Nine days and counting

Why is my life a deadline now? I mean, it couldn't be that I'm doing something life-altering, now could it? :::gasp:::

I've never really been one much for the countdown. When I got married, we hadn't even set a date so there was obviously no count-down. We just ran off and got ourselves hitched and only after that told my parents. Yeah, we had a reception, but that's no biggie. We were already married. Anticipation over!

When pregnant with Thing One, while I was given a due-date, I didn't pay attention to it. I didn't believe in due dates because babies come when babies come. I had a rough time frame to go by, but I had about a month that I had sketched out as the time "when the baby would come." It was all good. I was on her schedule. Then she ended up being born on her due date. D'oh! Served me right.

With Thing Two, it was a whole other story. In a nutshell, I had no clue I was pregnant. For nine months. Yes, you're reading that right. And neither did the four different doctors that I saw during the full YEAR prior to her birth when I was being treated for severe gastro-intestinal problems that felt like someone was throwing a bowling ball around my insides. In fact, I had my annual pap smear a month and a half before she was born and the nurse practicioner didn't even catch it. "Here's your uterus, my dear, it's a bit tipped but it's normal, and here's your ovaries." Yeah, right. In the meantime, she strips my membranes while getting her scrape for the pap smear. Most painful thing I had ever experienced during my yearly exam. Yeow! And then she hands me the refill for my prescription of birth control pills. Yup. Birth control pills. The ones that I had been taking continuously since the birth of Thing One. It's a wonder that child didn't come out some sort of a mutant!

So for both marriage and birth - two of the most important and life-altering times in a woman's life - I haven't had a real clock ticking in the background. But now, with this surgery, I do. And it's making very loud noises in my head that I can't drown out! Gah! It's even echoing!

And there's sooo much to get done before my time comes. I have to get my short-term disability paperwork in, and make my official notice to my boss about my time that I'm gone, and clean off my desk, and hand over my work to my co-workers, and make sure that my mother knows how to find Delano and not get lost, and make sure the girls are properly packed, and to make sure that I pack the right kind of clothes and the right kind of hygene things and the protein powders and my pillow and, and, and . . . .

In and out. In and out. Deep breaths. Time creeps forth in its petty pace, and nothing I can do will either speed it up or slow it down. Hopefully I'll be able to deal with that and not go insane before next Wednesday.