Anesthesia, Surgeries, and Challenging Defeat
Harvey Jackins used to say that anesthesia is as close to death as a person can come without actually dying. I’ve had anesthesia several times.
During my birth my mom had ether anesthesia, which was usual at the time. My second anesthesia was when I had appendicitis at age thirteen. (It seemed like only an instant between when they asked me to count backward from a hundred to when I was back in the hospital room.) Anesthesia number three was for a tonsillectomy at age nineteen.
At age twenty-two I had three surgeries after a head-on car collision in which I‘d been in the back seat with no seat belt. (They hadn’t been invented yet.) Multiple injuries included a compression fracture in my back, a broken wrist with a severed nerve, and a broken hip. I was initially pronounced “dead on arrival” and then was unconscious for three days. During the nine weeks I was in the hospital, I refused pain pills and sleeping pills. Even before I found RC, I didn’t want to get addicted to drugs.
After finding RC, I worked in many sessions on the surgeries and the anesthesia. Later my goal was to end the chronic pain in my back. Thanks to RC I’ve had no chronic pain for at least ten years. (I have occasional pain but can easily get out of it with exercise and discharge.)
I’ve only recently associated feelings of defeat with anesthesia. In a recent session I was going through (once again) the sequence of surgeries, focusing on the anesthetics, but this time I fought for myself. I knew my counselor was there, but I didn’t look at her; it was too distracting. I was challenging the defeats. The incidents were piled one on top of the other.
I was a pianist in grade school and high school, and after the accident, due to the cut nerve in my left hand, I could no longer play the piano as well as I once had. I look forward to challenging that defeat.
Bellaire, Texas, USA
(Present Time 182, January 2016)