[Coda]

Simultaneously awesome and awful, so into the shouting thread it goes!

My wife is currently undergoing a double jaw surgery to correct an overbite that's been bothering her for all her life, and it turns out that it will also correct a respiratory obstruction she never knew she had. The hospital will be calling me with hourly updates, and I just got the first of those to let me know that the anesthetic is working and that the surgery is underway with no issues or complications.

It's positive and hopeful, in that this could really improve her quality of life in a way she can't really imagine. The surgeon has plenty of experience and while the procedure is moderately invasive it's also reasonably straightforward with few risks of complications.

It's also anxiety-inducing, in that it's a major surgery. It's a five-hour procedure that involves cutting and moving a lot of bone. The worst case scenario is exceptionally unlikely, but my protective instincts toward my wife are naturally amplifying the emotional reaction. And even in the best case she's going to be in the hospital overnight for monitoring, she'll have her jaw tied closed for at least two weeks, she'll be on a liquid diet for that whole time, and she's going to have to manage a lot of pain.

Intellectually I know that everything will be fine, and that the recovery isn't going to take that long in the grand scheme of things. But emotionally I'm running on three hours of sleep because I had to get her checked in before dawn and I'm concerned for my beloved.