Yesterday I had the surgery. I set the alarm for 5 am so I'd have time to take a second shower with some super-germicide as ordered, then appear at the hospital, about as far east from my place as you can go in Manhattan and a couple of miles downtown, by 7 am. Instead I woke at 4:45 after little sleep, as if I knew what was coming. After the shower, I walked rapidly through the ghostly, snowy dark (how empty the streets are at 6 in the morning after a snowfall!) to the subway and then the bus, arriving at the hospital half an hour early. It was oddly comforting to see how busy the hospital was at 6:30 am, staff going in and out chatting on cellphones or walking with quick steps down corridors.
From there it went like clockwork, as it pretty much always does at Sloan-Kettering; they have their firm routines, and you're pushed along the required stops on the road with beautiful precision. To my joy, I did not have general anethesia; instead I was given Propofal (if that's how it's spelled), the Michael Jackson drug. I did not even count down...the last words I heard were, "We're just giving you something to sedate you first." There was no second as far as I could tell, and I woke up feeling remarkably well, considering. Big elastic bandage around my chest, but couldn't see beneath it, and still haven't really looked, so nothing to get upset about there. I'm saving that for later.
My dear daughter C. picked me up on time, stuck me in a taxi for a damned expensive ride, and by midday we were at my table having tea, toast and jam before she had to return to work. I was almost euphoric: It's over! Then I popped one of the Vicodin and basically slept dreamlessly on and off the rest of the afternoon, evening and night. In between bouts of sleep I ate the chicken-and-cornbread pot pie I'd thought to make the day before. So far, so good.
But I woke this morning in the lowest spirits I've had since the diagnosis in late December, basically spent an hour or so mopping tears. The pain had worsened over the course of the day, and I realized when I woke up that it hurt more than yesterday to reach things, or pick things up (like the flowerpot one of the cats upset in the middle of the night), or wash dishes. I didn't have to get up for any reason, so I lay there exhausted, in spite of all the sleep. Then the anxious thoughts began:
1. Now that I've experienced this relatively minor out-patient surgery, I'm more afraid than ever of the more extensive surgery with general anesthesia I'll have to have if the post-op path report is not good. Sure, that's now unlikely, but that's what I was told at other times...So unlikely that the sentinel node will be malignant! Odds are that the altered appearance of your nipple is nothing at all! If there's one thing I've absorbed from this, it's that unlikely things do happen.
2. My daily habit is to leave my apartment as soon as I'm dressed, rain or shine, work or no work, to have breakfast out while I read the paper. I don't really feel the necessity of this when I'm a houseguest at someone's spacious home, so it must have to do with a kind of morning loneliness or claustrophobia, or both. In spite of feeling pretty awful, I did get dressed and went out today, only to feel dismayingly weak and invalid-ish. Basically I had the gait and strength of a ninety year old woman. Yes, that's to be expected 24 hours after even out-patient surgery, but it brought back very unpleasant buried memories of feeling that way for six solid months during chemotherapy eleven years ago.
3. This led to lots of self-pitying thoughts about being alone. In addition to Real Estate Envy and Good Health Envy, I felt a bad infusion of Partner Envy. How well that must work: you have someone by your side who by institutional imperative (at the least) is obligated to take care of you, or better yet is impelled to do it by their emotional investment in you. You have a claim on them, very different from a relationship with good friends who are being kind (your grown kids have a deep emotional investment, but if they have young children of their own, as all three of mine do, their main obligations are elsewhere). And if you live with your main squeeze, you don't have to feel that you're burdening him or her too much. That's how the partner system works, but it hasn't been there for me for many years.
4. As one of their little jokes, the gods decided to render my cable box completely dysfunctional last night, so the comfort of holing up in bed (and there really is no other place to hole up in my studio apartment) while watching amusing stuff I'd saved for this occasion was trashed. This is a new cable box, installed last summer -- what amazing timing. No TV at all till it's fixed, and of course no appointments to fix it are available for days. I could read, but my head is foggy and the programs on my DVR would have been just what the doctor didn't order.
Yes, this is all mostly silly, made larger by lying in bed feeling sorry for myself. Big deal: I thought I'd work intensively on the book this month and that's not possible. So there's no partner to hover over me and bring me tea and pick up the dirt from the plant that the cat sent crashing at 3 am. So I'm not my usual energetic and curious self the day after surgery and feel both restless and also unable to do anything to entertain myself now that the cable box is sitting there dead and useless. At this point, I'm alive and haven't heard anything different. And I long ago decided that I'd rather take care of myself than live with a partner I'm not downright crazy about. Plus there's a fair chance I'd have to be the partner who takes care of the other (given my luck), which sounds much less appealing.
One step at a time, to paraphrase the useful advice of AA.
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