Evidently, my family doctor faxed over all my records and paperwork and letters upwards of 1-2 weeks ago. And I got a chest x-ray on Tuesday. That makes all the prerequisites except the nutrition class completed. All of them. All the needed items for the dossier that goes to Blue Cross Blue Shield so they can determine whether I live or die are in one place.

On Thursday, in keeping up with physician supervision for just-in-case sake I found out I weigh more now than I ever have before. I don’t remember the drive home. I remember standing in the laundry room trying to decide which pair of pants to iron and realizing that if it came to it, I have enough ambien on hand and a package store near enough to finish it. I emailed mag and predictably, she didn’t write back.

I went to work and emailed the surgeon’s office asking if there was anything else I needed to complete and whether or not I could maybe get an estimate about when the packet would be submitted. The surgeon’s office also didn’t write back, even though I didn’t ask them any dates. I just asked what more I needed to do to proceed. And I still haven’t heard from them. There are a million reasons for that, but all I can think is denied.

I’m no longer so Latin platitude mellow about things. And that’s because, purpose or not, I’m out of choices. If it comes to it, do I try to bear the process again, another 6 or 8 or 10 months of waiting with a lesser chance at the outcome I want? Do I take out a second mortgage and pay cash? Or do I just go quietly, more and more reclusive until all that’s left of me is the caricature of someone who used to at least pretend to care about herself?

I don’t know if it’s the heat or the watching of several strange movies, including The Libertine (meh) and Children of Dune (wow!), but I can’t sleep lately without having at least one nightmare. And two out of the last three nights, it’s nightmare, followed by waking up, convincing myself I’m okay, and going back to sleep to have the exact same nightmare. Not eating anything strange, or past 7:00, or going to bed too early or too late. No bizarro reading material. Or, at least no reading material that’s any more bizarro than usual.

But two nights ago I dreamed twice, after having dreamed it once the night before, that I had a monster growing out of the sole of my right foot. It was a bit like a crab, or the purple monster in the episode of Buffy where they get eggs to learn about parenting but the eggs are full of demonspawn, except instead of purple, it’s frightenly half-translucent, half flesh color. And it pokes out of the bottom of my foot if I’m not standing on it. I am by nature a picker (scabs, hangnails, callouses, whatever) and so in the dream, I’m sitting in a sort of modified cobbler’s pose, stroking the sole of my right foot. I notice what I think is a bit of skin peeling off. I pick at it a bit, and look down to notice it’s more of a fissure. Something pokes out, spiky looking and jointed, like a leg, and I grab it. I tug a bit and there’s a weird feeling in my foot, like something’s tugging back. Finally I break a piece off and it transforms into a bit of wiggling, slimy grub that I immediately drop and after it hits the ground, it disappears. I look down again and see two more legs working out of the fissure.

And at that point, I usually wake up, sit up, rip the cflex mask of my face and taken many, many gasping breaths to fight down feeling like I want to vomit. Cos, oh my god, there’s something growing out the bottom of my foot. Last night, I made Christopher look at the bottom of my foot to make sure there were no cracks and fissures. There weren’t. And my tickling reflex is strongly dull as usual.

So what does it mean when you dream that you have a monster growing out of your foot? A bunch of times? To the point that you’re pretty well ready to start googling “gross foot monster” to see what happens?

Recently Christopher and I celebrated our seventh anniversary. Seven years we’ve been married; engaged a year before that and exclusively dating a year before that. I’ve been with him since I was 20 years old, still in school, still unsure of how life worked, let alone how my particular life would work.

Sometime near the end of the summer of 1997, he was staying at my house in Brentwood, having just graduated from college and taking the summer off before starting grad school. We’d stayed up late with friends, watching some movie (Reservoir Dogs, I think). I showed everyone but him out, but I remember him standing there in the foyer with me, as if he were host to my hostess. And it made me feel all kinds of strange, because for all the time he’d been spending with me, I thought I was thinking of him just a little too much. I was seeing another guy, significantly older than I was and strictly as a fling: other, older dude provided me with plenty of pot, read me poetry, and kissed like a demon. It wasn’t serious, at all, in any way. But a few months before, in celebration of Christopher’s graduation, we’d had a spot of late-night, outdoor binge-drinking and, supported (literally, they stood one on each side of me and held me up I was so far gone) by two other men, I’d told him in no uncertain terms that what he needed was someone just like me, except prettier. My exact words: “You need a woman lik me, except prettier.” I don’t remember much after that except the boys peeing in the bushes and me not wanting to watch.

But that night, which was really early morning, I locked the door behind my guests and turned to Christopher who, instead of heading up the stairs like he might have, turned and walked back into my parent’s living room. I followed him and sat down next to him, on opposite ends of my parents couch. And we started to talk. Several hours later, as the sun started to rise, we finally got through a bunch of academic doublespeaking, and caging and posturing and I laughed when I said, “I like you like you.” He laughed and said, “I think I like you like you, too.” He took my hand, lying there on the couch cushion next to his. And I think shortly thereafter I went to bed in my room and he went to bed in the guest room and I got up two hours later to go to work and he stayed home the whole day and read Mein Kampf.

Just a bit less than nine years later, we had dinner and talked about things, with plently of academic doubletalk (though we’re both posers at it, now, so far from our early-adulthood aspirations). We talked about politics and how it’s affecting us and Christopher cited John Derbyshire and I agreed because my husband + Derb = must not be ignored. And we talked about Firefly and Star Wars and Harry Potter and how happy we are and how far we’ve come from two kids who got married really young and fumbled around half in misery and snow for quite a while. Back then I wrote papers for grad school and he played Diablo II and we both read Derb’s columns and played a lot of scrabble.

We don’t play Scrabble anymore, but we routinely call each other mid-morning to ask, “Did you read Derb’s latest?” In that sense, we haven’t come all that far. But as little as we’ve moved foward, we’ve delved deeper. We know each other better and fess up to our mistakes more readily and can admit that being married is a difficult thing. We have to work hard and it feels like I’m constantly probing the state of things. I think we’re no longer married to each other so much as we’re married and the marriage is a dynamic third-party that exists between us and surrounds us. It demands attention all the time and seems so fragile. But then something happens and it turns out to be far more resilient than I could have perceived. We’re no closer to having kids except in the way that Christopher is fond of the idea as a daydream. I’m still deeply in denial about things, but he’ll draw me out, I’m sure of it. It’ll take awhile, but I’ll get there.

We have a house and a couple cars and careers that are miles away from what we dreamed of that first night we said “like you like you” as if we were 6th graders. We’ve lived in three cities and helped build a family and weathered so much. It makes me think back to our first dance as a married couple, in front of everybody, when Billy Joel sang, There ain’t nothin’ that I wouldn’t do. Go to the ends of the earth for you, to make you feel my love.