Don’t be a Negative Nancy, be a Lit-up Liz
By Liz Biggs
Recently, I got some bad news, and I have been a Mopey Molly. A Woe-is-me Wanda listening to “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” by The Smiths. After following doctor’s orders since my Mardi Gras dance floor injury, my broken fingertip is still dangling by a thread of a bone and refuses to heal. A bone graft is my only option to regain full use of my right hand.
I did everything I could to avoid being a Surgery Susan. This will be my 14th surgery, and I’ve hated every one of them. Not a single one was elective or cosmetic — it would be fun to wake up with bigger boobs or a tighter face, but my surgeries have enabled me to breathe, walk or stay alive. I was born with a defective lung, and trust me when I say that recovering from major lung surgery is the worst. Days are long when every breath you take is excruciatingly painful; I’m glad I was 20 and handled the six-month recovery like a champ. So yeah, a finger bone graft is no big deal. I’m mostly sad my body let me down and didn’t cooperate in the healing process. So lame.
But an Instagram post from my daughter inspired me to be a Positive Polly. “I love you, Mom, you are the biggest light in my life,” she posted. That’s pretty much the best compliment I’ve ever heard, but now I have to live up to it! I need to look at the glass half full, not half empty. What if my finger wasn’t fixable and I had to live the rest of my life with pain every time I use my right hand? I should be thankful for modern medicine and good surgeons who have the knowledge and skills to make my life better. I should be thankful that I have the option of using a cadaver (allograft) because my bones are not trustworthy. The Hopeful Holly in me hopes my donor drank a lot of milk. Maybe he was a football player, hopefully a quarterback. I should drink more milk. Maybe I shouldn’t donate my organs or bones — I’d hate to be a letdown for someone who needs strong bones or body parts that work properly. My bones would be labeled Abby Normal.
Another Positive Polly revelation is you get good drugs when you have surgery. My favorite drug these days is Advil — I haven’t had super fun drugs since the 80s. Well, except for that Scopolamine and Zofran I recently took on the ferry from Athens to Santorini. Suffering from severe motion sickness since I was a child, I was required to have a bucket in my lap every time I got in the station wagon with my family so I didn’t throw up on my clothes. I have filled countless barf bags on turbulent airplanes. One exasperated flight attendant handed me a Hefty bag because what can you do with full barf bags — hand them to the passenger next to you while you fill another? Don’t even ask me about boat barfing.
The 5-hour high-speed ferry was supposed to be a nice way to experience the Greek Islands between Athens and Santorini. But the winds were gusting at 40 mph, and the swells in the Aegean Sea were 8-10 feet, so it took 7 hours. The ferry attendant handed out fancy foil-lined barf bags to all passengers (way better than the wax-lined ones I’m used to on airplanes). The lady next to me was moaning and barfing, so I snuck out of my assigned seat to a window seat to watch the waves. The boat was rocking so wildly that the window dipped down almost touching the surface of the water and then rose up to the sky. I asked the Greek dude next to me if we were going to die, and he said probably not since this was the new, more stable ferry. I didn’t ask what happened to the old, less stable one.
But thanks to these new, magical anti-nausea drugs that my siblings insisted I bring, guess who didn’t feel sick at all? It felt kind of groovy to be on that rocking boat, humming “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones, feeling safe because the stranger next to me said we wouldn’t die. Why be a Negative Nancy over things you can’t control or change? Negative Nancy is exhausting. I’m going to try very hard to be a Lit-up Liz from now on.
