Identity as freedom...and all about my middle finger

That's one cute baby, and to a trained eye, one puffy arm.
The baby is the important part :)

Last Thursday or Wednesday, it's all blurring together, I accidentally slammed my middle finger in my bathroom door. It hurt. It bled. I cleaned it out, and I treated it with antibiotic ointment. The next day, I woke to a creeping swelling mass of infection. Dutifully, I traced it with pen, and I watched it. 

Lymphedema makes it more likely that small little scratches can turn into large system-wide infections. These infections can end up with the patient (me) in the hospital for a bug bite, scratch, paper cut, and other minor annoying booboos and scrapes. Up unto this point, the potential infection has never crossed the blue traced line that I have been instructed to make. 

This time, though, the infection pushed the pen line up, and the red fingers of inflammation started stretching towards my knuckles. By the time that happened, it was Monday. This apparently confused me enough that I couldn't remember what I was supposed to do. Go to the doctor? Go to the ER? What had my OTs/PTs said?? No WebMD for me, I've learned my lesson. Luckily, I had an OT appointment in the afternoon. She looked at it, and said "you really need to go to the doctor." 

D is far away. My finger is infected, and I have to GO TO THE DOCTOR. "Who will watch the dogs if I have to go into the hospital?" A hug and some reassuring words later, I sat in urgent care waiting for the verdict. No hospital, and as my favorite urgent care doctor said, "you'll live." 

Five days of antibiotics later, my finger is much less red and finally less swollen. I'm tuckered though. I made it through the things I had to do at work, with gracious help from my coworkers, and I came home early today. 

I rested while my sweet mother in law started putting my garden to bed for winter. Before she arrived, I was poking around on Facebook, and I stumbled on NPR's Ted Radio hour. The show was all about identity, and I had one of those moments of clarity. 

This guy had spent years writing this book about parents of kids with different identities. He, Andrew Solomon, was fascinated by children born to parents who are different than the child like a deaf child born to hearing parents or a child with down syndrome born to parents without extra chromosomes. So he's talking along and then he says something that resonated into my bones:

"As long as you experience your condition as an illness, it is a prison, and once you experience it as an identity, it's the source of your freedom." 

Wow...I mean wow. What does this mean for me? What is my identity as a cancer survivor? What is my identify as a person with lymphedema? What does this mean? I know it means something important.  Part of my grief is that I didn't choose this identity. I wasn't born with it. There is a disconnect between the me that I was and the me that I am. 

I've fallen into this trap where I am defined by what I am not and what I cannot do. I am the person who stares at the mountains and longs to go into them knowing full well I shouldn't. I am the person who can't feel the heat of the water or the metal car. I am the person who can't feel my feet. 

Is that the real Amanda? Guns blazing with stars?

Identity is not defined by what a person cannot do. It is defined by what a person can do. I spend my professional life teaching people this. Why is it so hard to see what I am? 

When I really think about who I am, I often relegate cancer survivor, lymphedema patient far away from the rest of me. It's like I've wrapped that part of my identity up and placed it in the closet under the stairs to my soul. I've separated it from me artificially in some vain attempt to control what I have no hope of ever controlling. 

So what does it mean to identify as a survivor and a person with a chronic medical condition? I don't know. It's a perspective that is all new to me, and it's something that I need to find out.