New week

Last night I slept for nearly seven hours—the longest in ages. Amazing how that changes my outlook on the world. This healing time peels back to basics—am I sleeping? Am I cold (goosebumps are bad for stitches)? how much pain is there? These are mostly questions I don’t ask in my regular life, or at least questions that don’t seem to shape the whole context of my days. But this is a new moment, and it brings with it these new questions.

I am making helpful discoveries. Keep the pain medication religiously to 6 hour doses—never stretch it out (I take the next dose in 17 minutes and can feel the crescendo that comes before the quieting). Sleep in my comfy (if ugly) Danish recliner rather than in a bed. Melatonin before bed and more blankets and pillows than I think I’ll need. Nap every afternoon. Ask others to get down a plate or a mug from a shelf. Watch and talk while dinner gets made rather than chopping and sautéing. These are new habits, and they are not forming without an effort.

The house and the village have emptied out. All of my associates have gone home now. Carolyn flew out yesterday afternoon. Melissa is on the South Island with her brother. Michael is back at work. My house smells like flowers and sounds like the sea.

My first days home were hard—this place is familiar and yet there are ways I am so unfamiliar. But the present becomes normal more quickly than I would have imagined. I feel like I am blinking into 2014 for the first time, looking around at this year that has been off to a bad beginning. What happens to it now?

I have paused on this sunny, breezy day at the crest of an in-breath. Tomorrow Stan will call and tell me the biopsy results and the future will become more clear than it has been in a month. I crave and dread the answers he provides. He thought there was a 90% chance that I wouldn’t have cancer in the lymph nodes. But there was also a 90% chance I wouldn’t get breast cancer at all.

I can see, over this next rise, the terrain of my next weeks taking form. This week, doctors and drains out and diagnoses. Next week the first day of the new school year (and Aidan begins high school). We become New Zealand citizens. The week after that I teach my first leadership program post surgery. There are plane tickets to buy, programs to plan, slide decks to make.

I can’t remember a time when I could see what I would be doing in three weeks but wondered who I’d be being in three weeks. It is unsettling and sort of interesting for a developmentalist to be asking questions like that, here from my perch on the crest of the neutral zone.