Diagnosis: Afterparty

After what I can only describe as a generally easy cancer journey thus far (I mean, who has the ability to chase running PRs during active chemotherapy?) I hit another small mental speed bump yesterday.

Creating my Advance Directive.

For a very organized person, the idea in theory sounds super fun, right? Planning is something I live for, right? The whole “the best gift you can give to your loved ones is having this all in place,” right?

Absolutely heart-crushingly wrong.

Make sure to have an entire box of tissues at the ready if you’re ever working on this task. Even using a template and AI to help me make sure I cover all my bases; it’s extremely depressing forcing yourself to picture your loved ones deciding to pull you off imagination-induced life support. But also, so very important that stuff is crystal clear, because this is still a very major surgery. I don’t foresee anything going wrong, but as all three surgeons reiterated, the odds are extremely low something bad will happen, but they’re not zero. In the event something goes sideways, it’s calming to know there are only a few major decisions anyone must make on my behalf.

But, once I got past the emotional part of it, excitement set in again. I’m only writing my Advance Directive because we finally have a surgery date!

July 27 at 7am.

I take a 7-to-8-hour nap while Krang and his children officially vacate the premises. They wind up (probably) in some kind of pathology lab and I wake up with a gnarly new scar, one less organ, and ideally a whole lot more future. It’s happening. The countdown is officially on.

Twenty-seven days from now, we crack this thing wide open and make a run at curing it.