What Do Yo Do?

What do you do when you realize your mood is just swinging the wrong way?

Last night I was fixing the dressing over my gunshot wound of a clot and I felt as if I was about to panic. I called for my wife to come in...she was busy in the other room...and apparently she didn't hear me despite calling three times. I just sat at the edge of the bed, staring down at this small silver staple and gory dark red opening on my midsection, listening to a rational voice and irrational panic in my head fight for control of the driver's seat.

I wanted someone to come in and see this, to tell me if it was really as bad as I thought it was, tell me that it wasn't taking on a life of its own. I wanted reassurance that this is okay. That I did the right thing. One of the last things I did before being wheeled into the operating room was ask my wife if I was doing the right thing in having this surgery, a change from which there was no going back.

I needed to know that this would be over. Not in years or months. But soon.

I needed to know that I didn't screw up in doing this. So often it's hard to see the points in our lives where we made the right choices and easier to see where we screwed up...worse, there are plenty of times where we made wrong choices and don't understand why we are in the situations we're in.

But staring at that wound last night and fighting the urge to just cry, I began to question myself and my choices.

In the end the more rational side won out. Score another point for my mild Asperger's tipping the scale on the side of rationality. I simply don't have a choice at this point. The surgery can't be reversed. My last moment where I could have opted out of the surgery, to waddle as fast as my pudgy feet could carry me while my bare behind was wagging in the wind (stupid hospital gowns) was in the moments before they gave me the anaesthesia in the operating room, when they asked me to get up from the gurney and hop onto the surgical table.

This wound, according to my doctor, will heal. She does this for a living. She should know, and really, what choice do I have but to trust her? I trusted the doctor that referred me to surgery to start down this path. I trusted the surgeon with playing with my stomach and intestines. I trusted nurses with seeing all my private nubbins while recovering for several days in the hospital, barely able to move.

I made a choice to put my health into the hands of others, and for that there is a tradeoff where I stepped on to the train and can't stop until we reach the next station.

That still scares the bejeesus out of me at times.

I try to be decisive. My wife would laugh at this idea no doubt, but I do try. It's my own small contribution towards building a leadership quality of some kind into my son. I weigh the pros and cons and then make the choice, or make the declaration of what will be done when others abdicate by bickering constantly. I rarely tolerate a group of people hemming and hawing over something as silly as where to go for dinner or what they are going to do next, especially if it affects me; they waste more time going in circles than just making a choice and following through. But that doesn't mean that I don't second-guess myself.

There are times in this recovery where I repeatedly end up questioning myself. I supposed this is all part of the whole "emotional rollercoaster" doctors tried warning me about ahead of time. Just as no one can truly understand what this is like without going through it, no one can be fully prepared for what non-physical effects (or physical effects, really) this may have on the patient that decides to go through with this operation.

So how does one go about dealing with this, especially if food is no longer a comfort that it once was?