A time to give- a time to receive

This story may take a while...In college I tried to work toward a more selfless attitude. I would find myself in a lot of relationships where I gave a lot of myself and received much less in return. I was always helping friends fix their cars in the college dorm parking lot. This included, a transmission swap, clutch replacement, numerous brake jobs, carburetor rebuilds, motorcycle engine repairs, paint jobs, engine swaps, etc, etc, etc...counseling troubled persons, hauling people around. Serving others. I can clearly remember a chapter in my life when I really felt like "Shel" Silverstein's "the giving tree" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Tree). I felt like I had been reduced to the stump. I was worn out. I hadn't gathered together enough "givers" in my own life to balance out the giving. It can be a draining and depressing experience.

Jump ahead to about 4 years ago. Married, two children; then they were 7 and 5. I was in the middle of writing my first book. My kids would occasionally ask me about my face and if I would ever have another surgery. My response would be to the effect of no, probably not, because I would not want to compromise providing for them just to spend that kind of money on myself to improve my appearance. They asked me a couple more times off and on over the course of about a month. I thought it was a bit curious but didn't think much more beyond that. They had been spending time with my Mom while Shiela and I were at various meetings or out on a dinner date and I knew that they would ask her questions about when I was a child.

Well, one afternoon, I stopped by Mom and Dad's to pick up Brit and Jarod and my Mom handed me a print out of some emails and mentioned that she had been researching plastic surgeons and had started dialoging with a surgeon out in New York. She said the correspondence had reached a point that I needed to be involved. This was all interesting to me. She and I had talked about this stuff in the past and I had always concluded that I was going to have to get a really well paying job and get rich to get anymore work done on my face because the insurance companies would not touch me.

Anyway, Brit, Jarod, and I hopped in the car and went home. When we were all in the house and settled, I sat down at the couch and started reading through the email correspondence. The first two or three were some basic introduction and explanation of my birth conditions. It was in the third or fourth email from the doctor, where he asked what kind of medical insurance I had. (NOTE: at that time I had been a self employed full time cattle rancher with my Dad. So, no medical insurance and low income). It was in reading Mom's reply that I struggled to maintain composure. She replied to the doctor's inquiry that she had been saving money for several years and had saved up $X0,000 for me to have another surgery. At the time, my mom was an administrative secretary at the local school district. She has never worked a high paying job. I struggled to keep my composure, my kids were playing in the same room and I didn't want to be a mess in front of them. I called Shiela, who was still at work and another close friend of mine. We were all moved.

The next few weeks were a whirlwind of activity. Dialoging with a surgeon and seeing miracles right and left as I reconnected with one of the surgeons who had done work on me in the past. He actually readjusted his schedule around mine, canceled other surgeries and fit me in around Thanksgiving break. I was teaching robotics part time at the local Jr. High and High School, so I was stuck to a schedule and he accommodated me.

It was about a four hour surgery and a lot of bulk was removed and some sculpting was performed. It turned out pretty decent. This was my wife's first exposure to this kind of major surgery. I remember it was pretty emotional for her as well. It was just her and I that went to the hospital. Well, some of her family came in from Nebraska but they didn't get there till after I was already in the operating room. There was a period of time where they whisked me off to do some preparatory work and left Shiela out in the waiting area all by her self. Poor girl. She didn't know that she would get to see me again before they put me under and she was just a bit scared and anxious. Then after about 15 minutes they had me gowned and had inserted the IV and they let her come into my little examining room. All was well again.

Soon it was time to go under and they wheeled me into the operating room. The anesthesiologist started to administer the "kockout" meds and I was out. Four hours later I woke up. There was Shiela and a nurse talking to me. Waking me up. I was a bit nauseous and disoriented and I remember thinking and saying, "this is why I haven't had surgery for such a long time." The feeling of coming out of surgery and the feeling of my face having gone under a fair amount of trauma; it doesn't feel good. This is the first surgery that I can remember that I was quite nauseous. I actually let go a couple of times before my stomach settled down. My loving wife was incredibly supportive during this entire process. Her family had arrived sometime shortly after I went into surgery so she got some encouragement and emotional support that was much welcomed. My recovery was amazingly rapid.

Back to the present. I might, some day, have some liposuction done to remove some bulk that has again built up. But barring any great breakthroughs in bone grafting technologies, I don't foresee going through any more major surgeries. Someday it would be cool if they just completely started over with a titanium jawbone on the right side that truly represented the left side. Then get rid of all the old work what has been packed into my jaw area. MRI's and xrays are interesting, there are some pieces of wire that have been permanently left in my jawbone. Very interesting to see all the work from the viewpoint of an MRI-CT scan.
Happy 4th of July everybody and thanks for reading!
James