Countdown: Five and Four!

I didn't post yesterday because of a slight contretemps.

Yesterday morning, as I was performing my ablutions, I noticed a small, puffy, blobby thing just within the wall of my navel. Some mad scrambling was required to 1) book an appointment with the Urgent Care people for my health plan, since it was a holiday, and 2) re-schedule the zapping so I could do both things.

The result, confirmed today by my PCP: I have a small umbilical hernia. So much for "no health crises in 2012". It will require surgical repair, so I am seeing a surgeon on Friday. Turns out that the small ones are more dangerous than the large ones -- the large ones can usually be manipulated back where they belong and the abdominal wall just closes up, but the small ones are in danger of strangulation, which is just as nasty as it sounds.

Thank God my mother, who was a nurse, told me about all this stuff.

I must admit that initially, discovering the hernia really, really distressed me. This is because the way my mother's progression towards death began was with abdominal surgery to remove an impaction; in the process and unbeknownst to them, the surgeons removed a very small tumor. That tumor turned out to be the "master tumor" that was inhibiting the growth of a whole slew of other tiny tumors outside her bowel, caused by a bout of ulcerative colitus when she was a teenager.

I don't have any of that, and this surgery is most likely a minor day surgery. But for a few moments there the boat of my soul was adrift, as the ancient writers have it.

However, those moments are past. The good news is that the doctors agree the surgery can wait until I am done with the zaps, so at least one problem will be resolved before the next commences.

The zap yesterday went forward without incident. The zap today was more complex. For some reason, there were issues getting the machine to understand that I was placed properly, and then they had to take the weekly positioning pictures, so I spent about 20 minutes on the table and kept four people waiting behind me. I do hope the last three are less interesting.

I've had quite a bit of peeling under the arm, but it looks a bit better -- lots of new skin.

And tomorrow I am actually going to try and go into work and work a half-day!