Feel the Fear and …

… let them cut into your brain anyway?

My attitude towards the procedure I’m supposed to have sometime over the next month or two (I’m still waiting for a date, which is its own kind of stressful) seems to have entered a new phase that I’ll call “full-blown fear.”

Or, I  guess, fear mixed with a healthy dose of anxiety. The thing is, I’m 100% confident in the doctors and nurses who’ll take care of me, but I’m only 25% confident in my brain’s ability to react as it’s supposed to. Historically, after all, it hasn’t been the best at behaving predictably and allowing medical professionals to fix it in a timely, efficient manner (#unrulyrebelneurons). If I had some guarantee that I could roll into the operating room, cool as cucumber, roll out with a few grids of electrodes in my brain, have seizures that confirm the focus that’s to be removed within, say, a week or so, then undergo a corrective surgery, I’m sure I’d be thinking about what’s to come much differently than I am.

But, of course, that’s not how life works at the best of times, and this isn’t a “best of times” situation. And so I frequently find my thoughts wandering to less-than-useful places.

The past five-odd years, since I started having seizures, have in many ways been one massive exercise in letting go: letting go, for example, of the rigid career plan that I had for myself and realizing that there are real alternatives waiting for me when I’m ready for them; letting go of the idea that I have to be in control at all times, of all aspects of my life (if you learn one thing about seizure disorders from reading my blog, it should be that having intractable epilepsy, at least the variety that I do, requires one to [involuntarily] cede power over one’s own body and brain, over and over and over again); letting go of disappointments and embracing other opportunities. Now, it’s time to do my best to let go of as much of this fear as I’m able to so that I can approach my surgeries as optimistically as possible. I’m sure that some of it will linger—I’m still the same fundamentally pessimistic person, after all (kidding?)—but I’ll do what I can.

Deep breaths.