The Walking Wounded
image by arturgutowski
Why do we leave wounds open and bleeding? Festering, inviting the hurt to sink down deep, infect the flesh and rot the bones.
I’m eating cookies as I type this. Not entirely appetizing, but I am a nurse in another life. Sorry if you were enjoying this essay on your lunch break.
I’m not talking about physical wounds, like deep lacerations or burns. Even burns are an entirely different story. I’m talking about emotional wounds. Things that cut you to your core, so deep, you alter your entire existence to manage your day to day.
Abuse. Neglect. Rejection. Withdrawal. Malignment.
Oftentimes, these wounds occur in childhood, but a lot of them occur in adulthood too. Most of our adulthood wounds are common ground where our childhood selves have played for years. Screaming for help to heal and we continue to ignore, or worse, we don’t even see they’re there.
When I did my med-surg rotation in nursing school, in the hospital, there was heavy wound care involved. I actually skipped the day I was meant to spend an entire 8 hours on the “wound care cart” because I had little desire to patch holes in skin all day. That’s what wound care is. Cleanse. Treat. Bandage. Repeat. No thanks.
When imobile patients lay in hospital beds all day, without a proper turning schedule, they get pressure wounds. The pressure cuts off the circulation to the surrounding tissues and the tissue becomes infected and dies. This process leaves gaping holes in the flesh that can often tunnel and create new ulcers in other places. In a perfect world, patients are turned by the nursing staff every 2-4 hours, relieving pressure on the hot spots, like the hip bones and buttocks, to allow the blood to keep flowing. Keep the tissue alive.
We don’t live in a perfect world.
When I was in school, I had a patient with two, stage four, decubitus ulcers. Decubitus ulcers are the medical term we use for pressure wounds. The wounds are staged or “graded’ according to the flesh, muscle and bone involved in the wound. Stage four means the flesh is rotten to the bone, through several layers of tissue and muscle. It’s the worst it can get.
We packed the ulcers with medicated gauze, but not before we debrided the wound. The debridement was always the worst. You have to remove the bandages from the previous wound treatment and the soiled gauze (puss and blood) from the wound so the wound can heal. Tweezers in hand, pulling away black, sometimes green, rotting flesh and soiled bandages to expose healthy, new, pink flesh underneath. The process is truly gruesome. You can smell a stage four pressure ulcer from the door.
After the wound is cleansed, fresh, new medicated gauze is applied and fresh bandages are applied on top of that. Wound care is usually done every 8-12 hours or when the bandages are visibly soiled. Eventually the skin regenerates and heals and the wound closes. This takes weeks - sometimes months.
And the thought of it never occured to me in the emotional sense, the same rules apply. The medicine won’t matter if the infected tissue is still sitting on top of the stuff you want to come alive.
You have to debride to heal, there is no other way. The stuff that’s dead. Black. Rotting. Soiled. It has to come off. And it hurts.
We usually give some pretty potent pain meds before we clean a deep wound, because the removal of the bandages and infected flesh is painful.
What I can’t figure out is how we expect to go through life unattending to our emotional wounds for years when we would never let a physical wound go that long without treatment. Eventually the infection, from a wound that deep, would get into the bloodstream and you would become sick and die.
Is emotional death as serious and physical death? I think so.
I have recently been face to face with this issue over the last year of my life. There are certain triggers that when set me off, send me spiraling downward into a hole so deep and so narrow, it’s hard to escape. Thought processes I have been accustomed to my entire life that are just now coming to a head so intensely, I decided there was no way out but through and I needed professional help.
My soiled, rotten bandages had to come off. I had tried it my way for years, just packing on medicine, without pulling away what was really rotting and dead.
Self-help books. Avoidance. Denial. Blaming. I am really good at blaming. “They laid me off. He rejected me. She bullied me in the workplace.”
I started intense, weekly therapy in June of 2019 and my life will never be the same.
Now it’s like living in a daylight I didn’t know existed. Like being a prisoner in a dark jail cell for so long, you can’t remember what daylight looks and feels like. And I said to a friend recently, “I feel so happy that I am finally at a healthy place mentally and emotionally, but all the while so sad for all those years I lived in darkness. Because this is the capacity at which I was to be functioning all along.”
But did taking off my dead skin hurt? Like hell it did.
C.S. Lewis puts it into words in a way that I simply cannot. In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace is talking to his cousin Edmund about his experience with Aslan.
“...I looked up and saw the very last thing I expected: a huge lion coming slowly toward me. And one queer thing was that there was no moon last night, but there was moonlight where the lion was. So it came nearer and nearer. I was terribly afraid of it. You may think that, being a dragon, I could have knocked any lion out easily enough. But it wasn’t that kind of fear. I wasn’t afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it—if you can understand. Well, it came close up to me and looked straight into my eyes. And I shut my eyes tight. But that wasn’t any good because it told me to follow it.” And I knew I’d have to do what it told me, so I got up and followed it. And it led me a long way into the mountains… there was a garden—trees and fruit and everything. In the middle of it there was a well… The water was as clear as anything and I thought if I could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in my leg. But the lion told me I must undress first… So I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place… But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and rough and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before... Then the lion said—but I don’t know if it spoke—‘You will have to let me undress you.’ I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know—if you’ve ever picked the scab off a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.” “I know exactly what you mean,” said Edmund. “Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there I was as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me—I didn’t like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I’d no skin on—and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I’d turned into a boy again.”
I’d turned into a girl again. I wasn’t what they said I was anymore. I wasn’t who they wanted me to be. I am finally becoming who I was meant to be all along. I had finally taken off my dragon skin... but I didn’t do it alone. I did it with help from a few very close friends, family, a licensed therapist and Jesus. A path I truly believe God had intended for me from the beginning. A road to healing, recovery and a heart fully alive.
The good news is, my story is not an isolated incident. It is not a unicorn or lightning in a bottle. It can be your story too. Freedom is waiting for you, underneath all that life has used to cover you in a skin that’s not truly yours.
Is it scary? Sure it is.
Is it worth it? It’s life or death. You have to choose.