What a long, strange trip it's been.

I should be in surgery right now, but instead I'm sitting at home in my nightgown, typing this. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around the events of the past 36 hours, and I honestly feel a bit fuzzy, like this isn't real. It's like one of those weird dreams you have where nothing makes sense and when you wake up you're like, 'Ah! No wonder nothing made sense! It was all a dream!'

On Monday, I had pretty much theeeeee most stressful day at work, but worked my hardest to put out as many fires as I could before leaving, thinking that I was not coming back until October. I left as a huge ball of stress, and later had to e-mail colleagues to ask them to water my plants for me, take my lunch that I didn't have a chance to eat out of the fridge, to put in a work order to have more chairs moved into my classroom, etc., etc. I wanted a day with no work before my surgery, and knew that if I went into work on Tuesday, I'd get sucked into all sorts of things I really didn't want to be sucked into.

When I finally got home, I was practically excited about my impending mastectomy - at least as much as one can be excited about amputating a body part.

Then Dr. T called.

Or wait.

I called him, and he called me back. After my post on Sunday night, I was starting to get a little stressed about the fact that I was getting ready to have this LIFE CHANGING SURGERY, and had heard nothing from any of the surgeons who were going to chop off my boob, then turn the fat in my abdomen into a replacement boob. I mean, geez, my local hospital seemed much more concerned about me when I was just going in to have an ice cream scooper put into my boob in an outpatient procedure. Now I'm having this surgery that requires a 3-5 day hospital stay, and I wasn't convinced anyone really knew I was having the surgery, including my surgeons. I intended to e-mail Dr. T and ask him WTF?! once I was done with my blog post, but he actually e-mailed me before I got to it. He asked me to call him 'tomorrow afternoon,' ( = Monday afternoon) to 'discuss your upcoming surgery.'

No big deal, I thought, he's just checking in. Finally.

Around 6 PM, we were having a conversation that went something like this:

Him: I have the results of your blood tests, and you don't have a clotting disorder. Your CT scan also looks great. But there is something about the surgery that has nothing to do with you.

Me: * silent * I can't believe he's pulling off the oldest trick in the book - It's not you, it's me!

Him: It's me.

Me: * silent *

Him: I hurt my eye over the weekend, and I have blood in my anterior chamber. Basically I can only see out of one eye right now, and I'm unable to do any surgeries.

Me: * silent *

Him: Are you there?

I honestly can't recall a lot of what followed. He did a lot of uncomfortable rambling - clearly, he felt really bad - and I did a lot of uh-huh's and ok's, and yeah's, while not really listening to him and just thinking I cannot fucking believe this! over and over and over.

We left things sort of open-ended because I cannot make decisions about realities I haven't yet accepted. After I hung up I wanted to curl up into a ball and have a good cry, but we had to go over to my parents' house for dessert - ironically, to firm up the plans for the week - so I had to hold it together. Later that night, I did have a good cry, then immediately sat down to start regrouping.

One of Dr. T's recommendations was to go ahead with the mastectomy on Wednesday and delay the reconstruction. However, after talking, I realized I've had zero communication with the surgical oncologist because I just assumed this was mostly Dr. T's surgery, and he was taking care of it. The surgical oncologist wasn't my favorite, but I figured Dr. T was the most important person in the surgery. The bottom line is that with Dr. T out of the picture, I saw no reason to go up to University Hospital just for the mastectomy. So late Monday night, I shot off several e-mails:

1. I e-mailed my Chair, asking to meet with him Tuesday morning. Clearly that October 5th return date isn't going to work for me now. After all my careful planning. Sigh.
2. I e-mailed Dr. F, the surgical oncologist at UH, asking her get back to me about my options, and whether or not she thought she would be able to do a nipple-sparing mastectomy. Since Dr. L seemed confident she could do one, I figured there was really no point at all going with Dr. F if she wasn't willing to try. 
3. I e-mailed Dr. L, explained the situation to her, and asked her if she could do a mastectomy for me ASAP (like, next week). I told her I completely understood if she couldn't, in which case I would keep my appointment up at UH on Wednesday. However, if it were possible, I preferred to do it with her. I crossed my fingers she would get back to me promptly because I really needed to make a decision fast. 

