Still Processing

Kearney and Brad came for an early Christmas and we did our traditional tree-trimming last night with good friends. Though a short visit, it was a good one and we all enjoyed the Christmas project, too. We made ornaments like the ones in the picture this year from card stock, using stickers intended for scrapbookers and card makers; a good time was had by all. Michael is now working on adding more heat to our sun room with his famous hot-water tube zoned heat system, this time to the bar counter. Life is good and we’re drifting through the rest of the weekend in a pleasant haze. Still muddling along finding the right line for how much of our lives I write about here, as opposed to my own thoughts that are within my personal sphere of choice, which brings me to a thought that’s been cycling in my head lately.

It occurred to me a few days ago that, if a person is going to have a major health challenge at mid-life, brain surgery for a benign tumor is probably way up there in the desirable options. For example, my body was in great health and I was overall in a great physical situation for withstanding the assault that surgery is to the body’s systems. Though it’s clear in retrospect that I’d been having symptoms for some time from the tumor and though I’m still not where I’d like to be, the acute stage of it all was pretty short and went about as well as it’s possible to imagine such a thing going. I only completely missed teaching one of my (weekly) law classes, for example, though I had a ton of help to be able to do that.

The big issue is learning to be a new person based on but different from the one I’ve always been. The changes are real and most of them are subtle, though a few are anything but. My personality is intact--sense of humor, view of the world, reactions to things. What’s not is my physical ability to be myself; there are new limitations I didn’t use to have, like the absence of fiction in my life and the truly bizarre and unpredictable balance problems. On the other hand, the life-work balances imposed by the stamina issues are a good result. I only wish I’d actually chosen them.

Anyway I look at this, being able to fret about it is one of the good problems to have. It is weird, though.