Well it is getting close to surgery day. I have to be at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute at six a.m. on Monday , February 8th, 2010. I know enough that a cancellation is still possible, but I choose optimism.

I am concerned and fear is in me, but it is not getting the upper hand. I have never been in the hospital for anything more than a day procedure. I have never had stitches. I have never had surgery. I am certainly going to make up for lost time.

The most bizarre thing is that I feel fine, at least I think I feel fine. I have next to no discomfort or pain. The nitro patches give me flickering headaches some days, and some days I seem to fatigue easily. And yet part of my cure after the surgery likely entails me feeling the worse that I have felt in my entire life . Logically this all makes sense, but it is a bit strange to get my head around all of this.

Speaking of my head - that is the part that I worry about (please no snickering). I think of my self as: relatively sober thinking, at least in my own mind ; clever, at least in my own mind; sometimes witty, at least in my own mind; a capable of being spiritual, at least in my own mind, sort of guy. I think I am nice and decent and the sort of person that you would not overly object to being a seat mate on a trans Canada flight. I hope that the surgery and drugs don’t turn me into some sort of forgetful, spiteful, nasty, self-centred ogre. I hope that I don’t become a blubbering idiot. I have already apologized in advance to my wife for this.

You hear so much on the emotional side of this (well, at least you do as a patient). One friend of my wife’s even said that this surgery is like the finger of God poking your heart. I have seen pictures of the painting on the Sistine Chapel and God has huge honking fingers. I know that the God of my understanding is going to keep his paws to himself and let the surgeons do their job.

This blog has been all about my woes and my perspective. None of this would have been within my ability to stand it, were it not for my wife. She has driven me to a large number of my tests. She is the one that had to hang out all day at the hospital while I had my angiogram. She is the one that has to do all the worrying, I mean the real worrying because it is always harder to worry about the health of someone you love, than you own. I have every reason to be optimistic about my recovery, but she will be chauffer, day nurse, night nurse, maid, cook, dishwasher, dog walker, cat wrangler, sidewalk shoveler, psychiatrist, mother, father, pharmacist, DVD inserter, and whine attendant. I am not very good at prayers (still in learning) but if anybody out there is, please pray for her. I am so grateful and thankful that she is in my life that a prayer from me would not do my gratitude, or her, justice.