On Tuesday morning, I was meeting with my Chair about the possibility of just taking the semester off, if need be. He said he would look into the university's policy on sick leave, which is weird territory for faculty because no one really takes 'sick days.' But apparently we do have them. In fact, after six years, I have 55 days of leave. You learn something new every day. While in the meeting, my cell phone rang, and I apologetically pulled off the pompous this call is more important than you are, and said I really needed to take the call. And I'm glad I did, because it was Dr. L. She said she had just gotten my e-mail and yes, she could do a nipple-sparing mastectomy for me next week, and she had already arranged for me to meet with the plastic surgeon she works with; he could see me at 11:30. All this by 9 AM. (See? This is why I love her!) (And I knew there was a reason I brought her flowers the last time I saw her, other than the fact that I love her. You should always have a surgeon on hand who is willing to do a last-minute mastectomy for you.)

I wrapped up my meeting with my Chair, went to my office to answer a few of the ten bazillion e-mails that are inevitable the first week of classes, then headed off to my appointment with Dr. G, the plastic surgeon. While I was waiting, my cell phone rang, and since I wasn't sure when I would be called back, I didn't answer it. I checked my voice mail, though, and it was Dr. F, the surgical oncologist from UH. She asked me to call her back on her personal cell to discuss options. Seeing as how I was working my own set of options, I immediately felt guilty, like I was cheating on her.

I had a relatively uneventful visit with Dr. G. I liked him, and I'm glad I met him, as I'm starting to accept there is a real possibility that Dr. T won't come through for me, in which case I need a Plan B. Dr. L had already filled him in on the situation, and he explained that he would have a very minor role in the mastectomy, as all he would be doing was putting in either a tissue expander or an implant to hold everything in place before the reconstruction. He said it would be very easy because my skin looked healthy and 'Your breasts are the shape the designers were thinking of when they designed implants.' LOL. Amazingly, I left with a date and a time for the mastectomy, which had been worked out between Dr. L's people and Dr. G's people while I was having my breasts measured and photographed.

September 1st, 1:00.

I left feeling much lighter than I was feeling just a few hours earlier. It all fell into place so seamlessly, it felt like the right thing to do. Of course, I also 'knew' that Dr. T was the right surgeon for me when I met him, so I understand that cautious optimism is the appropriate attitude.

I left Dr. G's at around 12:15 and went home to grab some lunch before realizing I didn't actually have time for lunch before getting downtown to my 1:00 appointment with our lawyers, to sign the final copies of our wills, powers of attorney, and advance directives. I wolfed down a tomato from the garden and headed out. So much for gaining weight.

The attorneys were sooooo slow. They actually seem like fun people, but every time we've met, it seems that at least one of us is in a huge hurry. My husband had an appointment at 2:30, and my cell phone was exploding with text messages, e-mails, and phone calls while we were sitting there discussing a hypothetical scenario in which I am diagnosed with stage IV cancer, then get into a car wreck and need CPR. Does marking 'withhold CPR' on my advance directive mean I don't get any life-saving measures if I become stage IV, which is technically 'a terminal condition'? Or suppose I become a vegetable during surgery, and my husband is so distraught that I'm a vegetable that he wrecks his car driving home and becomes a vegetable, too. So we're both vegetables but we aren't dead. What then? As one of the attorneys said, she practices 'soap opera law,' meaning we get to discuss all these dramatic and highly unlikely scenarios, the type of things that really only happen on television.

