Calm, Cool, Collected and Composed. NOT!!!!!!

Why is it you can look so calm, cool, collected and composed on the outside, but really be freaking out in your mind. For all intents and purposes I look like any other normal person going about their business, when inside my brain it's a different story. I am fixating on things with such morbid thoughts, it takes my breath away.

You know the commercial with the guy or girl casually walking down the street listening to their walkman, but their shadows are dancing around wildly to the music. That's how I feel, but not dancing with music. It feels like, if you saw my shadow, I would be pulling at my hair and beating and/or slapping at myself, just going plain crazy.

I love to read, so to occupy my mind, I have been voraciously reading to keep from going nuts. I know I should not be feeling this way. Everything is going to be fine, but my mind says what if it doesn't go fine.

I took care of my mother for four months when she was dying. I loved doing that for her. But I also knew she was mortified by having to have someone (even if it was me, her own daughter) to take care of her. I really think I am ten times worse than her about that. I don't want something to happen to me that would cause my husband and my daughter to have to take care of me. I'm not afraid of dying, but I am deathly afraid of being physically dependent on other people (even the people that I know love me dearly) for life's necessities. It freaks me out just thinking about it.

I worry that maybe I could have gotten a better neurosurgeon (should I have gone to UAB or HealthSouth); how long I will be under the knife (they told me two hours); if the anesthesia will give me complications after surgery (I am allergic); if I will have temporary or permanent paralysis after surgery (they said not very likely); how long I will have to stay in the hospital (they told me one night); if it will be cancerous (won't know for approximately three weeks); if the tumor can reoccur (will have to have follow-up MRI's every year to check and see); and more than a hundred other dreadful thoughts all at once.

God will take care of me, no matter what the outcome, because He is with me always, and I place my trust in Him that all my needless worries are just wasteful thoughts inside my head.

Four days and counting 'til my surgery. I dread it. I have a low threshold for pain and don't like to be in the hospital. So what else is new!

~Debbie~