It's been a wild seven days. I knew last Tuesday when I looked at my open wound that surgery to remove the expander was probably going to happen, but I didn't expect it to happen as quickly as it did. Ultimately though I'm glad the surgery was Friday and I had a long weekend to recover. I also had high hopes that my doctor would be able to just replace the expander, but that's not what ended up happening. Which means I will have at least two more surgeries this year. When I started this journey, I expected to have two surgeries total. Now I'm looking at at least five.

The mental/emotional toll of this has been a lot. I've struggled with depression more over the last two weeks than I have at any point in this process, I think because I subconsciously could feel the extra surgery looming. Some days it's hard to get out of bed. Some days I get back into bed shortly after getting out. Some days I'm fine. I just take each day as it comes and try to have as regular of a routine as possible to keep myself on track.

The extreme upside is how well my community has loved me. While I so appreciate that my parents would have dropped everything to be here, with how quickly this surgery happened (less than 24 hours after it was scheduled), I recruited other people to help. Hope picked me up at 5 am Friday and sat with me at the surgery center the whole time and brought me back home. Amanda brought me dinner and hung out with me Friday night. Toyia brought me bagels Saturday morning and ordered me picture frames for prints I've bought over the past year and haven't done anything with, and then took me to DryBar today. Sara took me to lunch yesterday and to stock up on groceries so I can eat at home. I truly get by with a little help from my friends.

I've also had these verses from Matthew 22 rolling around in my head over the last couple of weeks:

34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. 35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

I am so grateful that my friends do not limit themselves to being wives and mothers and choose to sacrifice to love me well. Where would I be without that kind of love?