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".