Some of the knots I've been in the past few weeks have calmed down a little enough for me to write about them.
Basically my mom needs this awful terrible surgery.
The surgery alone takes 6 hours.
Recovery is like 9 months to a year, although people can get back to some semblance of a routine in about 6 weeks (but it probably still involves dealing with the wound and drainage).
There's huge risks of infection (if the patient even survives).
I can't write this without crying.
It's so fucking hard to think that she has to go through this and the levels of pain she'll experience.
She may not get the surgery, because it's so risky.
But there are risks to not getting it.
I f she *does* get the surgery, the gamble--the whole reason why--is that it will be okay and the hope that (after a long period of recovery and pain) she will be fine.
But imagine having a date where you actually plan for your life as you know it to go away. For like 9 months. To schedule the kind of pain where you cannot breathe without agony. How does a physical being survive like that? Only so many coloring books and movies can get you through.
I've been in knots for weeks, ever since I learned about it.
On my birthday I cried driving into work thinking that this time next year on my birthday I may not have her.
This is just one portion talking but on an emotional level I don't feel like I could survive that level of loss.
Maybe you don't. Loss like that breaks you and you just reform in a different way.
It's just so much to think about.
I'm really trying to live in the "right now" where nothing terrible has happened yet. It's both a blessing and a curse to be human sometimes and have this ability to think ahead, imagine the future.
It's been hard to write about because I haven't wanted to face it really.
When I have talked about it, like to my dad, I feel myself becoming disembodied, in order to talk about it, and from a far away place I notice my heart rate rising and this slight feeling of faintness at the edges, things start getting a little darker and from that distant place I wonder curiously if I will just collapse. It hasn't happened yet but even now writing about it, it could almost.
