Freaked out howling

I got my surgery date on Monday. April 14th.  And even just knowing the date sent me into a little internal tailspin (as evidenced by yesterday's blog).

I feel like I'm living on many levels these days.  The top 85% of me is doing really well, authentically well, loving the bike and grateful for my people and being very present in the moment.  I am functioning productively at work and managing to meet an impossible deadline.  I am being nice to my loved ones and enjoying my time with them with gratitude.

Then there's a guilty 5% layer that is actually sort of reveling guiltily in all the intensity.  I have always kind of thrived on crises, which needs looking at I'm sure, but being in the midst of a good story always kind of exhilarates me. 

And under that, there's a state that I call "freaked out howling." 

This state started small but is growing every day. It's possible it's a good thing, to be feeling weepy at times, and unbearably anxious at other times.  My acupuncturist says that cancer is a qi stagnation problem, and that I need to let things flow, emotionally.  Yell more, cry more, emote more.  So things are flowing.  Tears flow from my eyes at unexplained times, when I'm taken over with sadness over my changing body.  My walking and riding are flowing me through space while I'm exercising.  Words are flowing from my fingers for the first time in a long while.  (Words that aren't trapped by the necessities of documenting technology for my job, that is.) 

I'm emoting all over the place, or trying to.  Usually I'm pretty much the calm voice of Virgo reason.  But  obviously yesterday I was feeling angry.  Today was weepy and sad.  I haven't taken it out on anyone yet, but I've told my kids that if I start yelling (which is something of an unusual occurrence) that they should not be freaked out but tell me (later) that that was some darn good emoting, and be proud of me for letting it flow. Luckily we haven't needed to test that plan out yet.

I don't usually have surgeries.  The only one I've ever had that didn't result in a bouncing baby boy was an emergency surgery several years ago.  I didn't have time to really think about that one.  I came home after a stressful day at work with intestinal pains, spent a few hours curled up writhing on the bathroom floor, spent the rest of the night in the ER waiting room, and finally got some relief around 5:30 the next morning.  I was in surgery the next day to take care of a piece of scar tissue that had wrapped itself around my intestines.  It was my 51st birthday.  I didn't have a chance to do anything but move the planned birthday party into my hospital room and enjoy the dilaudid.

This is different.  This is giving me a month to contemplate a whole bunch of issues, none of them easy.  Some of them involve wondering what depredations my currently perfectly fine (ish) body is going to have to go through to get on the other side of this.  I look at pieces of myself and wonder what everything's going to be like in 6 months, a year.  Other thoughts involve what kinds of things I'm going to be putting into my fine (ish) body, what poisons, what devices, what pieces of me will end up in other places.  I feel like I'm about to become a Picasso painting.

And it's all so abstract.  I FEEL GREAT.  There's nothing in me that says, well, at least I'll feel better when it's over.  No!  I'm going to feel worse, for a long period of time, and then maybe, someday, I'll feel just as good as I do now.  It seems so illogical.  These machines and doctors are telling me these things and I simply do not understand them on a visceral level.

I also know that none of the things I'm fixating on are happening now.  This is all my mind torturing me with imaginings of an unknowable future.  I don't know what it will be like.  I just don't.  It's fully possible that this month prior to surgery could be the absolute worst it will get, emotionally, because of these weird disconnects and fears and projections.  Once I'm in the soup... hey!  I'm in the soup.  Every moment that ticks by will be one more moment I've gotten through and one less that I'll need to ever do again.  And there will be lots of good moments, I know that.  There will be some that won't be so good, and hopefully I will be armed with something that I can conk myself out with.  Or they will pass.  Or someone will come sit with me and make me laugh.  Or I'll write something that really lets out a lot of steam and feel better afterwards.

The moment we anticipate with dread is NEVER the way we dread it will be.  Never.

I've always said -- regarding Sisyphus and his rock -- that the curse is the walking downhill part.  Pushing the rock uphill?  That's just work.  You put your body into it, you focus on the roughness of the rock on your hands, you make little games with yourself about your velocity vs effort.  The truly insidious part of his fate is walking downhill, knowing what was to come, understanding that things would change, and not for the better, and not quite yet.

In the meantime, I'm learning the deep dharma of parsing out each second and trying to make it into my sole reality.  Very challenging, when "now" is so fraught, so intense, so busy, so crowded.  I'm usually pretty good at it, but this situation is really pushing me to the brink of freaking out, howling.  Not that you could tell it on the outside.  But inside... it's there.

What is helping: the many kindnesses of my friends and coworkers - from soup on the porch, to fruit on my desk, walking the dog, breathing in the spring air, as much walking as I can get in, sleep when I can get it, talking about little mundane things, immersing myself in the binary technicalities of my job, having spontaneous and surprisingly heartfelt soulful conversations with people I'd never really thought I'd go there with, the smoothies that Roger makes me in the mornings, the times I take care of myself consciously, writing.

What is not helping: reading too obsessively the various threads on the internet; worrying about things that haven't happened yet; basically anything and everything that goes through my mind that isn't really simple, and really happening right now.

 This is now. Nothing bad is happening at this moment.  And a lot of good is possible.  For now, though, it's time to go to sleep.  And hope tomorrow is a slightly gentler day.