There is a strange intimacy that happens when the body becomes the subject. Not the comforting version people post on wellness blogs — the one where everything is serene and perfectly balanced. No, the real voice of the body is a blunt instrument. It isn’t gentle. It bangs on the walls, it forces you out of bed, it interrupts your peace, it sends lightning down your nerves. And if you’re unlucky enough to end up under anesthesia twice in a short window of time, the body stops hinting and starts screaming.
After my two surgeries, my blood pressure became a stranger. I had lived most of my adult life in a calm, steady range. A baseline. The kind of measurement physicians nod at and move on from. But when I came out of surgery, I was introduced to a version of myself I didn’t recognize. My numbers shot up into the 140s… 150s on bad days. My heart rate jumped without permission. Every hospital cuff tightened like a hand around my throat, sending the same message over and over: you’re not who you used to be.
Most people imagine recovery as a progressive slope — you get operated on, you rest, you heal. We want it to be linear, like exposure compensation: a predictable adjustment from one stop to the next. But the human body isn’t a dial. It’s film left out on the sidewalk. It’s chemistry happening in real time. It’s spikes of stress you don’t even know you’re carrying until you wrap the cuff around your arm and watch the numbers climb.
There were moments that reminded me of photography in the earliest days — when nothing made sense and everything felt wrong. When every image was either blown out or buried in shadow. That’s what post-surgery blood pressure felt like. A badly developed negative of myself. Every walk, every breath, every stress response measured in digits and decimals. I could feel the numbers in my skin before the cuff even inflated. I hated that version of me. Not because it was weak — but because it was unfamiliar.
But here’s the thing: pressure is not the enemy. Pressure is the question. It asks who you are when all the comfortable structures disappear. It asks what discipline you still have when the body refuses to cooperate.
My answer to that question was movement.
Not the “go outside and get some fresh air” kind of movement. I mean the full-city kind. The kind that becomes a ritual. The kind that pulls you through Toronto like an orbit. Daily 15,000–20,000 steps, then 25,000, then 30,000 on days when something was burning inside me that needed to be walked out. I treated the city like a sensor. Mapping it. Testing it. Pushing it. Every route became a shutter release. Every block became a frame.
And as I moved, something started changing. Not dramatically. Not in some cinematic arc. Slowly. The 150s bled into the 140s, then into the 130s. The spikes I used to dread flattened. I began to see the pattern: consistency is the lens. The body — just like style — doesn’t improve because you want it to. It improves because you show up relentlessly and grind at reality until it bends.
Then one morning, it happened. I strapped the cuff around my arm, pressed the button, and saw 127/79 appear on the screen. A quiet number. No alarms. No panic. No evidence of the chaos that had defined the months after surgery. My heart rate sat in the mid-40s, slow and steady — not sick, not failing, just trained. The kind of number people who do nothing with their bodies call “abnormal,” and the kind of number that makes endurance athletes smirk.
They don’t see the cost. They don’t see the 30,000-step days. They don’t see the hospital corridors, the clinical waiting rooms, the weeks where the question wasn’t “Am I improving?” but “Is this the beginning of decline?” They don’t see the psychological trench warfare that happens when you’re told your body might be losing the fight, and you walk anyway.
When my BP finally dropped back into the normal category, I didn’t celebrate. I didn’t treat it like an achievement. I simply nodded and thought: I have my baseline back. Not because I’m returning to who I was — that person is gone — but because I’ve reclaimed authorship over my own physiology.
Photography taught me this: every image is a negotiation between light and darkness. Too much or too little destroys the frame. Pressure works the same way. You can’t live at the extremes forever. You find the exposure that tells the truth of the moment. You adjust the frame. You breathe. You take the shot.
My body is still a story in progress. I don’t pretend the storms are over. But when I see 127/79 glowing quietly on the monitor, I feel the way I do when I look down at my camera and everything finally falls into alignment — not perfect, not predictable, but exactly the image I needed to see.