Done

In the middle of June, I flew off to another city where one of only two surgeons in Canada capable of doing the surgery performed a procedure on me that cured my Condition once and for all.

Or so the Government of Canada decreed. Insofar as I was concerned, I was "cured" last year when I took a pretty radical step in my treatment plan. But...I'm not going to complain.

Still horribly tired with practically zero energy levels. Unpacking a "welcome home" prezzie that was a Lego kit exhausted me and I hadn't even started building yet. Ack.

I'm seriously thinking of taking an extra week of unpaid leave off work right now.

Some humour that arose when I was chatting with a dear old friend:


Me: Pain's always there. It comes in bursts, like someone is taking a scalpel to me.
N (laconically): That's...because someone did.
Me: *pfffbt* Thanks for pointing out the obvious.
N (drily): You're welcome.

Ah...with such friends, how can I fail? Seriously though, I want to take you all for your support throughout this time. Thank you thank you thank you.

And now, I'm off to bed as I'm seeing spots in my vision. Stupid exhaustion.

Cycling airlock...

I'm here at the hospital with about 2-3 hours left to go before the surgery happens. It's been quite a stressful experience so far, with some sweet spots. I'm glad that my friends came by to visit and that my sis is here too.

I had a serious attack of the doubts last night, as I sat all alone in my hospital room. I mean, what if this is *NOT* the right path for me? What if I'm mistaken and this is just some mid-life crisis?

However, there is evidence that this is the right path - I'm apparently happier, healthier and not as much of an annoyance. :) Heck, my internal users (I manage an internal-facing software team) wished me well and one of them dragged herself back from maternity leave to have lunch with me to see me off.

That's...never happened to me before. It's strange being liked, but that again, that's almost a textbook example of what a successful treatment of the Condition is.

I'm pretty sure this is the right path for me. As a dear friend last night put it, it's like wedding jitters...and that's what this is, pre-surgical jitters.

A kind nurse (who's working at the Hospital today instead of the Residence) came by to tell me a joke that she'd promised to tell me earlier. That was really quite nice of her.

Well, I suppose I should rest or meditate or something before I start climbing the walls. I obviously haven't learnt too much patience in all this. 2.5 hours to go. Whee!

Entering the airlock

Well, I'm sitting on my bed at the recovery residence, anxiously awaiting my surgery to happen next week. The surgeon came by, had a pre-op examination on me and assured me that everything is A-OK. I'm also meeting other patients who have already had the same surgery...and they're all universally in pretty rough shape. I'm tense and stressed.

Whee.

The staff here seem excellent though. T-2 days and change...then I should be free from this Condition.

Checkpoints

I've always stopped at various checkpoints during the course of treatment for my Condition to ensure that I'm still on the right path, emphasis on the "I" given that in cases such as this, there's a lot of commentary and pressure from external sources, some motivated by personal gain, others out of love and good intentions. I will say that the phrase "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" is certainly true here.

I'm now sitting just shy of a week before surgery, one that requires me to sign an amazing number of disclaimer forms prior to the doctor operating on me. The gist of all the forms all revolve around the following concepts:
a.) If I die, it's not their fault
b.) No exchanges, returns or refunds

It's the last one that makes my sis and I giggle, but I guess there have been some poor unfortunates who have chosen to skip all the safeguards straight to the remedial surgery then regretted it. In fact, the support groups are all rife with "Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!" notices warning everyone considering this particular course of treatment to be really, really, absolutely, totally sure.

Am I 100% sure? To be completely honest, not quite. Also honestly, I don't think I've the type of personality to be 100% sure about anything - the worm of doubt is always at the back of my mind, which has both advantages and disadvantages. But as things go, yes, I'm as practically sure as I'm ever going to be, which is around 99.9997% sure.

Surprisingly, I passed the threshold of "am I really sure" last night. As part of surgical prep, I had to go off my medications a couple of weeks back to allow the meds to flush out from my system before I go under the knife. I've gone through this once before in early 2007 when I had to go in for my last surgery and the effects of going off meds was...unpleasant. This time, it's been touch-and-go thus far and I was terribly afraid that I'd regress back to where I was prior to treatment. However, what I'm finding now (even though all the meds have been flushed out of my system by now) is that some changes, especially the neural remapping seem semi-permanent; I'm not having the same brutal hidden side-effects as I did the last time. That came to a head last night when I had an unplanned event that in turn made me realize, really realize that this surgery I'm going to have is truly remedial surgery, in that what it's doing is fixing certain birth defects (from my viewpoint - most of you without the Condition will most vehemently disagree, I'm sure) and making the current me congruent with a healthy me.

Which is the textbook case of "yes, this is the right course of treatment for patients with the Condition".

Up or down?

Snippet #1: I was off to visit my team which was situated in another city a little while back. The day before I left, I had a team lunch as was the norm. The topic of my upcoming surgery came up and one person asked, "So, what's this surgery for?", to which I replied, "Oh, just some female stuff". He shuddered and exclaimed, "I'm glad I'm not female!", which earned him The Glare from both his manager (who's female) and I.

Snippet #2: I was chatting with a couple of senior executives recently. It was a casual hallway chat and these two have been needling at one another for some time now. One of them (let's call him Mr. A) was complaining about the other (Mr. B) treating him "mean" and solicited my input on the matter. My response was apparently quite funny to Mr. B (which wasn't really what I intended), who then proceeded to smack Mr. A on the arm and said, "See? Even she knows how to man up better than you do!"

I'm currently reading Off Armageddon Reef by David Weber. As with practically all of of his books, this is a great read. In this novel, the protagonist is a woman whose personality and memory has been put into an artificial body long after she died. She awakes centuries after her death to find the last human planet regressed and strayed horribly from the original colonization plan. Understanding that social mores have shifted back to hard patriarchy, she reconfigures her artificial body into a male one in order to nudge the world back on the original plan (and thus have a defence against the alien menace that wiped out Earth in the first place).

Here's my question to you all - I propose that were it a matriarchy and the protagonist was male, the thought of switching to being female to help achieve the mission wouldn't ever cross his mind. Thoughts? Am I wrong? I submit that there's nothing wrong with either solution in this hypothetical case - I'm just curiously exploring why societal norms seem to encourage a unidirectional "man up" attitude (and an unspoken converse of "fem down").

Stressed but satisfied.

It's been quite an eventful few weeks. I've traveled quite a bit during that time and I've still another long trip scheduled in a little over a week when I go for my surgery.

I had a good visit at one of my company's satellite offices (or head office - I can never remember which is which given that they're both pretty big). I used some of the lessons learnt at my recent certification with my team there and the results were phenomenal. I can't say much about it other than the fact that our initiative is going forward far better than expected now.

I also had a chance to go for a work-related conference which was a fantastic opportunity to network. If I play my cards right, there's more goodness arising from the contacts I made at the conference.

The flipside of all this is that I'm still one mega-stressed puppy. With my surgery under two weeks away, this is not a good place to be. *sigh*