My husband went in for surgery three months ago and I was concerned because I felt waaaaaaayyyyyy too calm. It wasn’t anything like the way things were for past surgeries.
I thought maybe I should take this as a win. But….. it made me a little uneasy to do that this time around.
You see this surgery wasn’t as complicated as the last few. Just six months before it he had surgery to remove lymph nodes in his chest and ended up with almost a complete sternotomy. So now he has a long scar down the center of his chest. This wasn’t going to be that type of surgery but it was still an impatient procedure to fix the damage that happened 6 months before that made his diaphragm stop working. So there were some real risks involved. There could have been damage to his stomach or kidney and lung. Even knowing that didn’t make me any more nervous about it.
We were leaving my teenage daughter home alone for the first time in our lives. Because of covid, she couldn’t come to the hospital with us and she would prefer to do her distance learning at home instead of feeling cooped up in a hotel room for a couple of days. She’ll be going off to college in just a little over a year so it felt like an age-appropriate thing to do. But I wasn’t worried at all about that either.
I didn’t think things should've been feeling right. I felt that I should have been stressing out about things. I should have been packed and ready to go days before leaving and I hadn’t even done that. Being calm should be a good thing but since I know that isn’t how I usually operate, it worried me.
The good thing is I did slow down enough to notice how I was feeling. That’s a plus. I’ve learned how to manage stress and anxiety on normal caregiving days. But when preparing for surgery there has always been an underlying amount of anxiety that I could always keep under control, but not fully. Now I was finding that I was taking everything in stride and it weirded me out.
I didn’t think it was necessary to try to think of all the worst-case scenarios just so I made sure that I was understanding the situation completely. I also didn’t want to have an all-out breakdown at the most inconvenient time possible. I’d been sleeping well. Eating fine. I cleaned the house, with my husband, to prepare for that week but also spent time hanging out and relaxing. So I wasn’t even telling myself that I was too calm but then acting like I was stressed out.
I had things set up so I didn’t have to worry about much the next couple of weeks. I had podcasts recorded and ready for you to listen to. I canceled Yoga classes for a week so I could make sure I wasn’t over-extending myself when we got back home. I did have things in place to look forward to… I had some shows that I looked forward to watching and some reading I wanted to do.
But those are things I always do.
I knew that I still had to be my husband’s advocate in the hospital. I still needed to be prepared to help him recover at home. I knew that I would be exhausted for at least a couple of weeks. I didn’t think the progression of things would be any different with this surgery. So I decided to be cautiously calm. Let the doubt, worry, and stress show when they wanted to peek out. I figured maybe after years of knowing how I would feel and the emotions I would have, as we went through the process of preparing, going into and recovery from surgery, was allowing me to simply be prepared for it all.
Maybe I knew that I would cry at some point and I would be ok with it … so I stopped and decided to just wait until it happened and not worry about it happening. I felt like I was calm because I knew that there are only certain things I can actually do and control and they are were taken care of. It was like the first time something went right that you’d been working on and it caught you off guard. Like a baby finally sleeping through the night and you find yourself
