it's the part of summer that feels like it might never end. I took a week off and spent most of it outside, camping in Ontario along Georgian Bay and then along Lake Huron. The night we got to Huron, we walked over the dunes to sit on the beach in the dark watching huge spiderwebs of lightning arcing across the water, *heart eyes*

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i started iron infusions about 3 weeks ago. I'll get an update on my hemoglobin on Wednesday but I can already tell that I am waaaaaaaaaaay better. It was a real frog-in-a-pan situation - I slowly got used to swooning languidly like a victorian-era princess, with my hand on my forehead. I feel so much better now. We did some actual hikes. i clambered over rocks to the blue-green water. We swam to the grotto. I don't need to nap every time I have five minutes to spare. I am even hopeful i'll actually be able to dance at our wedding.

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oh, the wedding. Three weeks to go. Saw a lot of my family at Bon Echo when we were camping a few weeks ago and ppl kept asking me if there was anything they could help with. I know everyone meant to be nice but it kind of freaked me out since I actually didn't think there was that much left to do. R is the best, and listened to me hyperventilate for like 2 days and then he made a detailed agenda, with Action Items. So I now I have my list, which is like, "write to ice cream truck guy to ask for passionfruit sorbet" and "make a list of songs that we need to hear". R is being so supportive of this wedding that he definitely did not want at all. Real keeper, that guy. I wasn't that sure I wanted it either but now I'm so excited to have everyone be here with us to celebrate.

I've been low-key trying to write my vows and I am mainly stuck on variations of, "R really is annoyingly better at everything and i vow to stop insisting that we do things my way" and "I promise to be nice". I know that it's not a competition but i hate that R's vows are going to be shorter and funnier than mine. I really can't seem to help going for the joke in every iteration of my vows, which is either a great way to show everyone who we are as a couple, or a stellar defense mechanism.

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In the midst of all this, I went to see a million specialists and my surgery is finally scheduled for 27 october. It was going to be September 5 but I decided to just take a break and be hopefully normal for a minute before I go back into recovery. I found a way to avoid the hysterectomy AND the surgeon is going to use robots so there is going to be much less cutting into abdomens [my abdomen]. I'm not that confident that this is the right approach, but it seems like a reasonable starting place. I can't just keep blocking of my Mondays for iron infusions forever.

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Back in my apartment in DC for 10 days... I left R in Toronto, packing up and letting people fete him with bachelor parties and the like. I'm happy to have a bit of time to myself to hopefully get a lot of work done and to reflect on all the huge changes that have happened since I left this place in August 2020.

11:26 p.m. - 2023-08-07