Cape Fear

As we start to make plans for our annual vacation on Cape Cod, I have, within the past couple of weeks, been struck with a scary, almost paralyzing thought:  what if this trip is just as awful as last year's "vacation?"

From a common sense point of view, the situation is not the same.  No infection to be monitored constantly in case of an emergency trip back to the hospital in New Jersey.  No stitches.  None.  Even my basal cell removal site has no stitches and has ALMOST stopped itching.  No healing drain holes, no complicated hour-long shower sessions (with drive time, almost two hours) at a remote (my dad's house) location. No presenting, as they say in the medical biz, reason for a revisit of last year's experience.

I would very much like to go back to vacation two years ago, in which we miniature golf course-hopped at night, arriving at the last to finish our games at closing time.  We ate whatever we wanted, mostly.  I spent hours sitting on a giant float tethered to the dock, doing Hebrew grammar exercises - it was heavenly. I read and sat and we went to the movies with my dad to see "Up" - we were the ONLY people in the theater and it was great!  (Middle of the afternoon, mall cinema, gorgeous weather.  Only crazy people and locals go to the movies under those conditions - and we are some of both.)

My depression last summer started just before we left, and ended maybe a week after we came back.  So, the common denominator between these two vacations is the time to sit and think, and there's a danger that too much thinking will lead to sadness, and then spiral downward from there.  Last year's trip was fully a month after my surgery, so the time passing in and of itself cannot be proof to me that it will not happen again.  It started before we actually went away, so that tells me it wasn't just the inactivity (although when I returned and started working hard again, it seemed to dissipate - coincidence?)

I have tried to do everything I can to prepare and organize so that there is no excuse to be sad and worried and anxious to get home as opposed to enjoying myself.  We have, in addition to Jackie checking in with Mario and Luigi two of the nights we're away, one of Ari's friends keeping an eye on the temperature in the room during the day and taking in the mail, and we've hired professional pet sitters who happen to also be members of our synagogue and live here in Oakland, to come on all the other nights and see to the chinchillas' needs.

I have stopped the paper; we have laid out everything we can think of on the dining room table and the list gets checked off every time something new goes to the table.  Alex and Ari have been reminded about a hundred times what they'll need to help with.  I have a stack of 9 "reading" books to go, as well as books loaded onto my iPad and there's another smaller (but not by much) stack of reference books for studying.

I am determined to continue trying to eat more healthily even while we're away.  So maybe only one or two lobsters, one order of fried clams, and a limit of two visits to Friendly's for sundaes!  Lucky for me, the penny candy store's greatest lure is salt water taffy, with maybe one tiny piece of penuche (brown sugar fudge) for old time's sake.

Instead of being afraid of this vacation being as terrible as I now know it's capable of being, I want to just cast off the old crap from last year and enjoy myself, but there are just still those things that chip away in your mind and I can't entirely banish the fear.   I've got one more meeting with my therapist before I go, and I've always come out of there with more tools for handling rough situations (real or imagined, past or future.)

I hope to be able to come back from the Cape understanding that last year was (an exceptionally awful) exception and that this year we took up right where we left off two summers ago - sitting by the lake, time with my dad and brothers and their families, watching our boys get together with their cousins whom they rarely see, and generally doing the "nothing" that is really something special to us.