Sequel: Oops You're Dead ›
Stort Stories of a Random Nature
A.C.L.
“Are you nervous?”
Exactly how many people had asked me that? I’d lost count. If I had charged people to ask the question I’d be on permanent holiday the Whit Sundays by now. As usual my response was much the same. Me nervous? Get real.
“No, not really.” That had been my reply to the nurse. In fact I hadn’t really thought about it; or perhaps had avoided thinking about it. The precise details of the operation hadn’t gone down well with me before hand. The thought of process itself made me squeamish when my surgeon had explained it to me. At the time I’d thought ‘don’t tell me what you’re going to do, just get on with it!’
The nurse strapped the blood pressure pump around my right arm and flicked the flat pencil case sized machine on. The strap expanded, tightened then loosened as it finished its reading. I watched the nurse write it down on some sort of sheet of paper she stored in a white file.
I suck at remembering faces. So looking back on it, all I see are a set of brilliant white, perfectly straight teeth and a bob of thick dark brown hair. The rest of her features are a blur. I remember leaving her office and being directed down to some sort of waiting ward. I was all cool and calm until a second nurse (whose face is also a blur) came and put Betadine, that anti bacterial agent that teachers inflict on kids with grazed knees, over my right knee. Until that point everything had seemed unreal. As though I’d just been playing along up until then; like the make believe games I used to play as a kid. But it was at about this point that it started becoming a little to real for my liking.
Here, I did something that I would have been much better off without. I started thinking about it. So, they were going to gas me with GA, hack open my right leg to perform a patella graft to replace the torn Anterior Cruciate Ligament in my knee… wait a sec. Do what?!
By the time this dawned on me I was already been wheeled down the maze of corridors of St. John of God Hospital and into the surgery ‘waiting room’ though a more accurate description might have been a ‘torture chamber’. The décor for starters was shocking. One would hope before going into any kind of surgery to wait the agonizingly long minutes away in a room filled with warm positive vibes. Maybe some colourful curtains, or some cheerful wallpaper? Hardly. Instead the walls were an off yellow, the light surprisingly dim while the air had that bland sterile taste. The kind you only ever find in hospitals or aeroplanes.
Luckily I didn’t end up waiting long. Perhaps only ten or fifteen minutes, through most of which my Mum had talked to me from beside the bed. None of what we said sticks in my mind, the only thing I distinctly remember was that my Mum mentioned that she’d be waiting in the ward the hospital had allocated me when I came out of the operating theatre.
Thus I found myself being pushed through the set of double doors. The stark brightness of this room compared to that of the ‘torture chamber’ is the most I can remember of its appearance, that and a small coalition of doctor’s and nurses beside a operating table. One was my anesthetist, who’d I’d met earlier and hadn’t been able to decide if the guy was poking fun at me or was simply overly grave. By the end of our brief discussion I’d come to realise this guy took his job VERY SERIOUSLY; so much so that kept wondering if he was for real. The other doctor I knew was my surgeon. Tall, was the most distinctive feature about him. Tall and beginning the saga of baldness. Having only met him twice before that day I had managed to chalk up what I’d seen of his personality to be a friendly professional.
After being asked to shift from the hospital bed to the operating table, I was pre-warned of a prick on the pack of my left hand as a drip was pushed into one of my veins. At that point I admit to suddenly having a fit of butterflies in my stomach (I’d been relatively calm up until then compared to now). A woozy, giddying sensation swept though my head. The anesthetist had defiantly been for real.
I ended up closing my eyes trying to steady that feeling and told myself to ‘just breathe’. The way I can describe how it feels to be put under and being aware of it is difficult. Your thoughts simplify. They start swirling and swimming about as an unwelcome force pushes its way into your mind, I’d think of it not as a needle or torn, but rather a tendril (something alive) that seems to seep in through the walls of what you define as your mind, before it happens abruptly, like the flick of a light switch. Everything simply turns off.
