Rollercoasters and roosters

So I feel a little like my life is a rollercoaster these days. When I'm feeling good, I feel very nearly healthy and thus great, but then inevitably the fatigue/nausea/anxiety catches up to me and I crater. It's so nice to have the good moments, though, that I'll take any/all of the craters just to be able to feel normal for a little bit.

Tomorrow I go in for a full day of appointments. I have a scan at 6:30am, then I meet with the surgeon to get the results of that scan at 9, followed by my pre-op anesthesia consult, and meeting with the ostomy team. I am NOT looking forward to it, mostly because everything that reminds me of surgery these days induces rather extreme anxiety. And while the prospect of getting good prognostic news from the scan is great, the fear of getting bad news totally outweighs the good. I have spent nearly all my life in search of data and information, and here for one of the first times I can remember, I think I'd really rather not know.

The main purpose of the scan is to give the surgeon a better sense of the odds that I will need a temporary colostomy, so that she can plan accordingly. Even if the scan looks great, it's still not going to be 100% that I won't need one, as there are apparently some issues that could pop up once she gets in there that would require a colostomy. But she said that if she doesn't have to do one, she won't, which is great news. But because there's still a chance I'll need one, I still have to meet with the ostomy team to go over where they're going to put it and caring for it and everything else. And, in the process of looking at the tumor to determine if I need a colostomy, we will also get my cancer restaged. And from everything I've read, stage at surgery is the single greatest predictive factor of survival. So if it's not good news it will be very hard.

The hospital also requires that I fill out advance directives/living wills/will wills before surgery, to make things easier on them in the event that I become incapacitated or die. While my surgery is long and complex (removing a large chunk of one's colon and rectum while allowing it to still function is not easy), it was not considered a risky surgery until I had my clot. Now, because of the clot, it is much higher risk, which makes me less than happy. But my surgeon hasn't ever lost a young patient on the table, so with any luck I won't be the first.

It's all just nerve-wracking. And to make things even more stressful, my husband is on the job market and has his first job talk on Monday! We fly out on Sunday morning (because with impending surgery/incapacitation, we'd rather be together than not, even for things like job talks), so he's terribly stressed about that aspect of his life, and about losing all day Wednesday to ferrying me around the hospital. As he likes to say, in any kind of normal world, going on the job market the first time should be the most stressful event in any young academic's life. Unfortunately, for us it's a distant second to my cancer treatment.

And the brakes on my husband's car went out on Friday in the midst of the big snow/ice storm, so we're still awaiting word from the mechanic on what the damage will be. Remarkably, they went out as he was stopped at a light, so he's fine, because with the roads covered in ice that could have been VERY bad. But it's an 11 yr old car, so if it's going to be a lot to fix, we might be in the market for a new car. Because that's not stressful either. So we're living in a state of basically constant stress and anxiety, which is less than fun.

But one week from today the first job talk and interviews will be done and we'll be on our way back to Boston, and two weeks from today, I'll be under anesthesia having my guts sliced and diced. So hopefully once we're through those two hurdles things will be less stressful. Though, to be fair, we were saying that as we were working 100+ hrs/week trying to work full time and finish the house in Michigan - once we sell the house and move, things will be less stressful. Oh how wrong we were!