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Personal Update: My Son’s Surgery & Approach to Navigating Difficult Emotions
73 Plays1 year ago
Hello friends!
At the time, this episode was released we will be en route to Duke University for a (hopefully) brief stay while my 11 yr old son is having surgery on both his legs. I wanted to record this as it occurred to me as I have been working though my own nerves and emotions about this experience. I found a few things that have helped when anxiety is creeping in or "what if" scenarios. This recording is for anyone interested in hearing about my own personal experience navigating this unchartered territory as well as what I hope are 3 specific things you can do when facing any sort of emotional event.
I/ we deeply appreciate all of you that have sent thoughts and prayers for a smooth uneventful medical experience. THANK you for lending me the encouragement that my tender mama heart is soaking up.
Appreciate this loving caring pod family we have here! 💙🐬🤍
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Transcript
Introduction to New Podcast Format
00:00:01
Speaker
Hello, everyone. I am here today with a personal story and update. This is a bit of a new format for this podcast in that we have focused so far largely on highlighting and spotlighting incredible guests and their messages.
00:00:23
Speaker
mixed in with a little bit of topic training.
Personal Updates and Shared Experiences
00:00:28
Speaker
So I'm trying on sprinkling in some personal updates and what I'm moving through and with the intention that as we are all connected and pinging off each other,
00:00:44
Speaker
in our experiences that what I am growing through and going through is going to be something that you can perhaps get a bit of an insight into something you have in your own life going on.
00:00:59
Speaker
I was originally going to take this week entirely off and replay one of our older popular episodes, but it felt really aligned and I felt like I had something to share with regards to where I am this week and want to just give you to start off some backstory.
Anthony's Ankle Surgery Announcement
00:01:24
Speaker
As my family this week is going through a surgery for my son, he is 11 years old and has been dealing with chronic pain in his ankles. That can be a result of even just walking or certainly walking distances and running has basically become so much of a challenge that it's pretty much out of the question.
00:01:54
Speaker
So to back up a little bit as this didn't just start or it was not a result of an injury.
00:02:03
Speaker
Anthony developed toe walking a little later than most kids do. A lot of kids toe walk when they're toddlers or learning to walk, that's really common. And it can also be a cofactor of a kid that has a sensory processing challenge.
00:02:28
Speaker
For Anthony, we noticed right about the time he was about five that his gait when he's running was a little bit off and that he would get fatigued really quickly. He'd have some pain, but we at the time just contributed it to just growing and changing and that kind of thing. That was about six years ago.
00:02:52
Speaker
And we've continued to notice this challenge with his walking, and we've gone to various experts, gone the non-invasive route, of course, at first, and as he's been growing, as he's grown into now being an older child.
00:03:11
Speaker
We were hesitant to do anything significant in terms of procedures and we wanted to see how this was going to work itself out, if he was going to be able to get some relief from stretching or from PT exercises, OT exercises, things like that.
Deciding on Surgery: Exploring Options
00:03:30
Speaker
So we certainly went that route and my comfort zone is much more in taking a holistic approach and doing things that are more non-invasive.
00:03:40
Speaker
So fast forward until, let's see, last fall he started to get involved with La Crosse again here in North Carolina. He did that as a younger kid in Virginia.
00:03:55
Speaker
And through various reasons, 2020, all of that, moving, that kind of thing, we really, he stepped away from it. But he's always been an athletic kid, and we were concerned that he was being challenged by running quite a bit. And then last fall, everything came to a head with two triggering events.
00:04:17
Speaker
The first thing is he started to do a very casual lacrosse Friday night type league and it was so painful for him that he really couldn't enjoy it and was not ultimately able to fulfill the few week commitment because when he would run, it resulted in bruising and spraining of his ankles. So every time he would come home and he would have
00:04:46
Speaker
swollen ankles and be in a lot of pain and be discouraged by how fatigued his legs were and how much it hurt him. The other triggering event, which if you followed along on my Instagram, which is at feel good with Renee if you're curious or don't know, was we took a family trip for his birthday to Disney World.
00:05:10
Speaker
Now, if any of you have ever been to Disney World, or a theme park for that matter, that it is a very intensive ask on your body. And even someone who does not have any sort of limitations can feel the effects. You can definitely feel like pretty fatigued in pain from the ask of walking so much in general.
