I returned to Utah in the fall of 2010 to do my student teaching while my husband and daughter stayed in Minnesota. I finished and received my Mild/Moderate Special Education endorsement from Utah State University in the fall of 2010 and rejoined my family shortly after Halloween. In January of 2011 I began to look at openings in the MN school district where we lived. In a matter of weeks I was hired to teach Special Ed at an Intermediate School a few minutes from my home. I had been warned that starting midyear would be difficult, but could never have imagined it being as hard as it actually was. It was overwhelming at hello and it did not stop until school was out in June. I returned in the fall hoping it would be a lot better if I began at the beginning, it was for just a bit. Then the bottom dropped out.

I had been struggling with severe acid reflux that was unresponsive to medication because I have autoimmune gastritis where my own body damages the acid producing glands in my stomach. The solution for me was a fundoplication surgery where the stomach is wrapped a round the base of the esophagus to prevent reflux. When told it would be a simple procedure with an overnight stay and ten day recovery, I decided to have it done on our break for teachers convention.

Five days post op, my stomach flipped up through a hiatal hernia that had been repaired and lodged into my chest wall. I was sent by ambulance in the middle of the night to Abbott Hospital in the center of Minneapolis for a repeat surgery. Six weeks later I found myself very ill and after many tests was sent back to Abbott where it was determined that the lower lobe of my left lung had collapsed and i had a severe pleural effusion. The fix for these things was a 7 hour surgery with my chest opened wide, my lung re-inflated and all of the infection cleared away. I woke up from that surgery in pain I did not imagine possible. As a result I entered the darkest season of my life. I attempted to return to my teaching position after a few more weeks off but lasted about a week. It was soon clear that I had to resign and my heart was truly broken.

The book Falling Upward by Father Rohr had arrived at my house just as I went into the hospital for the second surgery and before the big one. As I began to read his words I found a modicum of solace in the surreal nature of the moment. However he wrote about it, I understood that falling into an abyss of pain was in all actuality just a part of the normal human experience, not its exception. He explained how all of us who get to live, will fall and will experience seasons of surreal life that bring with them tremendous pain. He went on to explain that what wasn’t equally normal was that some people who fall make the choice to lean into the fall and grow upward as a result. Up toward God, but equally toward a mature higher self. I was there in the heart of Minneapolis alone, in pain and away from everything familiar in my life in those dark December days. I had no idea how to go forward but because he issued me the invitation to fall upward, I said I would. I re-read and thought about this book for a solid decade after that first read. I still pick it up on occasion.

I survived the ordeal, including the additional gall bladder removal a month after the thoracotomy in January. It was pure hell. I have grown up and matured in ways I never imagined possible for myself. but boy did I mourn the loss of my Special Ed teaching career and a working life all together for way longer than I should have. I know it was because leaving it all that way was abnormal and without any real closure brought to it. It literally felt as if I had fallen into an abyss of pain, therapies, doctor visits and drugs. I felt snatched away from my own life for a very long time. Many days I didn’t know if I would ever feel like a genuine part of the human race again.

Thus endeth the second part of my Falling Upward in Minnesota story.

More to come.