The Road to Recovery

It's done. Done is good. And now I will keep feeling better a little at a time. It went pretty well as far as these things go. I'm uncomfortable any time I'm not just sitting still. And I walk around hunched over like a question mark. But having read about all the symptoms I could have had before and all the things that could go wrong during and after, really this is a breeze. They gave me the good drugs so I'm alright. Though the drugs do specifically say that they impair mental faculty so don't hold me to anything.

Going under the knife

I'm heading back to Boston tomorrow to have the surgery on Tuesday. To be honest, I'm not sure how I feel about that. Relieved that the wait is finally over, certainly. Not scared. I think I've been running around so much this month that it doesn't entirely feel real. I've had so many trips to that hospital for appointments that it doesn't feel any different even though it's very different. I more than half feel like I should be biking to get there. I do wish it could have all happened more quickly. The more time I have to think about it the more I think about it.

Anyway, don't know when I'll feel like posting again, or when I'll have anything interesting to say. Recovery is going to be a lot of sitting around while my abdomen heals up. I don't think that will be exciting for anybody. In about a month I'll be heading out for the Woods Hole Film Festival where Killer is screening. I'll definitely have a lot to say about that. And then two weeks later it will screen again at We Like 'Em Short in Baker City Oregon. I won't make it to that but I am more than a little pleased to say that it's screening nationwide. 4 states so far and counting.

Pre-Op

The pre-op appointment was kind of boring except for the 3 vials of blood that they had to do a lot of poking to get. It's the 4th time I've had blood drawn in the last 2 months and this chick had a hard time finding a useful vein. I'll admit I'm not an easy one, but ouch.

What the MRI told us

Here's the first thing I noticed about today's doctor. He was cute, and younger than I am, though not by much. But when did I get old enough for specialist doctors to be younger? Anyway, I would be totally crushing on him except A) he's married, and B) I'm not likely to ever see him again. We shall call him Dr. S.

Pictures for the fun of it

Here are a couple of the pictures that I've been taking while down here at the Cape. They're not award winning photos, but taking them make me happy.

(Also I got the week of teaching in Maine, and I have a confirmed surgery date of 6/25.)

On the director track

I'm going to tell you my day chronologically because while my committee meeting was in the morning it still wasn't the first important thing to happen.

TMI

This week has been stressful. Not because of the end of the semester - finishing the film on Tuesday, screening it last night, having my committee review meeting next Monday morning - that's all to be expected at the end of the first year of school. It's the health thing (giant fibroids that I've been referring to as my basketball, if there's anyone not up to date). But even that wasn't stressful in the way that I think other people might have been stressed. There was no need to think it might be cancer so I wasn't worried about the diagnosis. It was just that until I got my official diagnosis I couldn't really make any other plans. Earlier in the semester I had gotten myself all worked up about squeezing every ounce of experience I could out of my time here and I put all sorts of irons in the fire to try to get meaningful work for the summer. Now suddenly I can't work all summer and don't know what part of the summer I might be able to work. I hate not knowing and not being able to plan. Being a pathologically organized person that little cloud of chaos in my life was making me crazy all week.

I'm not sure what to do with myself

Yesterday was the last day of classes. How did that happen? Wasn't I just whining about packing my house up? On the other hand, I've shot 6 short films, written about 10 short scripts (some of them very very short), learned to use Avid, played with lots of different cameras, so I suppose that's a year's worth of things.