00:05:34
Speaker
So it was really that week that we noticed how excruciating walking was for him and we would come back to the hotel and oh my gosh his poor ankles were literally like green and he
00:05:52
Speaker
would cry and we'd have to give him Annie Advil and just ice and that kind of thing. And just he got through it. But I honestly felt like we may have to get him a wheelchair. And he was at his age. He was not interested in doing that and didn't want to
00:06:10
Speaker
really admit that this was as much of a problem as it was for him so he continued to just push through and at that point in time my mom intuition was pinging me so loudly that I knew we had to take further steps when we got back and start to really look at what we could do to
00:06:32
Speaker
help him with this issue. And really not only that, but get to the root cause of what was going on. Because we had a lot of people and experts telling us, he toe walks, he has tight heel cords, tight calf muscles, but that's all they were telling us. We weren't able to get someone to even x-ray him here.
Seeking a Second Opinion
00:06:53
Speaker
We live in Wilmington. It's not a huge place. There's not that many pediatric orthopedic doctors. So they basically said, sorry, we can't help you here. You're going to need to go to Duke, which is up near Raleigh, Durham area, North Carolina. Duke say it is a renowned pediatric orthopedic facility. So I can see why that would be the respective place to refer us to.
00:07:20
Speaker
And it's, you know how it is when you have a medical situation. It always takes so much longer to sort through than you think it will. It takes a lot of diligence to move through the process. So we started the process as soon as we could back in the fall. And yeah, we got in at Duke for an opinion. Learned some lessons with that. Went up thinking we were going to be met with a certain sort of
00:07:51
Speaker
personality, let's say, of that surgeon. We were gonna be met with a plan or options and didn't really feel the love from that particular surgeon. It was not at all what I was comfortable with in terms of their bedside manner and just how they talked to us and treated us. Just everything was going off of me in no way. This guy is not gonna be operating on my kid. So, side note, listen to these
00:08:17
Speaker
messages when you get them, do not ignore them. Part of me was even thinking, oh, he's an expert, he's a surgeon, this is how they are, trying to talk myself out of it because it took a lot of effort to get there and we had waited a while for the appointment and I just wanted to move forward with a plan. But after consideration and feeling into it, decided that was actually going to not be the right person to do the surgery.
00:08:47
Speaker
And again, maybe he's an incredible surgeon, but just was not feeling the love with his approach to talking to us and communicating with us.
00:08:57
Speaker
went back to exploring other kind of facilities, other doctors, other hospital options and kept coming back to the advice and the guidance that Duke is really a fantastic facility. And it is worth mentioning the closest option. Everything else was going to be requiring like a five hour drive or a flight, which
00:09:21
Speaker
wasn't going to make sense if Anthony was going to go ahead and have surgery. We decided to go back and get a second opinion from another surgeon. I'm so glad we did. Definitely felt a lot of relief. And not only did the surgeon corroborate what the first surgeon said in terms of an action plan and a procedure that he recommended, but he was also way more with it in terms of
00:09:45
Speaker
listening and allowing us a lot of space and the appointment to ask questions and to get really specific with what we were going to be faced with in terms of the
Surgery Plans and Details
00:09:56
Speaker
surgery. It took a little while, but we got there with a plan and this does feel aligned for the bright thing to do.
00:10:07
Speaker
And we went to then consider what time of year, what would be the least disruptive for his school schedule for summer, things like that. And we went ahead and moved forward with the date of April 4th. So the week that this will be released, we will be moving forward, hopefully is moving forward with all systems go on the surgery, the surgery itself.
00:10:32
Speaker
is to not only lengthen his calf muscles because they are so tight, he cannot make a heel strike when he walks or runs. The recommendation is to have the calf lengthening on both legs. And also, the more intensive and involved surgery is a
00:10:56
Speaker
corrective surgery to correct he has a torsion in his lower leg, his tibia. So that means that it's rotated externally. His right foot, if you're looking at him, splays out quite a bit. And it has to do with the actual way that the bone grew. So that bone is rotated and that part of the procedure is a little more involved.
00:11:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's going to require resetting that bone and there will be a plate and screws and one leg will be casted with a walking cast and the other leg will be a hard cast. So he will have both legs casted for I think it's about five weeks.
