It's a date!

Well, I hope it's an auspicious day for surgery, because Monday November 29th is the date set for my bilateral mastectomy at Vanderbilt. I'm torn, because I could do it the following day with Dr. W who is associated with another hospital in the area, but I think I'm going to want to go ahead and do it at Vandy. Either way, it's that same time right after Thanksgiving, which this year is also Dave's birthday. I will work the Wednesday before the holiday and then be off for the rest of the year. In some ways I'm excited about it and I'm trying to focus on that excitement to stave off the dread.

I will have both the breast and plastic surgeons working together on me; I don't know how long the surgery lasts, but I know it's a lot longer than any I've had so far, and I will finally spend my first night in a hospital as a patient-all the previous surgical experiences have been on an out-patient basis. I've slept on a mattress on the hospital floor beside Dave's bed years ago when he was in for so long after his abdominal surgery, a few years before his cancer diagnosis and I hoped at the time that it would be the only time in my life I would spend an  overnight in a hospital, but it's not going to work out that way.

can you see the dark "mohawk" look down the center?

I'll have another surgery while I'm there to remove a tumor in my thumb. I met with the hand surgeon yesterday and he said that the left thumb anomaly is probably not a neuroma, but a giant cell tumor and is most likely benign. He said he feels so confident about it's non-malignancy that he would feel comfortable just leaving it alone, but that if I want to have it removed he would do it while I'm in the hospital, if not during my breast surgery as it only requires local anesthesia. And I do want to have it out-it has been fluctuating between hurting, tingling and doing nothing, occasionally interfereing with my work, and I imagine that left alone now it may impede me in future. It makes sense to me to attend to it while I'm going to be out of work anyway. And I don't really feel like leaving any tumors in my body right now, even if they are benign! Of course I'm not going to ask for a hysterectomy now just because I have 3 stable fibroids, but if the ovary scare I went through in January should have happened now, after the breast boogie, I would have gone ahead and had the complete hysterectomy that I opted out of at the time. Ah 20/20 hindsight...

So Thanksgiving is my last hurrah for a while. I wish I could beam myself to California for the holiday to be with my family; my aunt makes an amazing meal and I am in the mood to whoop it up with my gang before I begin sleeping it off for a few weeks. With Dave's birthday coinciding, I want it to be a special day for him, but I can't really plan to make a big meal and invite friends; I don't have the energy. And so far, we haven't had any other plans pop up.  I may have to do turkey-for-two, or maybe find a restaurant this year. I'll bet Wild Oats has a prepared meal that we could bring home...that might be the ticket. I'll have to look into it.

Never have enough time to read, to write, to run around with friends and to walk around the track, but life is good. Gonna enjoy some time by the fire catching up on reading, writing and playing instruments during my down days in December.