The Day My Skin Returned
I should write science fiction.
Be a writer for the Dr. Who series.
In the past year and a half – ever since a post-surgical brain blood clot changed my life – I’ve gone through plenty of weirdness. My body’s perceptions have included a floating head, a reattached tilted head, floating two feet above the ground, not being able to differentiate one toe from another.
I think this week tops them all. This week, my skin came back! It's hard to describe. But here goes.
I woke up last week – after recovering from Covid – feeling different and spent two full days trying to place what had changed. Then it dawned on me. I could feel my skin again! It wasn’t that I couldn’t feel it before. I had touch sensations but somehow my skin and I weren’t connected. It wasn’t a whole.
My skin existed somehow, somewhere, outside of me. And now, I am IN my skin. It’s a whole organ, connecting me together. Making me whole. I feel like one unit instead of being a fragmented human being.
I’ve had a really difficult time, since my injury, being out in the wind.
It just makes me crazy.
I feel like I’m blowing away. It’s too noisy. There’s too much movement. I can’t take all the wildness of it.
Last week, after my skin returned, I went outdoors on a windy day – 30 to 40 mph gusts – and the wind was OUTSIDE of ME.
I was separated from it. It didn’t seem to bother me. How strange and beautiful!
I went for a walk in the wind thinking, “The wind is there. I am here. The wind is outside of me. I am inside my skin.”
It sounds crazy, but this was a brand new perception. Wholeness. The wholeness of me. The separation of me from the outside. The differentiation between the two. Outside. Inside. Not Me. Me.
I walked around feeling the wind on my legs,
and face, and arms. Feeling the warmth of the sun
on my back. Feeling the movement of my clothes blowing.
And I knew myself as a whole unit.
United. An entity in and of myself. It’s kind of wild to all of a sudden feel whole again when I hadn’t even known how fragmented my skin had felt. What a relief. OH! Here I am! This is me.
Amy Dickinson said, “Life is easier when you are comfortable in your own skin.” She has no idea how true these words are to me!
I told my physical therapist about it, and she smiled brightly.
“You’re still healing!” she said.
Then she added “Sometimes when a body has a virus, it resets as part of the healing process.” She’s seen other brain injury patients go through resets after viruses.
Maybe getting Covid helped my brain reset. Or maybe it was just time for another leap forward in the healing process. I’ll never know. But either way, I am happy, happy, happy to be moving forward on this long healing journey.
Yesterday, with my newfound freedom from the wind,
I went to a yoga session. Outside in a park!
It was glorious. Trying to do a full session of yoga while feeling the wind on my skin. Breezes blowing the trees. Birds singing an evening blessing to the sky. I felt myself whole, gathered together, in the company of friends, and thankful for so many things.
As the good Dr. Who once said,
“The universe is big. It’s vast and complicated and ridiculous. And sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles.”
I like his words.
May this vast, complicated, ridiculous life be full of miracles for you today.
Thanks for following my ever-strange journey!
Love always,
Jill