Cancer log 196: Reconstruction procedure #3.

I have surgery tomorrow (another reconstruction procedure, fat transfer from lower belly to breast, should be routine, not a big deal), and I am, per usual, stupidly anxious about it.

It’s weird, the bits that bug you. I heartily dislike the little IV needle they put in the back of your hand (although the actual IV fluids are great when you’re feeling yucky), which I have now had inserted many times, given pregnancies and c-sections and contrast for cancer-related MRIs etc. and so on.

And I am apparently really slow coming out from under anesthesia — I wake up super-cold and disoriented and sometimes nauseated, and it takes me a long time to get back to normal, long enough that the nurses start to get impatient at every hospital I’ve been at, and so now I kind of dread their irritation even more than how yucky I know I’ll feel.

Plus of course, there’s the fact that I opted into this. I could have just skipped it, stopped and said I was done with attempts at reconstruction, at aiming for symmetry, etc. It makes me feel dumb, that I’m putting myself through this, that I’m making Kevin wake up and go in with me at 7:45 a.m. tomorrow (I have to have someone with me, according to their requirements, or I’d probably just cab in and have him there for when I finish…), that for the next few days, I’m going to be moving slowly and not able to do much around the house.

I really wanted the house done with Christmas decorations before the surgery, so I wouldn’t be lying in bed fretting about lights needing to get up, etc., and so we did a big push and we did manage to finish today; it’s all pretty decked out.

We even trimmed the tree this evening, which Anand really wanted to do, because he says there hasn’t been enough special holiday stuff yet. So Anand had hot chocolate (which Kavi doesn’t like, oddly enough), and we cut out and baked sugar cookies in holiday shapes (mostly Kavi, since Anand quickly got bored with that part), and the kids decorated a few of them. I’d show you pictures, but I forgot to take them. They’re cute as heck. I’ve stored the rest of the baked cookies to ice next week, in preparation for our holiday party.

But even though Kevin and Kavi made the sugar cookie dough and Kev did a lot of the cutting and decorating too, so it really wasn’t that much work, I was really tired and stressed about tomorrow and I can’t say that I enjoyed any of it as much as I normally would. I was glad to spend time with the family, though. I think the kids had fun. Making happy memories, hopefully. I think I mostly managed to keep the mommy-crankiness to myself, which is something.

Heh. I didn’t really come here planning to say any of that — what I was going to say was that I appreciated having the Crisis on Earth-X superhero 4-episode crossover to distract me today, in between churning through my e-mail backlog and putting up the last decorations. It was a really fun series, with much punching of Nazis and a fabulously satisfying ending, and just what I needed to take my mind off things for a bit. Yay, superheroes. (Speaking of superheroes, the next Wild Cards book, Mississippi Roll, will be coming out December 5th in the US and Australia, a little later in the UK. I’m not in that one, but I’ll be in the one after, Low Chicago, with a story that is one of the best things I’ve written, I think.)

I should go to bed. But I can’t eat anything after midnight, so while I’m resisting the urge to stuff my face in response to that injunction, maybe I will go get myself a little spicy hot chocolate before bed. A little holiday spirit. Ho ho ho.

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