I am blogging to you today from a hospital waiting room, waiting for my blonder half to emerge from a surgery of surgeries, one ovarian tumor lighter than she was when she went in. The surgeon is just shy of one hundred percent positive that it is a benign tumor and promised not to touch any vital organs unless they were "horribly diseased," which, though a brash turn of phrase from an otherwise plucky doctor, struck us as almost comforting after the Brooklyn accented anesthesiologist told us that it was possible for my lady to experience, death, nerve damage, stroke, bran damage, etc. from the general anesthetic, but, hey, a piano could fall on our head just walking down the street, so fuhgettaboutit. So despite anticipating my being on a slightly paranoid piano watch for the next few days, at least I'm not panicked while my future wife goes under the knife.
The short story is that in running tests for a completely unrelated operation on a major tear and boney impingement in the stuff that holds her hip together (college basketball plus sucking the marrow out of life one Chelsea Piers adult league and round of beer pong with the team at a time) they found this tumor, which meant a rapid transition from our not having a care in the world to having two pretty big cares in the world: one apparently the size of an orange, and possibly with teeth and hair growing in it (which is normal in the tumor world) and the other...well, the doctors didn't use any fruit metaphors to describe her hip issues, so I don't remember how big the tear is, but I know it's bad news.
The point I'm trying to make here, is that for a four month and change relationship, this was quite a mound of mashed potato worries to sling on our otherwise carefree veggie platter of girlfriend and girlfriend with very little notice. Now the gravy: I've never really had anything life threatening come my way, and I'm not great at dealing with anything serious in the first place. Forget life threatening, I've never broken a bone, had to say goodbye to someone I loved without ample notice, (my grandma was 97 when she bid us adieu, which, though sad, is kind of what you expect from a grandma of her years) or gone through any really major trauma ever. Well, family matters got rocky there in high school with an un-fun divorce coupled with a family member or two in rehab, more therapy than you can shake a $90/hr stick at, and the realization that I was a weird-o, which a was difficult to deal with before I figured out a way to make a living doing it, but that was years ago, and I’ve done a lot of work processing all of that. I was a worrier as a kid. I was high strung and thought the world at the cusp of a clumsy collapse at any given moment.
As a matter of fact, I've spent a huge chunk of my life trying to learn how to NOT take things so seriously, a skill which I have skillfully mastered, and am now skillfully happy and able to move and groove with the ups and downs of what has turned out to be an extremely ups-and-downs-filled career. So what happens when real trauma comes my way? What coping mechanism kicks in then? Is it back to panic and worry? Obsessing over details and making deals with the universe wherein if I am able to hold my breath for the entire time it takes for my car to pass through a tunnel my future wife won’t die in surgery? Am I going to go back to being neurotic, or will I stay cool, calm, collected, and unable to process anything real without a joke and a high five?
Again, no one's life is at risk here, but that steaming mound of double surgery is still swimming in butter on that plate of ours, and it's tricky business.
Mmm...butter. Goddamn, I would kill for some mashed potatoes right now. I'm in a hospital, they must have some somewhere... I wonder if there's a cafeteria downstairs...
Damnit. Ok, so I’ll admit, somewhere along the line of learning how to let things roll off my shoulders, I lost my ability to focus on anything in any way upsetting. In fact, focusing on any single thing for any length of time is an ace long lost from my deck, and though I've done my damnedest to replace it with a wild card or joker doctored with a sharpie and a hand drawn "A", it's never exactly the same thing. My girlfriend is right when she worries that I’ll not be the best care taker, and I’m an asshole when I assure her that just like the song says, “I’ll be there,” because I know I may not be cut out for this.
I took our second ever fight for her to communicate to me that she needed some major support, much more than I thought I was giving, and our third ever fight for me to realize that I was going to have to stop drop and roll to find a way to make time for said support in my never-a-dull-moment-cabaret-and-burlesque-nervous-audition-after-nervous-audition schedule, at least while my girlfriend is recovering from surgery, and possibly for good. Either way, I’m sitting in a waiting room terriefied, not that the surgery will go poorly, but that our relationship will if I can’t pony up and simmer down.
More in a moment. Aunt Cathy just got here and I should stop clacking away on my iPad and look concerned. Sigh… for better or worse, here I come!
