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Summary
The playoff run had left him with a knee injury he'd played through until they were swept by Carolina in the Eastern Conference Final. He hated to lose, but he was happy to be home, to finally break the long stretch of stress and strain that is playoffs hockey. There's a surgery scheduled to repair his knee and he'd been glad for that, ready to get onto recovery instead of reinjury, but as the day approached and he began taking preparations for it his anxiety began to coil, rumble, tighten around his gut, and jerk.
He didn't flinch at first, expecting it. He took his medication and added the as-needed Xanax, did restorative yoga and even resorted to smoking indica. He ran an extra mile each day in the evenings with Ilya, headphones blasting, knee only screaming a little, squeezed into its brace. Any other time, all of this would plateau the worry and relax the knot in his stomach, the tightness in his chest, the stocatto of his heart. As the surgery draws nearer, the tightness only ratchets further shut. He doesn't feel like himself, panicky and frazzled, scared out of his mind all in a rush here and there as he thinks, they're going to cut me open. They're going to put me under. I've never had surgery before...