Clever Consulting

Well I saw the thoracic consultant surgeon today. I wore my red headwrap which wasn't quite warm enough for the icy cold weather and it kept riding up above my ears which made me wish that I was perhaps wearing something a bit more sturdy on my head, but it was okay. I felt much more tired on the way there than I expected, but it was good to be out of the house for a change. The consultant I saw is Belgian with a very german-sounding accent. His voice reminded me of watching old black-and-white 50s spy films and this image kept distracting me from what he had to say. The upshot of it is that he can do the operation which would involve whipping out my sternum and replacing it with a mix of goretex and some other material. The operation would take 4 hours, they'd also take out my mammary lymph nodes and a tiny piece of lung. I will feel exactly the way that I do now and if I were his wife, he would advise me to have this procedure done, as we're still at a curative point.

For Real.

I tried not to recoil in horror as he went through the process. Part of me wanted to run away from the room (a feeling that I always get when I'm freaked out - I'm obviously a flight, not fight kind of gal...) and the other part of me just wanted to burst into tears. But something inside me told me not to. This guy was a thoracic surgeon for a good reason. He spoke with an icy kind of precision. No time for emotions. Definitely no time for tears. But I found his coldness refreshingly reassuring. This is not the kind of man who would panic in the operating theatre. Or suffer from shaky hands. In the end, the meeting turned out to be a positive one, and I left his consulting room feeling elated. To celebrate, I'd wanted to pay a visit to the House of Fraser to check out some possible wigs and maybe get my face painted by one of the Mac or Bobbi Brown girls. Unfortunately I was feeling too weak, tired and hungry by the time I emerged from the hospital. I ended up just skipping back home to eat some of my mother's divine chicken soup.