You know what they say about assumptions

Cancer makes explicit all of the implicit assumptions. Once you start to peel away all the things you take for granted, you realize how truly fragile life is. Life is a glass flower that even breath could shatter. You assume your husband will be the same tonight as last night. That he will walk, talk, laugh, love. The possibility of anything else is absurd. But cancer steals that certainty. It makes you realize that the life you take for granted is built on a foundation of thousands of assumptions about the successful workings of the complex differential equation of your body, your life, and your universe. In truth, if one tiny strut of that foundation cracks, the whole thing could come tumbling down.

He may not walk tomorrow at this time. He may not talk. His personality may change. He may have to relearn those things, just like our 1-year-old daughter. 

Nobody knows.

Somewhere, now, they are preparing to open his skull, to expose his brain. To them, it is just an organ to be dissected and stitched back together. To me, it is a man I fell in love with when I was 19 years old at a campfire in Vermont, because he was goofy, and loving, and kind. To me, it is the father of my three children, the one who plays weird video games with them and jumps on the trampoline. To me, it is a caring physician and a brilliant scientist. It is a web of all of the strands that make him him, and if any wrong one of them is cut, the whole life we have built together for 17 years could collapse.

When I was a child, I used a technique to rationalize my fears. One time when I was six, my grandmother, who lived with us at the time, didn't come home as expected. This was before cell phones, and we weren't sure where she was. I started to think about what could have happened to her. Did she die in a car crash? Was she run over by a bus? Did somebody murder her? But then I asked myself, what is the likelihood that the same thing I am worried about happening to her actually happened? I knew that it was very low. Despite the statistical inaccuracy, I told myself from then on that if I imagine something terrible happening, it is very unlikely to happen. For my whole life, that irrational thought has given me comfort when I am afraid of the unknown.

However, most of my fears before now have truly been irrational. And now, today, I am facing very rational fears about real possibilities. It is a different world, now, that the foundation has cracked. The once inchoate fears are now corporeal.  The possibilities that were once the musings of an anxious mind are all anticipated possible complications of a brain surgery gone wrong. 

I am no longer sure what story I will tell to protect myself. It cannot be that because I have imagined it, it is impossible. All of these fears are possible now. The unreality of the situation (of a husband's awake brain surgery a few rooms away) and the derealization that brings is protecting me, for now. I suppose it only needs to last another six hours, when reality will become clear, and the fears can dissipate in the solvent of realism.

Anyway, Eric is in surgery. We will know soon. For now, I am holding it together, assuming everything will be okay.

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