Post-Vacation, Pre-Op Business/Busyness

I got home from a trip with my father last Tuesday afternoon. Our vacation was lovely: a perfect mix of relaxing, spending time with family, and being distracted from my upcoming surgery. Though I had a few seizures, we had a safety plan in place, and it worked exactly as it was supposed to.

The same afternoon that I returned to Toronto, a friend arrived for a six-day visit. It was also lovely, and it also helped distract me from realities associated with Operation “Implant VNS.” In fact, it was only when he left on Monday that it really struck me. This is happening, next week, and I don’t feel at all prepared for it (in the practical sense; I’m emotionally there, more or less, though I have my moments).

I should probably clarify that there’s not, in actuality, much left on my surgery-related list of things to do. I mean, there’s lots I’d like to do, but not a lot that needs to be done. I’ve already gone to my pre-admission appointment and finished all of the other pre-surgery medical stuff that I was told to, besides the pre-operation shower routine that’s elaborate enough to require an entire instruction booklet, complete with diagrams (I’ll start the booklet-guided showers today). I’m slowly getting other aspects of my life organized: mostly making lists of what I need to accomplish in order to be organized, but it’s a start.

So why am I worried that surgery day is going to roll around and I’ll arrive at the hospital and realize that there are a million things that I forgot to do and that I should probably cancel the procedure, just in case not returning a library book/cleaning my desk/stocking the fridge with my favourite foods will result in a botched operation?

The brain—my brain—works in mysterious ways, I guess. Maybe I’m not as emotionally prepared as I thought I was.

There are things that I want to write more about, such as the above-mentioned pre-admission appointment, my vacation, and what else has been going on in the embarrassingly long gap between my last post and this one. I probably will sometime. But since I’m too scattered right now to produce anything but a short update, I’m going to allow myself to stop here so that I can take some deep breaths, eat a few Girl Guide cookies, and review my to-do list.