Prayer after surgery: for the days after

You wake up, and it is done. Someone says it all went well, or says something else, and either way you only half hear it. For weeks, your prayer had a date. It was organised around a day, an hour, a door to go through. And now the door is behind you.

What begins then looks nothing like what you prepared for. The days after are slow and blurred, cut up by dressings and naps. You are relieved and exhausted at once. The body, which has been opened, sets its own pace and does not ask anyone’s opinion.

And prayer, often, no longer knows what to say. It had a request, and the request has been answered, one way or another.

The psalm that talks to itself

There is a psalm written from exactly this place: Psalm 116. Its author has come back from a long way off. He says so plainly: “The cords of death surrounded me, the pains of Sheol got a hold of me. I found trouble and sorrow” (Psalm 116:3). That is over now. And here is what he does, once he is on the other side:

Return to your rest, my soul, for the Lord has dealt bountifully with you. For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, and my feet from falling.

Psalm 116:7-8 (World English Bible)

Notice who he is talking to. Not God, at first: his own soul. The psalms do this now and then (Psalms 42 and 103 do it too), and it always catches you. Here, what he tells himself is a permission. Return to your rest. As if the soul, during the danger, had left its place, and did not know on its own that it was over.

That is what happens after surgery. The body is out of danger, but something in us stays on alert: watching for pain, reading every sensation, going back over the night before. Perhaps the prayer of the days after starts there. Not with a new request. With a sentence you say to yourself, in front of God: you can rest now.

And the next verse says nothing about running. It says: “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living” (Psalm 116:9). Walk, in the future tense. The first steps down the corridor, one hand on the rail, belong to that verse.

A prayer for the days after

Here is a prayer written for this page. It is meant to be said in bed, in an armchair, between two visits from the nurse, without having to be said in one go.

Lord, it is over, and I have no strength for much. Thank You for being here on this side too. Teach my body to heal at its own pace, and teach me not to hurry it. Quiet whatever in me is still on watch, as if the night before had not ended. Bless the hands that cared for me, the ones I never saw. And for every step I take again, let me take it before You.

You do not need to say all of it every day. One line is enough, the one that fits the day.

The thank-you that does not come on its own

You expect to be full of gratitude, and you find you are mostly tired. The thankfulness is there somewhere, but it has no energy. You almost blame yourself for it.

Psalm 116 knows that question. It asks it: “What will I give to the Lord for all his benefits toward me?” (Psalm 116:12). And its answer is surprisingly light: “I will take the cup of salvation, and call on the Lord’s name” (116:13). Not give. Take. No grand gesture, no debt to repay. The thank-you of recovery looks like that: going on taking what is given, and saying the name of the one who gives it. The rest will come, or not, when your strength comes back. For a fuller kind of thanks there is the gratitude prayer, which can wait until you feel like it.

When the after is not what you hoped

Not every day after is a day of relief. There are complications, results still to come, pain that lasts longer than you were told.

The same psalm that gives thanks kept, a few verses on, a sentence it could have deleted: “I believed, therefore I said, ‘I was greatly afflicted’” (Psalm 116:10). Both live in the same mouth. You can say it is long, that it hurts, that you thought you would be better by now, and stay inside the prayer. If a new medical step comes, the anointing of the sick is not kept for the very end: it can be received at thresholds like these too.

What recovery has already given

There is a famous precedent for weeks of forced stillness. Ignatius of Loyola was a soldier when a cannonball shattered his leg at the siege of Pamplona, in 1521. He spent a long convalescence in the family house. In the account he dictated years later, he tells how he asked for romances of chivalry to pass the time, and there were none: he was given a life of Christ and lives of the saints instead. Reading in bed, he noticed that some thoughts left him dry and sad afterwards, and others left him at peace. It was there, in a bed, that what would become his way of discernment began.

That is not a promise: nobody comes out of recovery obliged to have had a conversion. But it is a reminder. Slow time is not lost time, and what can be seen in it is often seen nowhere else. Julian of Norwich, who came close to death at thirty, spent twenty years pondering what she had received on that threshold. The days after can last a long time.

Something to try in those days

Each evening, write a single line: something you could do today that you could not do yesterday. Getting to the window. Standing up without help. Reading three pages. Nothing more.

After a week, read it back. You will see what tiredness hides from day to day: that you are moving forward. It is the simplest form of a prayer journal, and it follows on from what the prayer before surgery suggested: keep a record, so you know what you asked for and what you received.

A prayer for the days after does not need to be long. It needs to let you come back to your rest.