Hey Val! Thanks for the encouragement :D You're right, it sure feels like forever when you're bleeding and not quite healed. But I am going to take your words to heart - I will heal completely!
Your life sounds amazingly busy. Maybe that's a good thing, since it helps keep your mind off your upcoming surgery? So what is a GCSE? I'm so impressed that you home-school your son. I have no idea what that involves for a child with Aspergers, but it must be a bit of a challenge, since I imagine conventional education techniques would not be appropriate. (?) Your son must be pretty amazing.
So why is your hubby panicking about you today? I'm so impressed that you are so calm. That means you are going into your surgery with a good state of mind, and that will go a long way to making the whole thing more bearable.
I've been doing some reading on setons and it sure does sound pretty awful. But I also saw on a number of forums where some people say that they aren't very painful after a while. I think you are quite right not to panic just yet. It looks like people have different experiences with setons, just like people have different experiences with fissures and LISs, so I think we should just assume that you will have relatively painless experience with the quickest, best possible outcome. You certainly deserve such a scenario, so I vote we just tell the universe that is how things will go.
I hope you doing well