Prep time!

A few weeks before the surgery my neurosurgeon mentioned that TV One was looking for a candidate who would do pre and post interviews, as well as filming my actual surgery. Really? Me? Before I could even answer his question or even ask more questions my mother quickly jumped in and responded "NO." That was it. Although it would have been interesting to look back on it and have that documented for generations, I was DEFINITELY not in the emotional state to go through talking to a camera crew on multiple occasions. I guess this varies on the person, but I wanted control with what was being put out there. Not some third party.
Okay...now it was prep time. There was to do before surgery....EKG, blood work in case I needed a transfusion, meetings with a speech therapist. That's right...I was going to be only in "twilight" and not fully knocked out so I would be able to talk, which is common. Of course they wanted to stick to subjects that were neutral and wouldn't cause any emotional response. Makes sense.

One thing that I wish they had offered was patient support. You can talk to a nurse or doctor about expectations and outcome, but I wanted to talk to someone who had been through what I was going to go through. I wanted the REAL story. I did some online research, but I was scared to do too much and find something I really didn't want to see. Basically I was going into this whole thing blind and only had a casual idea of how things would turn out.

Ready or not....I had to go through it.