Surgiversary

Issue #11 of “What’s Her Problem?”: Should I be celebrating medical milestones more?

It’s my surgiversary (x3)!

This is a big week of surgiversaries for me. That’s what I call surgical anniversaries. Nine years have passed since I had open-heart surgery, a septal myectomy, to relieve the obstruction in blood flow through my heart due to the genetic heart disease Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (HCM). I received my first ICD (Implantable Cardioverter Defibrillator, which is both a pacemaker and a defibrillator) that same week. And exactly one year ago, I had another surgery to extract and replace the leads (wires) and battery for my ICD.

It’s a strange time of year for me. There is so much to celebrate in my health journey. Obstacles I have overcome. Near disasters I have survived. But, similar to the way I am trying to learn to revel in good news and small wins, I also have trouble celebrating surgiversaries.

I love birthdays and find meaning in them. Cards? Balloons? Chocolate? Friends? Yes, please. So, why not do the same for what essentially amounts to my re-birthday? Isn’t it worth marking the occasion and the fact that I’m still here?

As I thought about how to encapsulate my feelings around this annual reluctance to celebrate, I remembered that I had already written a piece on this topic. Not something that has been published or anything I’ve ever shared, with anyone. Rather, it’s something I wrote nearly 8 years ago for one of my first writing classes.

The course was Creative Non-Fiction, and the writing prompt for one of our weekly assignments was: Write a brief personal essay on anything you like. Though you will be focusing largely on your personal experience, try to expand this into a universal point somewhere in the piece.

Receiving this prompt just a few months after my first surgiversary, the idea that immediately sprang to mind was to write about my complicated feelings around the fact that I hadn’t celebrated. I was also drawn to the format of taking a personal story and making it universal (oh, hello foreshadowing for this Substack!)

Below, I present to you the words of the Deb of January 2018. She hadn’t yet developed the neuropathy that would show her there are worse things than open-heart surgery. She was clearly frustrated and struggling mentally. I chose not to edit it, despite the clear need for revisions, because I think it provides some valuable insights into my (unsettled) mindset at that specific moment in time.

I wrote:

Anniversaries are so ingrained in our culture that it almost seems sacrilegious not to celebrate. Birthdays mark another year of our existence, anniversaries with a partner signify the time we’ve shared our lives, and even in the workplace, businesses use hiring anniversaries to show recognition through annual raises or parties.

And speaking of parties, is there any bigger celebration of 365 days passing than New Year’s Eve? Cities, major and minor, throughout the world hold concerts, set off fireworks, and conduct a countdown to the precise moment when the year changes. Has the anniversary of a year been properly celebrated if Dick Clark[i] or Ryan Seacrest or Anderson Cooper wasn’t there to ring it in with us?

Then, what was wrong with me? Why didn’t October 11, 2017 mean more?

It was the one-year anniversary of my open-heart surgery (my surgiversary, if you will), and even though I felt like I should be celebrating something, I wasn’t entirely sure there was anything to celebrate. Yes, 365 days had passed, but was that enough of a reason to rejoice? Society tells us it is, but I certainly didn’t think so, and as a result, I just let the day go by quietly without remark.

But was that the right call?

The preceding year had been complicated, to say the least. On October 11, 2016, a surgeon had cut open my chest, sawed my sternum in half, and removed the excess heart muscle that was impacting my daily ability to breathe and function before sewing me back up again. Then, as if that wasn’t scary enough, I:

unexpectedly received a pacemaker/defibrillator;

sold my home of 10 years and watched from afar as my friends and family packed it up while I was too sick to do it myself;

went through physical therapy and occupational therapy;

landed back in the hospital twice with post-op complications;

temporarily relocated to my parents’ house in a retirement community (at the ripe old age of 38) so that I could afford to quit my job and focus on my recovery;

and underwent 10 months of cardiac rehabilitation.

Plus, anyone who has had a life-threatening illness or undergone major surgery knows just how traumatic that can be, and PTSD was rearing its ugly head.

Was any of that worth celebrating?

I had definitely overcome a lot, but there was still an enormous amount of work to do. Did that mean I had failed at this whole recovery thing? And why did it feel like I’d done something “wrong” when I didn’t compose a quippy and joyous post about my surgiversary on Facebook for others to see and celebrate with me?

I still don’t think I have the answers to these questions (except the one about New Year’s; Ryan Seacrest is essential!). But maybe that’s ok. It was too much external pressure for October 11th to mean more, so an arbitrary 365 days later wasn’t the right time for me to celebrate. Maybe another time in the future will be though…and that’s when the party will really start.

Post script: I still don’t officially celebrate these milestones, and I am open to suggestions for how to commemorate them. But, I did start posting on social media (most years), beginning with surgiversary #2. Let’s see if I cook up something fun next year for surgiversary #10…

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Each issue of “What’s Her Problem?” includes questions for further discussion. You can Leave a Comment publicly below, or become a Paid Subscriber to join the conversation in the private community Chat.

This week’s questions:

Do you celebrate medical milestones like surgiversaries? If so, how?

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[i] RIP, Dick Clark