Tomorrow Everything will change

I will be booking into the hospital this afternoon. My operation will be tomorrow. It is a strange thing waiting for an operation. I remember hearing about a Buddhist practice, but can't find anything written on the web about it, so may have imagined it; of meditating on the prospect of some potential loss or grief. During the meditation, thinking about the grief while distancing the emotions from the image of loss. Imagining how you would cope with and accept the inevitable losses or pain in our lives.
That may or may not actually be a Buddhist practice but that's what I have been attempting to do. So I have been trying to imagine myself after the operation, imagining the drip, feeling like every part of my body is bruised, the pain in my gut if I try and move. I imagine focusing on different parts of my abdomen, running my hand over to find where I am cut and what has been done to my body. And I have been visualising testing different muscles to see which ones can contract without pain. To work out whether I can use my quads and glutes and upper body to move without engaging the abs. Scenes from American police shows come to mind, where there is a guy on the ground who has been shot, and the cops are saying to each other, gun shot wounds to the gut are the most painful. Then I imagine injections of pethidine and drifting out of myself a little, the pain still there but dull and less.
OK, this is gruesome right. But I think the worst that can happen is that I am right, and this is how it will be. And maybe I will drift in and out of sleep for 24 hours and not remember too much about that time. But I want to be prepared and not be shocked by the amount of pain.
So I will tell you in my next entry, not sure how long it will be, exactly how it was.

I started putting all this down before I read the link below, but it may explain why I am blogging about this. http://www.wildmind.org/search/emotions