It’s 2 am. I’ve spent almost the last 36 hours in bed. I was planning on getting up today, but I woke up with a horrible migraine. Thankfully, now that I’m off the meds for my brain tumor, I can take my abortive migraine meds, so I was feeling a little better within an hour and the migraine was gone within five hours.

But having a migraine and recovering from a migraine are two different things. The exhaustion you feel after a migraine is hard to explain. I simply could not muster the strength to get out of bed for anything. So I just continued sleeping on and off all day, much the same as I did yesterday.

But this wasn’t pleasant, restful sleep. No no. I was beset with nightmares every time my eyes closed. Sometimes I would wake up and then fall back asleep, only to have the same dream cruelly continue from where it left off.

Like the dream about having surgery at a children’s hospital downstate. (Don’t ask, I have no idea where that idea came from in my head). But things were so scary and chaotic and uncomfortable, it was just a horrible dream. I can’t really explain it. Undergoing surgery is a scary thing, no matter how many you’ve had, and I think this dream was playing on my fears of my upcoming brain surgery.

Because I’m scared. I truly am. It sounds like such a simple procedure. They go in through your nose, cut a hole at the back of your sinus cavity and the pituitary gland is right there for them to mess around with. But this is still a delicate procedure that takes hours. It is brain surgery. So many bad things could happen. I could develop diabetes insipidus and need to go on desmopressin for a long time. Other hormone systems controlled by the pituitary could be affected. I could have a stroke. I could die. These aren’t simple worries. No, they’re not carving a hole in the outside of my head or anything like that, but this is brain surgery nonetheless. And I’m scared.

I know my surgeon does multiple of these kinds of surgeries a week. And they’re probably all pretty much the same. But I’ve never been normal when it comes to things that are wrong with me. So who knows what could happen this time?

Five weeks from now it will all be over. I’ll be (probably not) resting in my hospital room on H60, hopefully with a tame roommate. And I will be tumorless for the first time in who knows how long. Hopefully my headaches will be gone not too long after that, once everything heals up. It could be a great success.

Or it could just be the start of another nightmare.

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