Analysis of the hardest work I've ever done

This is the hardest work I've ever done. This, at the day clinic of the psych hospital.

I was a scholarship student at Boston University (french horn), and had to play juries every so often to keep my scholarship, and I did that.

I've played countless auditions, and have been told all sorts of things about not having any talent, I should learn real estate. Got through that.

Skip the other relatively easy stuff about my life....moving to a foreign country without knowing the language or the ways of the culture (living only on borrowed money at the time), getting acclimated to a new orchestra job where I didn't know the language (Hebrew or Russian).

I did all that.

I arranged my own wedding from start to finish, waded through technicalities with the Rabbanut of Israel, rented apartments, learned how to get a mortgage in Hebrew.

One time, early on in my stay here in Israel, I was told by my boss in the orchestra that I had to get a stamp at the ministry of interior for my passport, so I can remain working for them, and not be on a tourist visa. So I showed up at 6am as I was told, and it was a veritable zoo. Literally, including donkeys laden down with wares to sell and camels... in the street. With the cars. And their Beduin owners needing things from the interior ministry also. Somehow I managed to get a number....from the dude who poked himself out of the building and handed out numbers to those who stuck their hands in his face. Me, young American chick waiting in the back, was told in very bad English that if I don't try harder to get a number, I won't get whatever it is that I need. So I tried to push my way in (very smelly), and looked at the guy holding the numbers. He stopped when he saw me. He asked what I need. I said I need a stamp in my American passport to work here. He gave me a number, but also grabbed my hand (ewww) and dragged me inside that building.

I had to leave without my passport, but they promised me I'd get it in the mail. I believed that like someone trying to sell me the Brooklyn bridge. But I had no choice. I hung around for two more hours, hoping the stamp could get done and I could leave with that passport, but no dice.

You know what? A week later, my passport came in the mail, with my working visa freshly stamped into it. I thought that was cool.

I got through all the red-tape to set up a life here. I learned Hebrew on my own, and with the help of my boyfriend's (Robert) TV news station.

I had babies, (one after the other, Baruch Hashem, I wasn't so young!) with no parental or family help whatsoever, got told off by nurses, learned my way around the education system for the toddlers, managed to enroll everyone in good places.

I took a doula course and became certified so I could help women have the positive birth experience they longed for. I assisted about 50 or 75 births....while playing full-time in the orchestra.

Then one day, as life was rolling along at a good clip, I went in to the hospital for a relatively simple and routine procedure to repair an inguinal hernia. That was when that "going along at a good clip" slowed down. There was a complication at the surgery. I was sent home anyway, "don't worry about it, it's not cancer" was the last thing my surgeon said to me. The nurse said to me upon discharge "If the surgical opening bleeds overnight, and there is more blood than like the size of a shekel (a penny), come back in. The next morning the entire bandage, corner to corner, was covered in blood. So back to the hospital we went. The surgeon who had done the surgery looked at the incision, and said "don't worry about that, everything is closed up tight." And he didn't put a new dressing over the incision.

So then, four days later, I was back in the hospital, brought by ambulance because I kept fainting from pain, searing pain throughout my entire body. The nurses thought I was over sensitive, and just needed the morphine for that over sensitivity. Nobody gave me antibiotics.

Things only got worse from there.
I was dying from that little incision from the hernia repair. Or, to be more precise, I was dying from the bacteria that got into the incision of the operation. Necrotizing Fasciitis.... now a household word in my house.

Emergency surgery, induced coma, more surgeries, tremendous painful abuse from the plastic surgeon. Got home with four small children waiting for me (one still in diapers), and I couldn't walk.

Yes, of course there was PTSD from that. It was while I was in trauma therapy for that trauma that, like movie scenes, I would get these clips of images of me as a young girl, being quite abused (not by a family member). I remember one day telling my trauma therapist about that phenomenon, and she looked at me, stayed silent for a while, and asked me to explain what I am seeing. I told her. She said to me "no, Sarah, I believe those are real, and that they happened, and it took this trauma to uncover those memories".

That was eleven years ago. One year later would be my first hospitalization in the psychiatric hospital, for PTSD.
Then I kept getting sick with one thing after another. Impossibly, another rare disease, right near where the last one was- my hip joint had tumors in it.
More surgeries, more infections, invasive tests, Quitting both my careers with a broken heart. Too tired, too sick, too unreliable, too weak. Boom, the fall of a horn player and a doula.

Now this... this. This stemmed from a trigger for the old, old memories of PTSD from when I was very little. One day I was helping out a friend, actually helping out the police, to find a man who was a friend of the family, but who was found to be a child molester. I was going around where I knew he lived; the police wanted an apartment number. I was looking on mailboxes and doors for his names. Then it hit me- the biggest flashback I ever had. Right there in the street of Be'er Sheva Israel, the face of perpetrator from my childhood was in my head-- and he was on my chest--- and I couldn't breathe. It was that visceral. I tripped across the street to get back to my car. Put the key in the ignition, and couldn't remember the code. Robert helped me remember the code. On the way home I miscalculated driving space, and took out the passenger side mirror at a trash collector (not a person, a big green trash box). I was thrown for a huge loop. I just didn't understand how big it'd be.

Then ensued two months of more or less sleep... usually less, and usually with me yelling during wake-ups from nightmares. I *knew* I was in a PTSD vortex. I know I was having flashbacks, nothing was mysterious to me. I kept waiting for it to blow over. I was sleeping less and less. I'd just listen to podcasts or audio books all night. Or look at the beautiful sleeping children in the house.

Then came that night that I was so psycho to sleep that I just started taking everything around (and I have a lot around.... when you've been through as much as I have, there is no shortage of opiods or pain pills of all sorts which, combined, can induce a good sleep. But that plan went bad. I fainted instead of slept well. You can read the passed few blogs to catch up from then.

So, I get back to my original musings... is this the hardest thing I've ever done? Well, I survived Necrotizing Fasciitis when I was given about a half hour to live.

This-- this work at the day center at the psych hospital-- this is the hardest active work I've ever done. I'm not passively healing. Although some of that physio-therapy I endured after the surgeries was pretty hard-core.

Oh, and I had to bury both my parents within a year and a half, and lost one of my closest friends in that time period, too.

I left the day center today mid-way. I did that a few times last week, too. It's just too much, I can't keep myself together, I cry too much.

So, as well as it may not be the hardest thing I ever did, it's certainly up there.

Oh, and today marks my 51st go around on this planet.....