Breathe

I can’t sleep. If I wake up at night, and I’m doing an awful lot of that cause the kids seem to have picked up on the tension and call me two or three times a night, I can’t go back to sleep. I think of all the things we could’ve done or should’ve done or need to do before the husband goes back into the hospital (sometime next week). 
Saturday we met up with some good friends from Milan. We decided to have a picnic at the beach. And I started stressing about it Friday. I hope it’s sunny, the husband needs some sun before he gets shut up in the sterile room, I hope the kids are good, he needs to relax, I hope everything goes well… Basically a recipe for disaster, I worked myself up to such a state of agitation that I spent the entire day feeling sick, my stomach in knots, angry at the weather for being crappy, wondering if maybe we should go somewhere else where it was more sunny, and generally not enjoying a minute of the outing.

All for absolutely no reason, cause I can’t control the weather and other people and the husband would probably have had a much more enjoyable time if his wife had been a little less neurotic and sleep deprived.

The fact is there’s a clock ticking above my head, counting down to Thursday or Friday when he has to be admitted in the hospital. The doctor’s keep moving the dates up, he was supposed to do the biopsy on Wednesday but now they’re saying Tuesday’s better and it’s driving me insane because I feel like there’s no time. It’s good that they’re on top of the ball, trying to get everything done as soon as possible, they’ve been telling us from the start how important it is to get in there as quickly as possible, but at the same time I want to say, no stop, we need more time why are you rushing like this, is there something you haven’t told us?

The husband turns to me, more and more often, and says:  breathe. Because apparently I hold my breath, constantly, like that will somehow stop time: oh, I’m not breathing hence time isn’t passing. Totally ridiculous, I know, and yet at times it’s just easier to not breathe.