"Waiting is the hardest part"

 More than one of you has told me that "waiting is the hardest part". Part of me hopes that is true, that knowing and getting good or bad news will be a relief.  For me, the sitting around, putting my life on hold, feeling normal and not normal, is hard. 

I am down to one week and one day, yet it feels so endless. I am looking at puppies for sale on Craig's list,  trying to master the "British Bisquit",  constructing another layer of my Lego structure, and sending bunny ears to Lizzie. 

Thinking about post-op has me pretty nervous. I keep having thoughts of backing out.  The "going into surgery" doesn't bother me, it is the "waking up".  I am carrying a pretty big load of worry, balanced with impatience.  I know that both of these mental states will do nothing to change the events or outcome, but they linger around the edges of my mind anyway. 

Convincing myself that, "everything will be okay", seems just as much fantasy and guess work as, preparing for the worst.  But preparing for the worst, leaves a whole lot of room for me to be pleased with the outcome. 

So, this week, I am basically preparing for the worst. I looked up the survival rates for different kinds of cancers, that's fun. I like checking which cancer treatments are most effective, and  which cancer types still evade treatment. All of this gives me just enough information to feel elevated by the survival rates, crushed by the lingering high death rates, and a growing curiosity to find out which group I am going to be assigned. 

I do continue to be optimistic that I will survive.  My big question is, at what cost?  


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