R calculated that we've spent 7 days together since September 8th. He's been back in Toronto helping with a family crisis and I had to leave to work. We're both chasing deadlines - he's got a grant due in two weeks and I've got this surgery coming up on friday, finally, so I came to the Congo for 3 weeks to get some stuff done while I can still travel.

Snapshots:
1.My last night in Kinshasa, drinking a cold beer with my coworker after a long day, effortlessly chatting in French because my brain finally clicked over. His wife is sending me home with a wedding present for R and I: matching clothes in bright African print - two long dresses for me and two shirts for him. Can't wait to see them on R, who is EXTREMELY pale.

2. Quietly vomiting into a bag on the plane after all the medications interacted in a terrible way on a particularly early morning. Those bags are so amazing. I am so tough.

3. In the province: the sweetest pineapple. Fresh beans. Fried plantains. Trying to decide if the specks all over my bed are eggs from some kind of cockroach or bedbug, or just (just!) termite droppings. Torrential rain pouring down onto the tin roofs at night, me cozy in my bed reading Jane Austen on my kindle. The thick red mud in the morning, the trucks sliding sideways along the road, 2 hours to go 20 kilometers.

For better or worse, when I'm here, my life at home just falls away. My family, R, the wedding, and the beautiful week we spent at the lake the week afterwards with our friends - a distant dream.

*
After so many months obsessing over the diagnosis, the MRI and ultrasounds and lab results, the choice of surgeon, the type of intervention, it's strange to feel so calm now that I am finally on the cusp of this surgery. Calmness? Or resignation? Acceptance?

Sometimes i think of my sister's kids when they were tiny babies and the amazing people they're growing into and I have a sharp pang, and then i just put it away. i have resolved to keep moving, moving, moving. I am done with being mired in grief, waiting for my life to be the way i thought it would be. It just is what it is.

This might succeed, or it might fail. "success" might mean I'm not in pain and anemic all the time. "success" might mean I can get pregnant. "Failure" might mean 2-3 months of pain and recovery time and then we're back where we started in 3 months. "Failure" might mean she gets in there and it's a disaster and i wake up with no uterus, or minus an ovary... but maybe that's "success" and it leaves me healthy again. All these possibilities are swirling around and i'm just floating on top of it. I think it's acceptance.

7:56 p.m. - 2023-10-23