Surgery

A friend of mine, who wants to move to my city, emailed me recently, to say she might not be able to as soon as she would like to, because she had to have some surgery. Last year, she did something to her wrist, where it was in a cast, or a splint for a long time. She couldn't write or drive. She had to take time off work. About 8 months later, someone recommended she see a hand specialist. They took an MRI and found out she had a congenital defect with her bone structure. One of her arm bones in the forearm was longer than the other. And so the surgery was done to correct this, to avoid further problems in the future, and she is waiting to see if she has the same problem in her other arm.

The point of all this is to say, isn't that how life is, sometimes? It obviously caused her a lot of pain to have this injury, and surgery is scary. They had to break her bone to shorten it and secure it with a metal plate. But if it had not been for the injury, no one would have looked into her arm with the MRI and found the underlying problem. This is just what life does to us. Sometimes, you can get along just fine with a basic defect. And it doesn't seem that there is anything wrong because you've constructed ways to work around it. It's just how you know to be. But when you suddenly encounter a situation where your structure doesn't hold up, it brings that defect out and shows it to the light. Or you have an injury, mental, physical, emotional, that causes someone - a doctor, a friend, or even yourself - to look closely and see what's been wrong all the time but was hidden from view. And as painful as the experience is, what it really becomes is an opportunity to fix and heal that structure. To put the metal plate in place, and strengthen who you are so that you avoid greater injury in the future.