Coming Down To The Wire

(NOTE: If you are seeing this on Facebook, please click below to see the entire post or go to my blog itself. I don't always make my point in the first paragraph, which is all that shows up on my Facebook page. I mean, if you actually want to see it all :).)

5 more days. I realized last night that I don't want to do this. Yes, I want - no, NEED - relief, and yes this is a last resort, and no nothing else has worked, and yes this is supposed to improve my quality of life. So why don't I want it? As bad as things are, my pain is a "known". Life after next Wednesday, according to what I've read on online forums for people who have had it, is a great "unknown". That there are a fairly large number of people who have serious side effects or whose procedure fails doesn't concern me as much, as I know that God's hands will be on those of my surgeon, and both my soul and my body are under His care. (If there is a failure of some sort, it will be because God chooses to use that - to use me - somehow for His glory, and I'd be ok with that too of course.)

So now Thanksgiving is over. I ate a plate of food, ate slowly, chewed well...and was sick until 6:00 this morning. These next 5 days will be spent on mostly liquids with small (a few bites) amounts of only those foods which will build up my body for the assault it is about to have on it. Plus I'm not sure how I will get my nutritional needs met in the days/weeks afterward, and my body will need all the nutrient support it can get for the healing. So I will be concentrating on quality protein in tiny amounts. I have been saving all of my meat juices, skimming off the fats and straining out every morsel of food, and freezing them for my clear liquids afterward, and plan to make a good marrow broth as well for the nutritional value.

I've been pushing myself to accomplish things these last couple of weeks, and by mid-day my body is screaming at me to stop but I always push just a little more, so much I want to get done before Wednesday. Yesterday making Thanksgiving dinner I had to slam down painkillers through the day just to get through it. Last night - well, early this morning - I decided that whatever didn't get done isn't going to happen now. No more pushing, no more eating, no more accomplishing. From now on it is just about preparing my body and my spirit and my mind...

It will all be fine, I'm not fearful, I just don't want to face the unknown. But I'm not facing it alone. Besides family and friends who will be with me I will be in a "God-cloud" through it all, as I always am. There's no room for fear but leaving the known, no matter how miserable and painful it is, for the unknown isn't something I am looking forward to. I will do it - I HAVE to do it - but I don't want to do it.