in less than 12 hours from now, i should be done with surgery.



as the hour draws near, i guess a little bit of nerves are finally starting to kick in. kinda like the feeling you get when you're waiting in line for your turn at the dentists office and you know he's gonna drill. i'm not really scared of drills or shots they give you at the dentists office. most of the times i make it out with some fillings without actually blinking in response to pain. i guess what i'm feeling now is anticipation. maybe in the last 24 hours it was a bad idea to watch a mock full open back spine surgery on a episode of tales from the crpt, and just now i just saw "anatomy of a shark bite" where the guy gets his calf on his left leg completely ripped off by a shark (all caught on tape.)



good thing for the anesthesia it has the ability to calm and knock you out. i guess why i'm not too nervous about this is because i know this is something that needs to be done, and worrying about it really does not effect its outcome. it's just a waste of energy. so why worry about something you have no control over? i'm just going to get there, fall asleep, and wake up with a small hole in my back where they had to go through to remove the herniated part of the disc. hopefully if all goes well, i should be getting to thornton by 7:00am, done with surgery at about noon on monday (technically today), and they'll be checking me out whenever the doctor is about to sign me out the next day. i'll be taking a small book to read just in case i can't find anything good to watch on tv. i'm planning to have my cell phone with me and AIM set up so i can use AIM through my phone (even though type is really painstakingly slow). i guess what would be nice would be to have a laptop if this surgery required me to stay a couple of days. i wonder what public hospital will be the first to have a computer terminal set up for each bed. i don't think we're too far away. but we're definitely not there yet.



my mom will be staying with me probably only through tuesday. hopefully she won't try to keep too busy and actually take some time to relax while she's actually taking 2 days off of work for the first time in ages. i wish i can hang out with my mom and show her around san diego a little bit while she's here but it probably won't be a great idea right after surgery. unfortunately it wasn't meant to be this time.



i'll start progressing from small walks to sitting for longer periods of time starting tuesday since they said i don't require any days of bed rest after i leave the hospital. i'll still probably spend most of my time in bed for the first few days taking it easy.