Part 11 — Learning to live without bracing for pain
Content note: post-surgical recovery, chronic pain history, grief, anger, medical trauma(non-graphic)
There’s a strange thing nobody tells you about finally getting help.
Sometimes the hardest part isn’t the pain.
It’s the silence after.
✨Waiting for the Other Shoe to Drop
The first couple days after surgery, I kept waiting for the moment where the real pain would show up.
Because it had to, right?
A major operation doesn’t just feel like a mild inconvenience. There was no way this was going to be easier than the pain I lived with before. No way.
So I waited for the “shoe to drop.”I waited for the moment where my body would remind me that healing still hurts. That I didn’t get to escape pain that easily.
But that moment never came.
Never.
🔥 The Weirdest Part? The Shots Were Worse
There was soreness, sure. Tenderness. A body trying to recover.
But the thing that irritated me the most during recovery wasn’t the surgery at all.
It was the daily blood thinning shot I had to give myself.
Those little injections annoyed me far more than anything happening at my surgical site. And that realization stopped me in my tracks.
If that was the thing pushing me toward grumpiness, then it meant something profound: my baseline for pain had been so high for so long that even post-surgical healing felt gentler than the life I’d been living before.
The closest I came to an “oh fuck this hurts” moment was… honestly kind of ridiculous.
I sneezed.
While sitting on the toilet.
With absolutely no way to brace my abdomen.
That one was HORRIBLE.
For a split second, I was convinced I’d popped a stitch. I yelled for my wife (then girlfriend), panicking, and had her check to make sure I wasn’t bleeding.
Everything was fine — but the fact that that was the worst moment?
That’s when a quiet realization began to settle in:
If this was the worst of it…then what I had been living with before was truly unimaginable.
🌊 The Shock of “Better”
I kept getting reminded to take my pain meds.
Not because I was being brave.
But because I just… didn’t feel desperate for them.
My wife looked at me at one point and said something I’ll never forget:
“You just had major surgery. You should be feeling worse than this.”
And she wasn’t wrong.
She was shocked.
But I wasn’t.
Because the truth was… post-surgery pain wasn’t even half of what I’d been living with.
And that thought didn’t just bring relief.
It cracked open something deeper.
🖤 Grief Isn’t Always Sad
The grief didn’t come all at once.
It didn’t show up as a dramatic breakdown or a movie moment.
It showed up as anger.
Lots of anger.
I was angry because I was right.
I was angry because the hysterectomy did give me my life back.
I was angry at all the doctors who dismissed me, minimized me, and made me feel like I was just weak or dramatic or “too sensitive.”
I was angry at the procedures I was pushed into — the ones that were supposed to help, but only made my case more complex.
And I was angry at my body.
Angry that I didn’t have a “normal” body.
Even after surgery, my body is still complicated. I still have fibromyalgia. I still have arthritis. I still have pain.
But I was angry that my body turned against me for so long in a way that stole entire years of my life.
And then there was the grief that surprised me most.
I never really wanted children.
But I still grieved that the choice was taken away — not by preference, not by timing… but by survival.
By necessity.
It was the option being gone that hurt, even more than the option itself.
🌱 Learning to Live Without Bracing
The truth is… I didn’t know how to exist without pain being the loudest voice in the room.
For so long, my entire life was built around survival:
managing symptoms
preparing for the next flare
fighting to be believed
holding myself together in public
collapsing in private
Pain wasn’t just something I experienced.
It became part of my personality.
My schedule.
My nervous system.
My identity.
So when it finally got quieter, it wasn’t instantly peaceful.
It was unfamiliar.
It was disorienting.
It was like my body didn’t know what to do with a life that didn’t revolve around suffering.
I kept waiting for punishment.
I kept waiting for the other shoe.
But it never dropped.
And slowly, the quiet started to feel like something else:
A beginning.