October 30, 2013 – Surgery Schedule

9:30am                 Surgery Check-In Time

11:00am               Radiology Appointment

12:30pm               Nuclear Medicine Appointment

03:00pm               Surgery

This surgery usually takes an hour.  Recovery time is one to four hours.  Then Jess gets to take me home.

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October 30, 2013 -- New Surgery Date

When it first sunk in that I really have cancer, all sorts of resources, both physical and metaphysical, came to mind for how to best support this process.  Some of them I’m doing, and others, not so much.  But it feels a little like I just added “Go through breast cancer” to an already over-full TO DO list.  Most of the rest of my life hasn’t changed… I’m still doing everything I was doing before.  Why wouldn’t I?  I actually feel fine.  I realize that will likely change with the surgery next week, but up to this point or that day, I plan to go on feeling good.

So, if the cancer is a harbinger of massive change in my life, and I do believe it is, am I not honoring the process because I’m not making time/space for it in my life?  I take it seriously, but our finances don’t allow me to stop doing what I’m doing and take off.   As I work on what self-care seems called for in this moment, I wonder how to juggle it all.

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October 29, 2013 -- Surgery

My surgery is scheduled for Tuesday, October 29 at Thornton Hospital.  The pre-op appointment is previous Friday, October 25.  Thankfully, all of the places I need to go are right there at the Moores Cancer Center and the hospital is on the other side of the parking lot

Now that there is a definite date, I feel a certain relief.  There is a written plan for my physical process through this now in the binder I set up (surprise! My organizing gene kicked in.) to keep track of all this stuff.  I realize now that the binder was/is a very necessary tool.  I have a quote from Mike Dooley speaking as The Universe www.tut.com on the cover.  It reads:

Before this odyssey ever began,

There was you, your best friends, and

Wide-eyed curiosity

Among you about

Who would be the first to leap,

The first to forget, the first to kiss, the first to tell,

The first to fall, the first to get back up,

And the first to remember that it all began

With a dare:

To love in spite of it all.

                Is that you, Mergatroid?

                                The Universe

Which is good in many ways, because I keep forgetting that that’s the place I really want to be living from.  It’s like Jess and I are living in two different worlds or realities.  In one everything is just as it’s always been, and in the other I have cancer.  Some days are spent entirely in the first, and others entirely in the second.  That it’s taken so long to actually get a plan and a surgery date turns out to be something of a blessing in disguise, giving us time to get used to a new reality, and also giving us a respite from that reality when it gets to be much.

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