Once again this morning I was awake at 5 o’clock and couldn’t fall back asleep — same as yesterday. What is worrying me now, and thus disrupting my early-morning sleep, is my upcoming masculinizing mastectomy.
On the one hand, I can hardly wait to do it and can’t wait to go bare-chested at the swimming-pool and climbing outdoors as soon as I’ve healed and it’s warm enough.
On the other hand, though, I’m also starting to get really worried for many different reasons.
First of all, I’ve never had surgery in my life so I simply don’t know what to expect and I’m terrified of the risks/side effects. I’m also very concerned about the recovery, the forced inactivity, and what all that might entail for my (mental) health.
Moreover, with this particularly bad flu season and COVID rampaging again and all the other illnesses going around, I’m extremely worried and afraid — reasonably — of getting sick again, which would not allow me to have my surgery at all.
But what has been keeping me awake the past couple nights is another concern: it’s the worry of not having the support that I thought I would have for my surgery. I’m afraid that the friends on whom I was counting for practical, logistic, and emotional support might not be available or as fully available as they were a few months ago.
When I first made the decision and started all the legal/practical procedures to get my top-surgery done, I had a solid support network of three local friends and one or two very close friends who could have come in from California: i.e. a total of five people on whom I could have counted to actually be with me, at my place, at the hospital, before, during and after surgery. On top of all my “remote” friends, of course, who are there for “online” emotional support.
Apart from one exception, all my “remote” friends are still there and I know they will be available on the phone, via email or to video chat. But for my local friends and the two who could have flown in from California the situation has changed and for different reasons none of them will be able to actually come and stay with me before, during, or after my surgery. And I haven’t found anyone who will be able to do so. I don’t even know who will drive me home from the hospital after the surgery — which is something I absolutely have to figure out because I won’t be allowed to drive myself home after the general anesthesia.
There’s two aspects of all this that is keeping me awake in the wee hours.
One is practical: who will drive me to and back from the hospital on the day of the surgery? Who will help me with the practical things like food and lifting things around the house in the first, hardest days of recovery (when my housemate will be away on vacation)? Who will stay for the night after the surgery to make sure I’m okay?
The other is emotional: how can I have failed to have a support network around me? How can I have failed at this once again? How can that support network that appeared to be present a few months ago have disappeared now? What did I do wrong? What do I do wrong, time and again, when it comes to close relationships? Or maybe it’s simply one question — the same old problem of mine: I do have plenty of wonderful, loving, supportive friends; but each and all of them have other more important things and/or persons in their life, other things and/or persons that they have to prioritize ahead of me: they have their own families, jobs from which they cannot take time off (or from which they understandably don’t want to take time off for my surgery), or their own issues and struggles. For each and all of them there is something/someone else before me. Understandably so because that’s how they have built their lives, based on their choices, and how I’ve built my life based on my own choices.
But this lack of support for my surgery now brings back the question to me: have I been making the “wrong choices”? Where do I keep failing at close relationships?
(And of course I have similar worries for the upcoming holidays, too, in particular for New Year’s which means so much to me, but those worries are “just” emotional, not practical.)
The Little Prince and the Fox 