© Nikky Lee
Exactly how many people had asked me that? I’d lost count. If I had charged people to ask the question I’d be on permanent holiday the Whit Sundays by now. As usual my response was much the same. Me nervous? Get real.
“No, not really.” That had been my reply to the nurse. In fact I hadn’t really thought about it; or perhaps had avoided thinking about it. The precise details of the operation hadn’t gone down well with me before hand. The thought of process itself made me squeamish when my surgeon had explained it to me. At the time I’d thought ‘don’t tell me what you’re going to do, just get on with it!’
The nurse strapped the blood pressure pump around my right arm and flicked the flat pencil case sized machine on. The strap expanded, tightened then loosened as it finished its reading. I watched the nurse write it down on some sort of sheet of paper she stored in a white file.
I suck at remembering faces. So looking back on it, all I see are a set of brilliant white, perfectly straight teeth and a bob of thick dark brown hair. The rest of her features are a blur. I remember leaving her office and being directed down to some sort of waiting ward. I was all cool and calm until a second nurse (whose face is also a blur) came and put Betadine, that anti bacterial agent that teachers inflict on kids with grazed knees, over my right knee. Until that point everything had seemed unreal. As though I’d just been playing along up until then; like the make believe games I used to play as a kid. But it was at about this point that it started becoming a little to real for my liking.
Here, I did something that I would have been much better off without. I started thinking about it. So, they were going to gas me with GA, hack open my right leg to perform a patella graft to replace the torn Anterior Cruciate Ligament in my knee… wait a sec. Do what?!
By the time this dawned on me I was already been wheeled down the maze of corridors of St. John of God Hospital and into the surgery ‘waiting room’ though a more accurate description might have been a ‘torture chamber’. The décor for starters was shocking. One would hope before going into any kind of surgery to wait the agonizingly long minutes away in a room filled with warm positive vibes. Maybe some colourful curtains, or some cheerful wallpaper? Hardly. Instead the walls were an off yellow, the light surprisingly dim while the air had that bland sterile taste. The kind you only ever find in hospitals or aeroplanes.
Luckily I didn’t end up waiting long. Perhaps only ten or fifteen minutes, through most of which my Mum had talked to me from beside the bed. None of what we said sticks in my mind, the only thing I distinctly remember was that my Mum mentioned that she’d be waiting in the ward the hospital had allocated me when I came out of the operating theatre.
Thus I found myself being pushed through the set of double doors. The stark brightness of this room compared to that of the ‘torture chamber’ is the most I can remember of its appearance, that and a small coalition of doctor’s and nurses beside a operating table. One was my anesthetist, who’d I’d met earlier and hadn’t been able to decide if the guy was poking fun at me or was simply overly grave. By the end of our brief discussion I’d come to realise this guy took his job VERY SERIOUSLY; so much so that kept wondering if he was for real. The other doctor I knew was my surgeon. Tall, was the most distinctive feature about him. Tall and beginning the saga of baldness. Having only met him twice before that day I had managed to chalk up what I’d seen of his personality to be a friendly professional.
After being asked to shift from the hospital bed to the operating table, I was pre-warned of a prick on the pack of my left hand as a drip was pushed into one of my veins. At that point I admit to suddenly having a fit of butterflies in my stomach (I’d been relatively calm up until then compared to now). A woozy, giddying sensation swept though my head. The anesthetist had defiantly been for real.
I ended up closing my eyes trying to steady that feeling and told myself to ‘just breathe’. The way I can describe how it feels to be put under and being aware of it is difficult. Your thoughts simplify. They start swirling and swimming about as an unwelcome force pushes its way into your mind, I’d think of it not as a needle or torn, but rather a tendril (something alive) that seems to seep in through the walls of what you define as your mind, before it happens abruptly, like the flick of a light switch. Everything simply turns off.
© Nikky Lee
♠ ♠ ♠
i've resisted the temptation to nick-pick and have left it as it was orginally written