Waiting is the hardest part
Photo credit: Pleasant McNeel
I’m a few days out from having my DBS device turned on and ‘tuned’ and once again I’m struggling to stay rational as I wait for this next - final - milestone. On Thursday of this week I had the CT scan and met with the surgeon, Dr. Rahimpour. As expected, I got a clean bill of health from him - no swelling or bleeding in the brain, more compliments from him and his staff on my shaved head, and he took out the remaining stitches in my scalp. He seems to think that the omens are good and all will go well.
Which, yeah, okay, so what? I mean, what does he really know? He’s just the surgeon. Until this thing is turned on and functioning, a portion of my brain continues to throw out worst case scenarios like there’s no tomorrow.
Of course, as the wise people of the world, across many traditions, will remind us - there is in fact no tomorrow. There is only the present - neither past nor future exist. And in the present, life looks good. It is finally snowing here in Northern Utah, clearing out the air and giving all the snow skiers a new lease on life. My house is warm and well stocked, and I have great health insurance via my fabulous employer, SAP. I’ve managed to build up a network of local friends since moving here in May of 2022, and stay connected with my network of remote friends from my nearly 6 decades on the planet.
Of course, also in the present is the grief that I can’t quite wrap my head around, grief over my dad’s passing. It feels indulgent to even mention it again - I have to work hard to give myself permission to talk about it, to ‘sit with my feelings’ as the saying goes. (Although, when I do try to sit with my feelings, it’s pretty clear to me that it’s hard and I don’t want to do it.) As in so many things, we of GenX are caught half way between the Silent Generation’s and the Boomers’ view that we should suck it up and have a drink, and the Millennials and GenZers who have created a whole framework and vocabulary around mental health that did not exist when we were coming along.
Many years ago, a friend’s ex-husband died suddenly of a heart attack. I remember her joking that her young daughter was seeing a therapist, because apparently, that was the right thing to do these days. We cracked ourselves up over the childhood traumas that we had experienced - parental death, divorce, illness, etc. - with no one even dreaming about taking us to counseling. It’s funny because it’s true and because it’s tragic and because when you never get counseling you have to laugh - it’s all that left.
As hilarious as unprocessed grief is - and trust me, it’s freaking off the chain (as the kids used to say) - it’s not always the best choice. After an amazing 2021/2022 in which we experienced multiple family deaths, both started new jobs, inherited a couple of dogs, sold a home, bought a home sight unseen in a city we’d never visited, and moved across the country with three geriatric dogs - well, it seemed like maybe therapy might be something worth looking into.
The kids are onto something with this whole therapy thing. I appreciate having words with which to describe how I’m feeling or not feeling. To understand that ‘compartmentalization’ and ‘dissociation’ aren’t bad - they are simply ways that I’ve dealt with things over the years. That waiting six months before I properly process emotions is okay - if not necessarily always optimal. But it is an option I can choose, if I decide to. Or I can try to stay in the present, feel the feels of now, instead of incessantly picking at questions like “what’s going to happen on Monday when they turn the DBS device on?”
I like it that I can now see that obsessing over the future is a form of self-distraction. As fraught as all the DBS stuff feels, it’s easier to think about than grief and loss. It’s also a reminder that DBS won’t fix everything - to quote Buckaroo Banzai, ‘wherever you go, there you are.’ Come Monday, even if I am in that top 5% that has great outcomes, I’ll still be me. The me who’s father died a few weeks ago, but also the me that is watching the snow come down outside while sitting on the couch with the dog curled up under a blanket, enjoying this respite from work. And also the me who may just go have a drink, and try not to think about it all for a bit.