Self-doubt

The date for my hernia repair operation approaches, and re-reading what I wrote on here in the entry-before-last I'm just as unsettled about it all now as I was then. Maybe it's just the feeling of being trapped - coerced into doing something I don't really want to because there's no realistic alternative.  No, it's not quite that simple: irt's more a case of constantly weighing up unknowns and trying to predict the likely outcomes.  And that's something I've never been very good at: I think I'd say I've always been more of a suck-it-and-see person, content to accept whatever result materializes.

And maybe that's the problem.  I'm pretty sure, trying to analyse my feelings now, that I'm overthinking what might go wrong.  I'm concentrating on the risks and possible problems of what is a very common routinely performed operation and speaking as one who rarely reads the little leaflets inserterd into packets of tablets detailing all the possible side-effects I'm somehow become fixated with the idea that I'm going to be the one in ten, one in a hundred or whatever.

The worst part is that I don't know why I'm doing it.  Everyone else in the family had to have an operation: my mother had what I didn't know at the time and only found out after she died was a hysterectomy, and my father had a prostate operation when he was younger than I am now.  And they both lived to tell the tale without as far as I remember making too much of it.

I think back to my childhood, which I once described in one word in one of those idiotic online survey-things as "carefree".  Because that's how I remember it.  On the other hand I'm sure there were an endless number of things that seemed a big deal at the time but which I just no longer have any recollection of because they ceased to have any importance after the event: life went on.  My mother was a worryer, and would spend endless nights awake, tossing and turning, unlike my father who seemed unfazed and slept soundly - or maybe he didn't show it.  On the other hand my mother was always 'there' for me and while I wasn't really in the habit of confiding all my innermost dark worries in her, I just felt her presence was reassuring: nothing bad was going to happen while she was around.  Maybe she would just worry about whatever it was it for both of us, so I didn't have to.  

I wonder what she'd make of all this now?  She'd probably tell me to pull myself together and stop being so silly.  Maybe she'd be more fatalistic and take the "Que sera sera" line: she often had this idea that things were or weren't "meant to be/happen".  She'd be right, of course: she always was.  So maybe I just need to cling on to the idea that my innate Libran optimism will see me though, come what may.