There will be Demons that will need to be confronted… I hope that you will have the upper hand with them, deciding when and where the battlefields will be, and not allowing them to take control of the rhythm of confrontation.

Tonight, or rather, early this morning, I have awoken to mild indigestion, a known precursor to a bout with reflux. Its 1:10 am. I had been asleep for about an hour and a half. I woke, recognized the signs, preemptively took a Zantac to deal with the problem. There were, almost immediately, a mild couple of hiccups which stirred fears of the days of hiccups in hospital. They subsided almost as quickly as they appeared. I returned to bed, where my darling lay sleeping, breathing heavily, oddly rhythmically, in a cartoonish sort of way. A word escapes her dreams, a phrase.. and that’s when the Demons decided that I needed to be reminded that they are still there to be dealt with.

There are the issues of immediacy, like the maintenance on the house that didn’t get done before I went into hospital. Weather-stripping on the front door needs replacing. The ‘bake’ burner on the oven isn’t working properly as of today. What are we going to do about the refrigerator that has chosen now to give us grief? How on earth am I going to get the Christmas shopping done in the next week?

My jaw still hurts and isn’t functioning the way I want it to be. My speech feels slurred, clumsy, though everyone I speak to tells me that I sound as clear and resonate as before the surgery. My saliva is thick, and in abundance. My right shoulder aches. My scalp tingles on the right side of my head. My digestive tact is still a shambles from the c.Diff I picked up in hospital. Have I made the right decisions about my treatment? Was the radical surgery really the correct approach? Would we have been in a better position to deal with the day-to-day pre-Christmas challenges if I had settled for the conservative approach?

And then the rest of the Demons put in their two cents worth. How am I going to thank all the people who have shown us so many kindnesses? How do I address the people who have come out of the fog of my past to send their good wishes? I am so embarrassed that I lost touch with so many of them, how do I reconnect? And the memories, how do I stop the memories from flooding in? The good times and the bad times we shared… the times that I was a jerk, the times that I needed more from them but couldn’t ask, the times that they needed more from me, but I couldn’t recognize it… all these need to be reconciled.

Do the ad hoc hauntings by these and other Demons point to a tenuous mortality? Or is this more about self realization? Are the Demons trying to suggest that I should be using this time to grow into something more than I am?