Anyway, eventually my husband had to leave, so the attorneys said they would finalize the papers and send them home with me. While they were organizing all of it, I stepped out to put more money in the meter and make some phone calls. Only I already had a $20 ticket! Jesus H, are you f-ing kidding me? The meter must have JUST EXPIRED; I could still see the meter reader the next row of cars over. Great, just great. I should have just left the ticket and gone back, but because I am honest, almost to a fault, I stuffed the ticket in my purse, put money in the meter, and headed back toward the lawyers' office. I had a little bit of extra time, so I sat down in front of the courthouse to try to call Dr. T, who somewhere in all of this had texted me and told me he could do the reconstruction on September 8th. I wanted to make sure this would work with a September 1st mastectomy before canceling my appointment at UH. He didn't answer, so I decided to go out on a limb and call Dr. F anyway. It was almost 3:00 and I figured she deserved to know that I wasn't going to be showing up for surgery the next day. I couldn't hear very well, because the wind was blowing and there was a lot of traffic and construction, and there are a lot of weird, loud people and weird, loud conversations that take place outside of a courthouse. Dr. F was actually quite nice, and said she was really sorry things had turned out this way. She was also understanding of the fact that I wanted to do the mastectomy locally, and had nothing but good things to say about Dr. L - As you know, she will take great care of you. She said that in 19 years of doing surgery, this was the first time another surgeon had canceled on her, and in 19 years she had only had to cancel surgery once, because she had the flu. So when I ask in an exasperated voice, WHAT WERE THE CHANCES OF THIS HAPPENING?! I now know. They were about the same as me getting a blood clot after my hip surgery. Minuscule.

After picking the final will and other papers up from the lawyers, I headed back up to the university to pick up my son and take him to his annual physical on the opposite end of town. I was supposed to get there at 3:45 to fill out the 'ages and stages' questionnaire but we were pushing it to even make it by 4 PM, which was our actual appointment time. Or so I thought. While we were driving through traffic and I was cursing all the slow people who were not paying attention because they were on their phones, Tara, the secretary from the pediatrician's, called to ask me where I was. LOL. This comedy of errors pretty much sums it up: Tara called on Monday to remind me of Katie's appointment at 4:00 on Tuesday, and I called back to confirm that she meant my son and not Katie, because we don't have a Katie in our house. She said, oh yes, that's what I meant, I just got confused because Katie was the next person on my list. So when she called me this time, I was like, 'What do you mean where are we? I thought our appointment was at 4!' and she said, 'No, your appointment was at 3:30. Katie has an appointment at 4.' Jesus. Finally I just barked at her, 'I've had a really bad day so just tell me what you want me to do.' Meanwhile, I missed my exit onto the freeway because I cannot drive and talk on the phone, and having to drive through the downtown added at least an extra 10 minutes (though we did actually get there at 4:00 on the dot).

After the appointment, I raced home, helped my husband with dinner (OMG I was starving!), then after dinner, some of my lovely friends came by for what was supposed to be a last-glass-of-wine get-together before my surgery that was supposed to be happening the next morning. I realized around 7:45 PM that I needed to call my mom and let her know for sure that I didn't need her to come by at 3:30 AM this morning, so I excused myself to make a quick phone call. On my way back outside, my cell phone rang, and it was Dr. T, so I answered, because we had been e-mailing and texting back and forth and doing a lot of phone tag, so I wanted to touch base with him. I could tell he was still feeling bad because he talked for a really long time, and by the time I got back outside, my friends had left. OOPS! I felt bad, but I was too tired to feel bad for very long. I mean gosh, what a crazy day.

Crazy!

And surreal.

After we got the kids in bed, I pretty much crashed. I was so worn out - both physically and emotionally - that I fell asleep with no sleep aids whatsoever before 10 PM and actually slept like a baby until 2 AM. I dozed on and off between 2 and 6, and finally got out of bed around 6:30. But it was weird not having anything pressing to do.

It's 11:30 and I'm not even dressed yet. I think I'm still recovering from yesterday. So I shall wrap this up, go take a shower, get dressed, then head up to work for a meeting with my Chair and the good folks who are covering for me during this saga. And then I will take my kids to gymnastics.

And wait.

And wait some more.