Trust

I’ve been thinking this past few days about trust. It’s a funny feeling to literally place your life in someone else’s hands, someone you have never even exchanged a word with. I know Mr Cale has a brilliant reputation and I’m not getting cold feet about the op – well, not much – but he’s going to deliberately stop my heart to do the job, and that’s pretty final if by some chance it won’t start again, after all, in America, that’s how they execute people!

So trust is pretty important. I do trust him, after all, he’s done the op over 400 times, but there is that niggling doubt. What if he’s had an argument with his wife, a parking or a speeding ticket? What if he’s got a hangover, or maybe is just having a bad day, I mean – it must happen, it sure as hell happens to me, and to everyone I know. Trust could go out the window then.

All that said, its Christmas, a time for families. I’m going to be with mine this year, and we won’t be doing much socialising. After all, if it all goes wrong – and it could, 4 people in every hundred either don’t survive the op or die shortly afterwards – it might be my last one with them. Time with them is very precious just at the moment.

It’s a become a cliché to say that “there are no atheists in foxholes”. I’ve never really professed to be one, I simply can’t get my head around religion as a whole. I never will, I don’t think, and I lack the faith that my brother has, but this year some of the carols that my wife and I have sung had some very real resonances for me.

Since I started this blog I've always tried to be truthful in what I write, what's the point in anything else? But it sometimes quite hard to lay your innermost feelings out for public display. The blog is also to help work things out in my own mind, and it definately helps there, so I suppose it's worthwhile, but by gum, I'll be glad when the operation's done with and I'm writing about the recovery and convalescence!