I know I’ve been talking a lot recently here on ye olde blogge about my continued path toward recovery from my surgery last year. Part of that is because I’m frankly happy about the fact that I’m starting to feel like my old self again, but a bigger part of it is because I’m struggling with the notion that for a very long time it seemed like feeling awful was just going to be my life now. That if I ever got to a point of “normality” again it would be due to the fact that I had just learned to live with the changes I had gone through.

While that is the case to an extent it is not nearly as bad as I thought it would be.

I also am struggling with the fact that there were people in my orbit who were making me feel like I should just get over it. That I was wallowing in self-pity.

I’m going to pause and be very clear now in stating right here that my wife is not who I am talking about.

In October of last year, a little over a month before I got back from the hospital, I went to a social outing with some friends. I really wanted to go. I needed to be around people after two months of being trapped in a hospital and another month of recovering at home. I was still carrying around some of the water weight I had gained while I was in the hospital, and I had discovered a whole new world of pain and discomfort where basically anything I ate caused me massive amounts of distress. I was weak, and I was tired all the time, and I was pretty miserable. But, as I said, I wanted to be there. I wanted to be around friendly faces and thank some of the people who had supported me throughout my ordeal.

Apparently I didn’t do a good enough job of putting on a happy face and several people commented to my wife that I looked terrible and suggested that maybe she should take me home. I guess I was putting a damper on the good time or something. One associate of ours even went so far as to tell my wife that I had said “this is my life now” when she expressed concern for me and opined that I was wallowing in self-pity.

I was trying to be funny. Guess I failed.

In any case, this is one of the things I’ve been carrying around that I’ve decided to set down. My recovery has taken as long as it needed to take. I’m getting better. I’m feeling good.

But I’m not apologizing for the fact that for a good while there I wasn’t, and I appreciate the people in my life who didn’t make me feel like a burden for not being a ray of sunshine after having a good portion of my guts yanked out of my body.