Being the Titanic on Hiatus.

The day after I made my last blog post, and an optimistic one at that, I got a letter calling me to the hospital for a pre-op assessment. At that point the operation took on a chilling reality; it loomed like the peak of an iceberg set firmly on the course of the ship that is me and my life, and it was headed inexorably in my direction. I knew that it couldn’t be avoided and it scared me witless because I knew that it was capable of sinking me with a mere nudge of its broad shoulder.

But why so scared? I’ve had three operations under general anaesthetic in my life and none of them troubled me at all, so why this one?

I decided it was all due to the reclusive mindset which has grown in me over the past ten or so years, and that the reaction was essentially phobic in nature. It scares me because I’m scared of being incarcerated in a strange place and placing myself under the direct control of strangers possessed of sharp knives and other clinical paraphernalia. I’m scared of being at their mercy and having to do their bidding, however good their intentions. It makes me feel like a trapped squirrel thrown in with the lab rats, and how I do sympathise with lab rats. And suppose the man with the sharpest knife makes a mistake…

And so the iceberg, forged in the frigid polar wasteland over millennia and dispassionate in its attitude to collision, filled my sight line and my consciousness to the exclusion of almost everything else. It continues so to do, looming higher and more silently menacing day by day as the fateful meeting draws ever closer. I wake every morning in fear and spend the day in depression. I wait to find out whether I shall sink or survive to sail on.

I hope to be back eventually. Please excuse the mixed metaphors.