Practicing

I see my doctor on Friday. It will be four weeks. I wish I could say that I feel ready to go full speed again, but I know that is not the truth. I am clear that I am really not ready to go back to school. I just don't have the energy yet. Unless something miraculous happens in the next two days, I am just not going to be ready. I'm going to need another week, and much as I hate it, I'm going to have to have the integrity to say so. Damn!

That's the easy part.

Most likely, there will be some verdict rendered on whether or not we can resume normal, garden-variety, "vanilla" sexual relating. Good old fashioned, "Hop on Pop" style sex. I have all my fingers and toes crossed for an affirmative on that one. I am way beyond hungry, horny, ready to go... Could we get a "start your engines" please?

More easy stuff. Inscrutable, Chinese doctor Lady has been getting the sex question from me since before the surgery, and at every opportunity since. Nothing too tough with that one.

Here's where it gets a little heavier, from my perspective... This is the doctor/patient conversation that I am anticipating, mulling over in my head, scripting, practicing, and hyperventilating over:

"I am embarrassed about asking this.

But I need to know and I don't know who else to ask that I can trust.

My partner and I used to really enjoy vaginal fisting. We were really careful about it, and it was something that gave us both great pleasure and joy and intimacy.

In the last year, I came to be unable to tolerate it because the fibroids just made it too painful to tolerate. I've missed it terribly.

Now, I don't know if I will ever be able to tolerate it again. I don't know, with this surgery, what I can expect. I don't know how my insides are arranged any more, what sort of capacity or structure there is.

I don't want to do harm, and I am so uncertain.

Please, help me to know what I can do to return to full sexual functioning? What can we enjoy again as a couple? Will we ever be able to engage in fisting again?"

If I live through that and come out the other side still breathing, it will be nothing short of miraculous if I can hear what she tells me. I wish I had an old fashioned tape recorder. Honestly, I feel like a 12 year old just dealing with my first menstrual period. This is crazy.

It isn't like this business of fisting is something I've never shared with anyone. I've been fisted in public for goodness sake, and more than once! I'm not really that shy about the actual act. I think that it is the notion of talking about it with someone who is "official" and "mainstream" and has the potential of judging. For me, the experience of fisting has always been not only enormously intimate, but also something that has been very closely connected with the part of my life that is NOT "vanilla." I am terrified that it may forever be gone as an option, and that the final removal of that part of my life may come with a scintilla of judgment that will make that even more painful. I am anticipating the loss accompanied by that psychological slap...

I so hope I am wrong...

Practicing my little speech... Trying to be ready. Trying to calm my mind, so that I can do this and get the information that I need to have. I just need to get to and through Friday. And in my head, all I can hear is a steady drumming of "Please, please, please, please..."

swan