T minus 8 days

Surgery is scheduled for next Thursday, 1:20 PM. And I find myself wanting the days to pass more slowly, time to start crawling. I'm trying to dig my feet in, keep next week from coming. So far my efforts to halt time have been fruitless. On the one hand I am absolutely ready to get cancer out of my body. It doesn't belong there, I don't want it there. On the other hand, I am not at all prepared for the measures required to make that happen.

It doesn't help that surgery and chemo are going to be way worse than how I've been feeling ... which is FINE. It seems like if you have to go to such drastic measures to feel better, you should have to feel pretty bad to start with. I'm still wondering if cancer isn't some imaginary thing the medical community concocted to make more money and get the public to unwittingly participate in their experiments.

I keep trying to prepare myself for next week. I picture going into surgery. I picture waking up from surgery. I picture coming home and trying to manage my household while recovering from major surgery. I picture starting chemo. I picture losing my hair. But I fear none of my pictures are that close to reality. And I'm realizing this kind of thing is something you can't really prepare for. I have a pretty strong feeling its something I just have to do, and once I'm there, then I'll figure out how I'll react.

Its very freeing actually, to know that preparation is actually impossible. It keeps me free to do other things, like finish projects for the boutique!

"Boutique? What boutique," you ask. I won't get to be there this year, but you must go shop at my Christmas boutique Mary Roseanne's Holiday Shoppe! Support breast cancer by shopping the Shoppe! (That's right, I will shamelessly use cancer as a guilt trip.)