A Spleen, a Flipper, Two Knees, and the Messy Path of Healing

When we got news that the Man was heading to school for two years, the first thing everyone said was, “I’m so glad you guys are going to get a break!” To which I really struggled to have a healthy response that didn’t sound like I was immediately panicking.

Spoiler alert: I WAS IMMEDIATELY PANICKING.

If you’re wondering why the good news of us “getting a break” after three commands set off my anxiety, I will just say this: the last time we were told we were “getting a break”, my husband ruptured three different tendons in his right foot and spent six months out of our ten month “break” being at one with our couch.

So, “school as a break” for our family was something I had mixed feelings about. But as I prayed about it (which makes me sound super holy—don’t be impressed—it’s just panic praying—which still counts!), I felt like the Lord was putting two different words before me: curiosity and healing. Curiosity for me, that though I couldn’t quite hit “excited” about our break, I could be curious about what God was going to do, and “healing” for our whole family, but especially for my husband, who was not only still limping from his last “break” but had also developed a couple of other major health concerns, due primarily to the intense stress of three nearly back-to-back commands.

{If you’re not one of military readers, a command just means two years that are mostly awesome but are also full of crises and a constantly ringing phone.}

At any rate, when we arrived in Alabama, I couldn’t say I was surprised when the entire family went down almost automatically with the Black Plague (Bruiser got an ear infection, Littles broke out in a viral rash…). It was kind of par for the course for our family. Neither was I surprised when Bruiser kept popping up with tiny little stomach issues. Here a barf, there a barf, everywhere a barf, barf.

We had, however, moved back into the influence of a friend, who was not used to this new version of the Frizzell family (the version where at least one person is falling apart at all times, and it’s totally normal, nothing to see here), and she talked me into making a doctor’s appointment for Bruiser. Why not, I thought. We already have doctor’s appointments stacking up for the Man, and the three Big kids are all seeing the orthodontist now. Bruiser was probably about due for some quality time driving to and from the doctor with me.

Before I got Bruiser to the doctor though, we got the Man in to be seen for his near permanent limp and for what has now affectionately been termed “The Flipper.” The Man’s flipper is his dominant wrist, which has swollen so badly over the last year and a half, that we can no longer see his wrist bones. Do we have any clue what happened? No. The doctors at our last base dealt with it by cheerfully jabbing him in the wrist with steroids, which didn’t do much except for possibly make things worse. The doctors here have been more successful with his ankle, and decided they would need to do some exploratory surgery on his wrist to figure out what was actually going on there.

Before that could happen, though, Littles was running the football out of bounds at one of his games and he stepped in a divot in the ground, got tackled, and came back up limping. On the leg where he’d busted his ACL just last year.

And you have to know I was on the sidelines going, “Seriously, Lord? Is this what healing looks like? Really?”

So, it turns out what was left of Littles’ ACL after last year’s reparative surgery had completely disintegrated. As in, that sucker looked like the remains of a dog-chewed koosh ball. About two months ago now, they went in and used a third of his patellar tendon to rebuild his ACL, which should hopefully be a more permanent solution than last year’s round one surgery.

Before Alex’s surgery, though, Bruiser sprained his ankle…and we found out from the doctor that his spleen was significantly enlarged, which didn’t explain the nausea, but did mean that for a few weeks there, if he got hit in the left side, said spleen could possibly rupture. Don’t worry. Bruiser dealt with this set back by only running down the left side of the field when he was playing Two-Hand-Touch-Oh-Whoops-I-Tackled-You football at our homeschool co-op every week. Totally reasonable.

In the week following Littles’ surgery, while he was back on crutches and living on the couch, the Man has surgery on the Flipper, and our family entertained itself by making, “Knock that off, or I’ll rupture your spleen!” into the new favorite family threat. Which just goes to show that our dark humor is alive and well.

And once THAT surgery was done, after Littles was back off crutches and living at PT, and once Bruiser’s sprain had healed and his spleen and shrunk back down (but he was still throwing up for unknown reasons), the Man developed a baker’s cyst and a small tear in his MCL and a LARGE tear in his meniscus. Which got us to three surgeries in two months: a record high for our family.

Don’t ever tell me we don’t exceed expectations.

Anyway, I keep circling the drain of “Is this really what healing looks like?” Because I understand that sometimes healing is two steps forward, one step back, but for the life of me: this has looked a lot more like one step forward, two steps back.

But I hear a still, small voice saying, “Yes, Marian, this is what healing looks like. It’s messy. Just watch and see what I’m going to do next.”

Let’s be blunt here: this isn’t an easy thing to hear.

I don’t want the messy path of healing. I want things to be easy and comfortable and straightforward. I want my kid to not be going through this again. I want my husband to not have spent the last five years in near constant pain. Also, I want to know what the end result is going to be. What is it going to look like if/when we survive this? And also: how much longer are we going to be doing this?

There’s a tendency in all of us to only want to go through difficult times if we get the results we want. For instance, my oldest, I think, would like to know he can come back from two ACL tears (and a club foot) to play football in college. He’d like this to be a comeback story: look what I endured and how I’ve persevered to be able to do something I love! But the truth is that God may very well be using Littles’ injury to move him in a completely different direction. And we’re not going to know. Not for a long time. And we’re going to have to be okay with that.

It’s been interesting to me seeing the correlation between curiosity and trust during this season. Can I be curious about what God is doing or am I going to sit here and tell Him all the ways He’s screwing up my plans? Can I trust that He’s good even when I don’t understand what He’s doing? Can I keep showing up for the story He’s writing or, to mix my metaphors, am I going to throw in the towel and close the book?

And full disclosure: there have been days of towel throwing and book closing (but only metaphorically—I never close my books in real life).

I was discussing the book of Habakkuk recently, how God’s answer to the Israelites’ ongoing issues was to send in the Babylonians (who were quite arguably a lot worse). And God says to His prophet, who is understandably freaking out that God is making a really bad choice, “I am doing a work in your time that you would not believe if told.” They wouldn’t believe it because who in their right minds would think the Babylonians were a good option!

And for a good long time, Habakkuk would’ve been entirely justified in his belief about God’s misstep. Things were messy. It didn’t look good.

But God says to watch and wait. Joy is coming. And He keeps His promises. He kept them then, and He’ll keep them now.

For those who were paying attention, He was about to blow their minds.

You guys, it’s a little bit of a mess right now. But also, there’s still been a lot of laughter and even hidden pockets of joy.

Part of that is that the word “spleen” is just really funny. Part of that is that I do dumb stuff when I’m trying to distract myself from my stress, like adopting two kittens…or deciding to bathe both kittens…and the cat…and the dog… all in the same day (I should’ve worn kevlar). Mistakes were made, okay? But the kittens are not a mistake. They are freaking adorable. And they are also making us laugh, because they like to play video games with whatever Frizzell is currently stuck on the couch.

But the other part of it is that even in the mess of healing, even when life is difficult, even when we’re hurting (for ourselves and for each other), there’s still a lot of joy out there to find.

If we’re curious.

If we’re willing to look beyond what we can see.

If we can trust that God is doing something that could potentially blow our minds.

But to get there, we take a spleen, a flipper, and two knees…and we have to first walk (or crutch) our way along the messy path of healing and learn to be okay with it not looking the way we want it to.