Patience

Day 6, and I’ve entered the in-between.

The acute pain is gone. Not “managed,” not “tolerable”: gone. What’s left is soreness, plus the occasional sharp little reminder when I move wrong, the “oops, that was a move we shouldn’t have done” flavor of feedback. The constant, continual stuff is in the rearview mirror, and that is genuinely great.

Except. That pain was doing a job. It slowed me down. It kept me in line and made sure I didn’t do anything stupid, because stupid had immediate consequences. Now the enforcer has left the building, and what remains is the long slog toward real recovery. This is the phase of “I want to do X and I won’t know if I can until I attempt it,” where attempting it might mean zonking myself out for the rest of the day, or hitting one of those “oops” moves and paying for it. The guardrails are gone. The judgment has to come from me now.

This is also the stretch where the people around me, reasonably, stop trying to do everything and start assuming I’m good. And the calendar agrees with them. Tomorrow I start my return to work, in a limited capacity. Also tomorrow, the husband is out of town for the whole day, which means getting my own meals for the first time since surgery. Wednesday, the dogs come home. Piece by piece, it’s life as I knew it, starting back up. And it’s hard in some ways, precisely because it’s neither here nor there. Not sick enough to be excused from life, not well enough to just live it.

I don’t have a whole lot more to say, because that’s the nature of the in-between. Little bits and pieces fall into place, life rejoins what’s expected and “normal,” and it’s okay to welcome that. It just means being patient, and understanding that the real race was never a sprint. It wasn’t even a marathon. It’s a really long ultra, full of ups and downs, with a finish line that gets a little closer with each small step. All it takes is patience. Just a little patience.