Pre-op stages: Paranoia

I'm fully into that most anxious and annoying of pre-op stages, paranoia. Here we are just coming out of cold season, and I flinch every time I hear someone coughing that rattley, "I've-had-this-cold-for-a-month" sort of cough. I had a day (that I'm now convinced is to be blamed on early spring blooms) where I was quite stuffed up with a scratchy throat and all I could do was obsess over it and whether I was allowed to take Cold-FX in my crucial 2 week pre-op period.

The worst part is that I've done something to my teeth -
my own damn fault, of course - but now I have sort of a chronic low-level toothache on one side. It started when I got all optimistic about the weather and had my latte iced instead of hot, and I think the sudden cold combined with a cracked tooth means that my mouth can be a little sore at times! After receiving a resounding NO! from both my family doc and my surgeon's office on whether I could have dentalwork before surgery, I decided to just hope for the best and try to get it fixed afterwards.

It's nothing that's going to kill me, I don't think. I just hope it's nothing that's going to keep me from the Holy Grail: Ye Olde Blessid Surgerye Date. Everything that happens between now and then (11 days!! SQUEEEE!!!) is measured in how it will affect my surgery date or my prep for surgery. I have no real idea but I keep thinking to myself - they can't bump me after my pre-admission clinic, can they? What would be the point in that, after doing so much work for someone to be bumped seems like it would provoke Surgeon Ire.

Fun Fact: My surgeon is apparently never called by his first name. He is called "Dr. ...." by everyone who works for him or with him - even those who previously worked with him! He does strike me as an old fashioned fellow, but it makes me feel even cheekier for calling him by his first name from the very first time I came to know about him! I used to be farrrrr too "respectful" of my doctors to ever deign to call them by their real name, but now it's almost an inadvertent weapon - I like to think that it's a tool to catch them off-guard and to remind them that I am also in the drivers' seat with them on this one.