One day after my toe surgery, Maria took this beautiful, touching photo of Zinnia resting her head on my healing, bandaged foot the other night.

I never claim to know what dogs are thinking – we don’t know yet – but Zinnia rested her head there every chance she got as if she knew what had happened and was comforting me how dogs like her sometimes can.

Sometimes I think she is mourning my toe.

I didn’t look at the photo until I saw the hundreds of Facebook shares and the many messages I received about it.

At first glance, I was overwhelmed by the love in it.

But something bothered me about it. The bandaged food on which Zinnia was lying looked strange and abnormal, as if something was missing or out of place.

I had to look at it three or four times before I realized what was wrong – something was missing. There was nothing but empty space in place of my big toe’s place, the hole visible even through the five or six layers of bandages.

“That space is where my toe should be,” I said. For the first time, I had visual confirmation of my new foot and the absence of a large and essential toe, the biggest one. I will never take a photo of my toeless wound or share one.

But the bandage will say it all when I look at it closely.

When I woke up in the operating room, my foot was heavily bandaged; I have yet to see the wound or any concrete evidence that something was missing; something was different; my toe was gone.  Not a drop of blood for me to see.

I haven’t wholly owned it; I’ve been too busy moving on and looking in the other direction.

For some reason, this revelation shocked and bewildered me. That was surprising. It also sharpened the sadness I’ve been feeling the last day, a gentle melancholy. The shrinks say this is common in amputation surgeries, large or small.

There is a reasonable and expected degree of pain, but I have seen nothing to confirm or help me focus on what really happened. I wrote once that some people live in a world of small fears, and some save themselves for the big ones.

I have always been afraid of the wrong things. Fear is tricky; it ebbs and flows, dances and goes. I’m scared to see this different foot, yet I don’t really doubt my ability to accept it. One lesson I’ve learned is that fear and courage often live hand in hand.

 

A part of me was so anxious to heal and move on that I didn’t want to think about what was happening now, what my foot really looked like. This was easy when I think about it; I haven’t seen it even when I look at a bandage.

Maria has assured me this will make no difference to her, and I believe it. It isn’t like I was a Vogue cover before the operation.

Every time I looked at my surgical boot and the bandaged toe, I didn’t seem to see that the right side of the bandage was primarily empty. A toe would have been there and filled out the open space where a toe would be and was.

I didn’t grasp this or perhaps didn’t want to. That’s how fear grows and festers; it loves the dark.

This was a fascinating window into how the subconscious can work to tell us what we want to hear and hide what we don’t want to see. I understand now.

I didn’t want to face the implications; I was too caught up in the process, the clearances and tests, the difficulty getting dressed or standing up, and sometimes the severe pain of walking.

I was playing the numbers, not the feelings. But life is not a football game.

My mind focused on the physical experience of amputation, not the emotional or psychological part.

As a lifelong extreme anxiety victim, I know much about how anxiety works.

When something like this happens, I have to stop and think about it and allow myself to feel it. Truth is the antidote, authenticity the balm.

If vulnerability is not acknowledged, it becomes a kind of malignant cancer all of its own. Men learn this lesson the hard way, if at all.

Amputation is associated with old, cruel, and primitive medicine, not with the super-tech stuff that can open heart valves and turn kidney stones to sand. People run from it.

I hadn’t permitted myself to be sad, so yesterday, I crashed; I veered from anger to fragility to depression. It was intense, a roller coaster ride.

Maria suggested we meditate in silence together for a full hour. Yesterday afternoon We did, and that hour pulled me back up to the level ground and a good place. Mediation has been a great friend to me.

Tomorrow morning, we see Dr. Daly and take the bandages off. Tuesday I’m going to the Mansion for my regular class. I’m not sitting around for a second longer than I have to.

I’ll see my left foot without a big toe for the first time.

I’m afraid of how ugly it might be and how difficult to look at and accept. But I’m not hooked on how I look. That will just take a little time.

I have a history of plunging my head into trouble without thinking, and I believe that danger has passed. Still, those old voices are rumbling around in my head.

I’ve had this toe for 75 years; how long will it take me to adjust to its disappearance?

I did this, it was a decision I made, but I’m still in the process of owning it. As I’ve written, there is a broken part of me, a sad part that suffers whenever I look back. So I hardly ever do.

This morning, I was back to myself.

The sadness had receded, and I awoke, as they hate to hear people say, and I will take my emotional history into account. I am moving forward but can’t erase the past or pretend it didn’t happen.

Extreme anxiety is one of the major mental illnesses, and while I have contained and controlled it and had more than 50 years of treatment, I know it will never completely disappear. Last night,  I needed to be mindful of it.

Predictably, I had a panic attack in bed; I’m sure the doctor’s appointment did that, along with my surprise at the photograph. It all came home to roost.

The way to fight these things for me is to accept them and to go inside and figure out where they came from, what is happening, and once I do that, and see it honestly and clearly – and write it or share it – then I began to heal and get my grounding and confidence back.

The more I hide, the worse it gets; the more I face it, the quicker it goes away. This is one of the many reasons I love my blog so much. I can be honest here, it’s up to me.

Here, my anger has bee dissipating, being free has helped to heal me.

I’ll do another hour of meditating today and put up some flower photos later – two things are always uplifting to me.

And I’ll get ready.

Tomorrow I won’t have to look only at a bandage; I  will see the real things for the first time. Maria is coming with me. She always knows when to come.

I can see my foot again and understand what happened Wednesday. The foot will disappear into another bandage and then one or two more.

Then, the stitches will come out, and I will live with the real thing. I have been practicing radical acceptance for some years, along with the profound value of the meditation process. I’ll be okay.

It’s not a crisis. It’s life.