00:11:44
Speaker
And that is the actual procedure. Yes. So all things being said, feeling very aligned with this and at peace that this is actually important that we deal with this. He's the right age to be doing it. All the things are aligning for it to be the right decision. But sometimes as the right decision isn't the easy decision and it comes along with some intense emotions and
00:12:11
Speaker
potential feelings of conflict. And so for me, I have definitely been feeling some fear and anxiety and even had some seriously intrusive thoughts about all sorts of things. I have
00:12:32
Speaker
Oh, a predisposition to anxious thinking, let's say, overthinking, catastrophizing. I wanted to record this because I am really working with this. I'm not letting it go unchecked. At the point of you listening or at the point of me recording this is very much on my plate and it's going to only probably be more front and center as we get closer to the actual surgery.
Managing Pre-Surgery Anxiety
00:13:01
Speaker
So for me, this is what I'm doing to deal with those anxious intrusive thoughts. I know that it's important when we are facing something scary to have an awareness around
00:13:19
Speaker
how I'm approaching it and to be very conscious of not piling on any extra baggage or pressure. So what I'm doing, and I can break this down really into one, two, three thoughts.
00:13:42
Speaker
So I'm allowing these difficult emotions to come up. I'm not suppressing them or pushing them away, but I'm really trying to notice my feeling state as a physical sensation. Like I'm noticing it in my body. If it's coming through as tightness in my chest or clenching in my jaw or holding my shoulders like I'm doing right now up by my ears, noticing that physical sensation
00:14:12
Speaker
leaning more into that than the stories that my mind is trying to tell. Okay, so that's an important distinction. My mind is very creative and loves to tell me very dramatic stories. I don't know if you can really, but a lot of times this comes up when middle of the night you get up to pee and you come back to bed and all of a sudden your mind has a lot of very creative stories that
00:14:42
Speaker
cause angst and tension and turmoil and noticing where I'm feeling the sensation of that emotion in my body more so than a story in my mind. Does that make sense? I try to work with being an observer
00:15:03
Speaker
to my emotional weather. I don't know if you've ever heard it described that way, but ultimately we are at our core neutral and our emotions can be thought of weather in the sky. So when I'm feeling
00:15:22
Speaker
the various things that are coming up right now. I'm focusing more on observing that and taking a step back, noticing how that feeling is showing up in my body and allowing that emotion to be like weather because the emotional frequencies that we are feeling are constantly changing.
00:15:46
Speaker
just like weather. Right now I'm quote unquote holding the pose. I love that analogy of being like in a yoga class where you're holding a difficult pose for a period of time. I think that's such a beautiful way that yoga helps us in general is that we can be in these uncomfortable places with our body. We can feel sensation and we can breathe and that sensation, we can observe it. And so that is how I am choosing to approach this at this point in time.
00:16:14
Speaker
I perhaps will have to do a debriefing after we move through this experience and let you know what came up in reality and how it actually went down, but that is my plan. Being an observer, allowing those emotions to flow like weather. I'm also practicing consciously choosing better thoughts. And what I mean by that is not bypassing the feeling, but choosing a better thought. So for example,
00:16:42
Speaker
trending towards these positive thoughts. I'm so grateful for this surgeon. I'm so grateful for his expertise. I'm so grateful that we have the healthcare, the ability, the resources to be able to do this for Anthony. I am really feeling, and I am honestly feeling grateful. That is
00:17:06
Speaker
an emotion that I'm experiencing as well. And I think it's important to note that you can be experiencing hard things and also have other layers of feelings as
Emotional Connection and Empathy
00:17:16
Speaker
well. So it's not all or nothing or all or one way.
00:17:21
Speaker
I feel aligned with a lot of gratitude in this experience. I do, especially at night when I'm getting ready to go to sleep and I tend to feel somewhat worse about things. I think that's a common human experience. Don't make any decisions or trust your feelings. After 9 p.m., I think I saw a meme about that actually this week.
00:17:45
Speaker
It's so true. It's so true. So I'm giving myself some space from really feeling into this and thinking about this at night. I certainly do not excel in positive thinking at night in particular.
