A quote from one of my favorite guilty TV pleasures, Nip/Tuck. "The real pain is in the waiting." The source of the quote is an interaction between Sean Macnamara and a patient.

She is a very elderly woman with lines and wrinkles galor, looking to recapture her look of some 25 years past. Her husband was suffering from Alzheimers and she felt guilty. A doting wife for 20 yrs, she says when she hit menopause she started writing and became popular. She left her husband while she toured and wrote, etc. One day he calls and says he doesn't know who she is anymore and the next day he has alz. So she wants surgery to look like she did on their 20th anniversary, because that is the woman he remembers, the love of his life. So she elects for 5+ hrs of surgery.

Sean is reluctant at first to grant the surgery because a procedure of that duration is risky. He agrees based on issues of his own. He wants a second chance also, but with his son, who he punched in a previous episode. He didn't mean for things to turn out the way they did, and he wishes he could take it back, and knows he can't. So he's hoping for, a second chance.

So completing the surgery, we find the elderly and recently renovated patient ripping out some tube thats part of the healing process. Sean finds her soon after, and she is quite embarrassed. She was just impatient, wanting to be well and be seen by her husband, so she can be recognized , known and lovd by him again. This is the scene where the quote comes from, as the hurt and pain of waiting for things to "work out" is palpable in both their of their faces, words, and choices.

The real pain is in the waiting. I can think of times when I have hurt people, and all I wanted was for them to understand, to forgive me, to see the change in their face or eyes. Waiting for anything can be a painful experience, especially if what we are waiting for is something we feel will be better than where we are right now.

Oh, and Christian is waiting too. Waiting to be free of the feeling of being a victim. Waiting to not be scared anymore, to be healed and whole. Here is where the show really got me. Because after we see Christian really floundering to overcome his experience as a victim of a rape and assault, we see Sean getting real close to bottom when his son rejects him. Sean, takes a knife, and cuts himself. The pain of waiting and wanting, the pain of losing someone, the pain of being rejected, the pain of being a victim. So the issue becomes control.

There are hundreds of thousands of people who cut themselves as an emotional survival technique. Most of them are young women. Feeling unwanted, unloved, abused, or just out of control. Cutting, like eating addictions, and sometimes drug addictions, are methods of control for people who hurt so much they have no idea what else to do.

And that, made me cry, weep really, for those I have known, and those I will never know, who know this pain. The real pain is in the waiting, waiting for the pain to go away.

May you and I know love, love strong enough to carry us through the pain. For that love is worth the wait.