surgery

“Don’t you think that’s a little … overkill?”I’d been waiting in the doctor’s office for at least a quarter of an hour, ready for what I was certain would be a completely routine post-op consult. Having never had any kind of major surgery before this tubal ligation, wisdom teeth extraction excepted, I didn’t realize that the existence of a surgical incision required a follow-up visit, about two weeks post-op, to ensure that everything was healing correctly.

Edmund, most of the time, is too lazy to work up the effort to squeeze out a full-fledged meow, instead settling for a meaningful glance, occasionally laced with a whiskertwitch or two. Only when he is annoyed (defined as “my brother kitty will not play with me when I bite him on the ass”) does he really feel the need to actually audibly voice his opinion. Today was no exception, but even without the vocalization, I got the point.

From the inbox…

My surgery is Tuesday afternoon. This afternoon, as I was driving out to pick up books to read while I’m convalescing, I realized something that caught me off guard for a moment: I was happy about the upcoming surgery. Yes, nervous, incredibly - anything that involves a high likelihood of general anesthesia should be treated with the respect and caution such drugs deserve. But happy. Relieved. Calm. It was going to happen, and I was glad of it - glad and grateful that I live in a country, during a time, that lets me decide the future of my own fertility.

The decision to not have children was made a long time ago, long before most of you knew me. Andrew may or may not remember, but Matthew does; one of my cross-country phone calls led him to mention that he remembers me talking about planning this someday surgery … twelve years ago. (…and to subsequently say “It’s about damn time you got around to it.”)

hEll0 wOr1d. Remember me?

Yeah, you. Hey, thanks for the painkillers and this wacky hole in my jaw. I survived anyway, despite your best efforts. Neener. I even had vegetables tonight - you know, those colorful crunchy things you chew? They rock my little blue planet. I was considering starting a peasant revolt if there was to be more soup.

Life axiom: you know you’re getting better when you’re starting to get sick of soup. Okay, so I’m not sick of the ice cream or the cinnamon-flavored applesauce just yet, and definitely not the yogurt or the smoothies, but the soup? The soup’s gotta go.

I really hadn’t intended on this one little dental appointment eating up my week, but in retrospect I’m glad I didn’t know how Hitchhiker’s-esque bad the tooth extraction was going to be. I mean, really, would you go in for a procedure if you knew that having it would cause you to swallow enough blood to make you retch for a period of days?

I want to tell you that I was brave, that it didn’t hurt, that it was an easy procedure and that I came home and laughed about it afterward. The problem is that none of these statements are true. The truth falls more between sobering and horrifying, and does not reflect well on me. I cried through most of the procedure, it hurt badly, and as soon as I got home I downed my first round of Lortab even though my procedural anesthetic was still in place — because I needed to numb the memories of the procedure as quickly as possible.The dentist asked me afterwards how I felt.