00:18:00
Speaker
But I'm practicing those better thoughts, better feeling thoughts. So the gratitude is part of it. Trying to think of the other ones that I was focusing on the other night. Optimism for how this is going to help him to be able to fulfill his
00:18:18
Speaker
strengths as an athletic person, as a kid who wants to play sports and wants to be more active. House is going to be an incredible, exciting opportunity. That's the other feeling and thoughts is that I'm actually and it is 100% true again. I'm actually excited. I'm excited for him to get this, to move through this and to have the result of having
00:18:43
Speaker
a healthy walking gate and what that will open up for him. And just giving myself a ton of compassion. Look, I'm a mom. You might be a mom. If you're listening to this, it's we are so intricately connected.
00:19:03
Speaker
Not just a fun thing to say, like our energy fields are combined with our children for, I think it's seven years, something like that. Everything that he is feeling, I'm feeling too. And then I'm also super empathic. We've talked about being a highly sensitive person on other episodes and being empathic. And that is a hundred percent the case. So my children are my Achilles heel when it comes to feeling
00:19:32
Speaker
additional layers of hard feelings, feeling their feelings, feeling my own feelings about their feelings, all of that gets layered on. So I'm really practicing trying on just so much compassion and space. Now is not the time for me to be putting pressure on myself on releasing certain amount of episodes or whatever other ambitious things I want to be doing.
00:20:03
Speaker
So that's really what I wanted to share today is as we move through something that is tender,
00:20:13
Speaker
And that is going to be an opportunity to work with different degrees, different heightened feelings that we can feel empowered in the process. We don't have to be swept away by it all. And we can still be very much with this in a conscious way. We don't have to push it away either and numb it or pretend it's not happening.
00:20:44
Speaker
So that is what is going on a personal level. That's what's happening in my house as you are listening to this probably.
Self-Care and Recovery Plans
00:20:51
Speaker
Oh, I wanted to say a couple of things about actual tools that we're using, aside from, of course, whatever we need to do in terms of pain medication and advice from doctors on that.
00:21:04
Speaker
I have just purchased a Heli frequency device. Does anybody out there know about the Heli? If you do message me, I would love to hear your experience. I'm brand new to it.
00:21:17
Speaker
And I can't really speak to it with any amount of expertise. I really don't know. All I know is that we're all energy. We all have frequency running through us. Life around us is all frequency. And there are certain frequencies just like on radio frequency that you can tune into that are beneficial with harmonizing
00:21:40
Speaker
the body harmonizing on a cellular level. We have a lot of space. We are not dense matter like we think we are, like we perceive with our seeing eyes. There's way more space and energy than actual density. So I'm going to be learning how to use the Healy Frequency Device for my son to help with pain, sleep, help me stay grounded and steady.
00:22:09
Speaker
And yeah, I would love to hear your experiences if you have any with that. I of course have cleared my calendar, taking some own time to really just, it's hard for me to say this is my plan because I am going to be just intuitively guided with whatever presents itself. I may
00:22:33
Speaker
Just do my best to rest and unplug and decompress and process the situation and the experience. There is a little bit of that Aries energy in me that is maybe you can clean your closets. Maybe you can do some spring purging. He's recovering and you're holding space for that and tending to him. We'll see. I am not attached to that idea, although it's way overdue.
00:23:02
Speaker
I used to be such a perjurer. I would purge regularly, especially when the kids were little and clothes were just outgrown so quickly.
00:23:10
Speaker
Since we moved here two years ago, I've had zero ambition and energy for very much purging, done very little. So we have, I feel like at this point in time, there's piles in the closets and so forth that could be dealt with. But we'll see. We'll see. I don't know that's going to be able to happen or that I will feel up for that or have the
Closing Thoughts on Compassion
00:23:28
Speaker
energy for that. Just giving myself a lot of space and allowing this to be
00:23:34
Speaker
however it's going to unfold, allowing it to move through me and hold space for the whole process. So that's what I wanted to share with you this week. Thank you for your positivity, your good vibes, your energy, all of that I am feeling and receiving and
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah, I'll let you know how we move through this and I hope that you are feeling good. And until I get the chance to come on again, hope that you all are moving through your sprain with ease and just giving yourself a lot of compassion, a lot of space. If anything is coming up, that's challenging for you as well.