Welcoming Back My Butt: How Almost Dying Helped Me Love My Body
My muscles and butt are returning. Let's celebrate!
Happy long weekend Substack readers,
I often talk about healthy as a spectrum. I may have challenges, but my health has returned in a new way… two years after giving birth, my butt is back.
In the photo above, I see a small woman on dialysis, all smiles, carrying her happy baby and swirling around with all the tiny muscles she has.
I was strong then. I am strong now. Thick in spirit. And I love both versions of me.
When I got to my first ob-gyn appointment after having my baby, they called my name and I sheepishly made my way to the scale.
118 lbs.
“You don’t even look like you had a baby,” the nurse compliments.
“You don’t want my weightloss plan” I say dryly.
While giving birth to my daughter, I triggered the rare disease called atypical Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome resulting in multiple organ failure, rampant blood clots, pneumonia, sepsis, four abdominal surgeries, and a five week stay in the hospital.
Fighting to get home to my baby was a rollercoaster-haunted house-maze of horrors. I survived, barely.
Thankfully, due to out-patient dialysis, I was eventually discharged - but I couldn’t walk or carry my baby. My muscles atrophied and I struggled with every movement.
Frustratingly, my relationship with eating also became deeply complicated. Food poisoned me as well as nourished me because my kidneys weren’t able to clean my toxins effectively.
It made every bite less appetizing.
In dialysis, I had to maintain a “dry weight” or fluids were painfully extracted from me - each dialysis session, every other day, began with a scale and ended with a scale. No matter what I did, I needed to stay below a specified weight.
Extracting fluids was always painful. For me, it caused headaches worse than any migraine. No pain medicine could help. Others would get terrible cramps, especially in their legs. It was excruciating for us all.
Our diet was analyzed through our blood- we’d get a grade essentially from a dialysis dietitian every month. She’d hand out papers with our results. So, each bite added up to a carefully analyzed diet.
And voila, the pounds melted away! I had a machine, painfully sucking weight from me if I ever gained… so the only way to go, was down.
Soon I became an incredibly-shrinking-woman with almost no effort.
As I began to see more and more people socially, I got an abundance of friendly comments on my thinness in that year after my pregnancy. I know it was supposed to be a good-natured compliment, but it didn’t fit me. My thinness and my disease were bound together in profoundly uncomfortable ways.
I recognize many people worship at the altar of thin. I did too for a long time.
For years I was an actor, where being thin was a prerequisite for me. I had people tell me if I wanted to be a leading lady, I needed to lose weight.
One time I showed up at my acting agent’s office and she had a measuring tape to check my proportions. Ironically, it was the same day as the Women’s March. The contrast between women protesting for our rights in the street… and here I was, at an office where less of me was clearly better than more.
But now my thinness had nothing to do with abiding by deeply upsetting cultural beauty-standards. It was imposed upon me by a difficult and scary health crisis.
I was fighting for my life. At my lowest, I was under 100 lbs only a couple months after giving birth.
When I saw my skeletal body in the mirror, I looked like I could be blown over by a sharp wind. My breasts, no longer thick with maternity because I couldn’t breastfeed due to the drugs, dangled and the dialysis catheter juts out of the right one. At the top, above my breast, you can see tubing tunneled under my skin leading up into my neck as it heads into my jugular vein.
My once curvy butt was gone. No longer rounded, it was flat like the edge of a sharp canyon.
My stomach featured a new abdominal wound mountain that cuts across the core of my body. It’s a rounded hill, with a craggy scar below as if some tectonic plates are meeting and dividing at once. The pink and purple scar is both numb in sections and howling in others. The right side is decidedly madder than the left. In fact, the whole right side of my body is angrier.
I was organs and bones. Muscles and fat were a luxury.
I used to be so hard on my fat. Especially the sweet thickness of my butt and legs. I didn’t recognize the magnificent glory of being so sturdy.
Now, I could see I felt less-than-perfect for no good reason. I had developed a body dysmorphia that made me so blind to the truth of my wellness and power. Most of my life, I had minor health irritations and issues, but this body took such remarkable care of me.
It took almost dying to reflect on my insecurities and learn how to truly love and miss my larger body. I’m often predisposed to wanting what I don’t have.
But I still needed to learn to appreciate my new smaller disease-ridden body. To make peace with my whole being seemed like the only way to find peace in anything.
I could go on and on about how my body let me down, but what good would that do me?
The thing is, after giving birth, despite depression, anxiety and trauma, I was extremely strong in spirit. These things are not mutually exclusive. You can feel every feeling and still be “strong” emotionally. In fact, I’d venture to say, that IS strength. Being able to experience the spectrum - that’s powerful.
Eventually with physical therapy, I walked again and carried my child for the first time 40 days after giving birth.
While I could spend time being angry at my body’s failure, I flipped the script and decided to thank my body for carrying me to this moment.
I had strength enough to fend off a serious disease and infection and an all-systems hit. It made a healthy baby and brought her into the world under extreme difficulties. And it allowed me to recover.
Every day, I patted my broken kidneys and thanked them. And, eventually, they did heal enough for me to become one of the very small percentage of folks who get off dialysis without a new kidney.
Today, two years later, my health is stable. I’ll always have this disease but I’ve been able to achieve beautiful normalcy.
And as a reward, I also see my old curves finally returning. My husband cheered the other day, “Your butt is coming back!”
I blushed with thrill. I didn’t think I’d ever cheer for my butt. For years I wished it away, but now I see its expansion as a sign of wellness and vitality. My massage therapist (who’s known my body for years) was giddy to feel fat and muscle on my bones this past week.
My curvy body is slowly emerging from hibernation. Now I can see how radiant I am and have always been, no matter my size.
I’m healthy. I have a chronic disease, yes, and the kidney function of a 70 year old, but I am still healthy. I am claiming it.
I’m claiming my strength, my healing, and the width of my butt.
It only took almost dying to get here.
Comment of the Week:
“Great job!” Ellen Mark
If you’re new here and wondering, “what happened to this lady?” read:
I started writing this when I was on dialysis. It’s intended to be both memoir and a practical tool to help folks who might be going through something similar or those caregivers and family supporting someone with a challenging diagnosis. NOTE: This is not intended to replace actual medical guidance. Please consult your doctors on your individual challenges and situations. Please talk to your clinicians before adjusting any of your care protocols. Also names have been changed for most of my medical staff.
Thank you to CC Couchois, Roy Lenn, and Dr. Richard Burwick for your founding level donation.
Such a powerful statement: "The thing is, after giving birth, despite depression, anxiety and trauma, I was extremely strong in spirit. These things are not mutually exclusive. You can feel every feeling and still be “strong” emotionally. In fact, I’d venture to say, that IS strength. Being able to experience the spectrum - that’s powerful." Thank you for this reframing!
🙌🙌