“Keep your game face on” – today’s note to my wife

The weekend before the suregery (3 days and 2 days) before the surgery and we are trying to keep things normal. We lost our main distraction when my wife finished her massive project.  It was such a blessing to have that project to keep us focused and distracted on a big task at hand.  But now it is gone and we have only a couple of days to churn through.  A whole weekend.  So what do you do?

Day 1 of the weekend was the beginning of soccer season.  Although the kids know mommy is going to have surgery for cancer we are not telling them the exact day so that they don’t get too worried.  That said, they just know things. They can seen the tension and the irregularities in our life.  Our son played a nice game of soccer and for once his mother wasn’t chatting and saw him score.  A nice goal in which he kicked in a rebound reflection off his own shot.  He was so proud of himself and when we congratulated him later, he said, “That was a goal for you.  A goal of determination”.  Darn kids, they sure can make you cry.

As I said, the goal was to stay the course for our kids so we had a couple of boys over to help celebrate our son’s birthday and make him feel like all is okay.  They giggled their way to sleep.

Sunday was more prep and cleaning day.  The things that I don’t do most of the time and won’t have time doing: 1) Laundry, 2)Watering the garden, 3) Answering all of her well wishes emails.  I took our son to the football home opener.  The 49ers slogan today was “Get your Game Face on”.  Well we adopted it in our household.  It is how we tackled the day getting everything done.  Our family was a model of efficiency.  We planned also to have a nice birthday dinner for our son and his uncle with the immediate family.  The dinner was for them but also for my wife to get her mind off things.  A quiet dinner at home was not what we needed.  It was also a time to mentally walk through the logistics of the next two days – Who is picking up the kds?  Who is going to be there during and after the surgery?  Who is going to be with the kids when I’m at the hospital?

We’re about as prepared as we could be at this point.  99.5% prepared!  Of course my wife is pounding out emails and running around making the kid’s lunches for tomorrow as I type this out.  I think she is starting to drive me crazy with the last minute reminders.    I just looked over at her and smiled.  She got the point…Game Face…yes, put it on and keep it on.

We’ve started a nightly ritual of checking in with each other to see if we are both okay.  Still anxious?  Check.  Had a good laugh today? Check.  Had a good cry today?  Check.  Learn something new today? Check.  What a day and weekend this was.

Tomorrow- Preparation day including Pre-op Lab work, Nuclear prep, pre-op with the RN