I am one pound down today after not having weighed in last week due to being out of town at a fabulous (NOT DIET) break, and then going in for surgery Monday night (NOT DIET either, but waaaaayyyyyy less fun).

The surgery itself was actually pretty easy to bounce back from.  If you are squirmish skip this paragraph, but for those who want the story, very little vaginal blood - like barely needing a pantiliner quantity, and the most of the ‘incisions’ they make for laparoscopic procedures are really just like deep puncture cuts.  They are seaed with steri-strips and I just drop on some betadine and a new bandage and don’t feel a thing.  The exception is the ‘big’ hole they made in my belly button.  Now, I am someone who holds most of my weight in my belly (this has been true all my life, there are pictures of a 3 year old me with a big budda belly and pretty normal arms and legs and butt).  So getting through this belly button on this big belly was apparently harder than usual for them, but they managed to do it, and despite worries it wouldn’t heal well, the healing is progressing normally.  It’s the incision that hurts the most, and I had a lot of bruising around it at first, but luckily having my mom here now means I get it checked by a doctor daily, so I know it’s on the right track.

I have obviously not been exercising, although I wear myself out doing almost nothing.  Yesterday a 15 minute walk around the neighborhood for the fête de la musique wore me down completely.  I’ve been trying to avoid napping because I’m not sleeping well unless I take Ambien (and I am down to one final little Ambien).  I took one last night and slept well for the first time since Tuesday (the night after surgery when I still had the anesthetics levels high I slept).

I’ve also had very little appetite.  I generally eat because someone else points out the time to me.  Even when I do eat I am tired of it pretty fast.  I have done enough reading on weight and metabolism to know that I don’t want to be eating at this level of calories for long- with the surgery my body is already in fight mode and a severe caloric restriction will only enhance this, so I need to find ways to boost my total calorie intake.

I’m still doing low carb.  I re-started Wednesday and even in the hospital didn’t have too many, since I only ate one meal (breakfast) which was all carbs but still a small yogurt, small applesauce and 4 peices of melba toast doesn’t make an enormous bolus of sugar.  I was on 3 litre drips of glucose fluid, so all in all it was clearly out of low carb but not terrible (I’m positiive I ate considerably more carbs during our nice weekend away).

Today is the big day of finding out where we are.  We see the doctor at 3:40pm.  I am going with my husband, I had to tell my mother she wasn’t coming with me (and she was VERY disappointed).   But ultimately it’s my decision to make, and the person who needs to understand it all and support me and help make any tough decisions is my husband, not my mom.  She asked if they could both go and I said, “probably, but that’s not what I want”.  Am I a cold hearted bitch?  I know she is terribly worried, I know she wants to make sure everything is handled well, I know as a doctor she would ask different questions than me (I’ve asked her to write these down).

But this is hard enough on me, on my husband, on our marriage without having a third party witness.  In the end if we have any choices to make they are up to us. If the cancer is on the scarier side than what we hope, well, we need to deal with that together, and there is little mom can do about it.  If as I pray, the cancer is slow growing, low grade, and very contained and we can consider a treatment path which might give us a chance at a baby, that is a decision that can only be made jointly by me and my husband.  Family, friends, experts, other doctors etc can help us see peices of the puzzle, but the only people who can weigh out the risks and benefits of such as situation is the two of us.  I can’t do it alone, nor can he.  Well meaning friends and family and knowledgable experts can give perspectives and facts, but at the end of the day it comes down to US.

So, you can add a small amount of Mom-Stress on top of the rather overpowering Health-Stress right now.  Luckily work has been great, so no work-stress to speak of, and I think I’ll use some of my waiting time this morning to deal with house-is-a-mess-stress.

Once again, thanks to you, my friends, for your support.