a lie.  I chose not to believe it anymore and to my own highest good I believe I could do something to heal myself of my current health and emotional challenge.

It is true that I am now not the completely physical being I was.  It is true that some cancer was cut out of me.  It is true that I am never going to be exactly as I was.  It is true that I have taken a left turn and it is also true that I will be challenged in a particular manner the rest of my life.  It is true that I am going go need to be healed and it may be true that I will not be completely healed.  But the truth is also that I am whole as I am and more complete than the man who is paralysed who cannot walk on his own.  It is also true that I am no better than that man or the one with the metal legs who became a marathon runner and a champion in his own right.  I Elliott Collazo will be all that I suppose to be at this time.  I will be all that I can be at this time.  I will be more of the other parts of me than before and I will become more balanced and more whole.  I will detach from my body parts that were taken from me and I will mourn those parts and move on.  I Elliott Collazo, now almost sixty years of age will continue to be all that I can possibly be and more.  I will strive to become all that I can be and all that God intends me to be.  I will enjoy and savour each moment and cry when I need to cry.  I will weep not just for myself and my own situation but for everyone's struggle because my struggle is not just mine and yours is not just yours.