I am having surgery tomorrow

Hopefully, by this time tomorrow, I’ll have had surgery, the tumor on the left side of my neck will be gone (the one on the right will still be there though), and I’ll be sitting in a hospital bed with a tube in my neck to drain out whatever gross stuff might end up pooling there. It’s a beautiful image and I implore you all to picture it right now. All should be well, but I’m not sure what time my surgery is, because apparently they only schedule it the day before, and right at the end of the day. So who knows. Hopefully it’s done in the morning as I don’t want to fast all day and get increasingly anxious and hungry.

Today, I’ll be running from one appointment to the next, starting at 7:30 a.m. and going through the early afternoon. I’ll probably be tired and stressed and zero fun to communicate with, but that’s all just a guess based on how I normally feel after a day at the hospital that’s this hectic. And I’m hoping this is the last day I have like this for a very long while.

Over the past week, I’ve finally had a bit of a break, and it was only then that I realized how taxing this all has been. I’ve still been working through most of this, so finally having the time to attend to all the other mundane life stuff I’d been putting off really put things into perspective. And what I learned was that keeping needlessly busy also kept me from thinking too much about the surgery and what it all entails. To say I’m not nervous would be a lie, but I mentally tried to put a buffer around this whole thing, so that the actual act of getting surgery was just something in the middle of my proverbial to-do list. Whether or not that’s a smart approach is hard to say, but I guess I’ll know in a few days if that was the right play or not.

I debated whether or not I should have one of these pre-written to post after surgery, but I didn’t know what to write. I figured it’d be a “Hey, I’m alive” type of thing, just to alleviate everyone’s fears, but I’m probably going to be sore and high on sedatives, so I’d probably delete whatever I wrote and replace it with some highly detailed Mr. T fanfiction which, while thrilling in its own right, probably wouldn’t be too useful. But I also didn’t want to do that because I don’t know if everything will be back to normal for at least a couple of days. Though I’ve gotten used to how my body feels day-to-day, I still feel inhibited. And my worry isn’t that something will go wrong during the surgery, but that a week later, as I slowly start getting back into the swing of things, nothing will have changed. That all of this will have been an incidental finding and that I’ll have to start this process over and figure out what is making me feel so weird. Truth be told, I worry about that a lot, but I’m choosing to believe that won’t be what happens. I want to feel normal again, so maybe foolishly, I’m disregarding anything that makes me feel like that won’t be the outcome. Deluding myself with positivity can’t be the worst thing in the world, can it?

Anyway, I’ll see you all on the other side. I’ll write a genuine update soon, once I can type and put together coherent thoughts. And until then, just know that I’m thankful for everyone who has offered their support. I couldn’t have done this all without the support of my family and friends, and I appreciate every kind gesture that people have made. I love you all. And I mean that.