Anaesthesia and Re-entry

Re-entry

This morning I had an email from my daughter Pia writing from her home in France to remind me that I had left the story of the blog hanging somewhere between Denver and Durango. That's the danger of starting a blog. Someone might be reading it and want the stream to keep flowing.

We made it back to Durango last Thursday, right on schedule. The trip was pretty easy for me; Doug did all the driving. It was a beautiful sunny Colorado day. When I got home up on the mountain I made sure to pee in the front yard over by the trees, and I patted Monty the dog on the head. Then I went downstairs to get a bottle of Boyer champagne and I put it in the fridge while I sat on the deck in the sunshine and waited for Joyce to come home from work. Nine days and one slight body alteration later, I was home.

Anaesthesia

My closest point of contact with the surgery was, interestingly, the thing that kept me from having to experience it directly. I'll have more to say about the process of going into that good night. But for the present I'm still trying to come to terms with the re-entry from the land of nothing. Never has my mind gone in so many different directions at once as it did during that little journey.

It begins in the recovery room. Total blackness starts to make way for very dim light. There are voices, then faces, then memories. But of course the memories have nothing to do with what has just happened to my body. These are memories of jobs I might not have finished completely, bills I might not have paid, billings I might not have gotten to my clients, term papers (yes, some of the memories go way back) I might not have handed in to my professors. It was the old "inadequacy dream," and it wouldn't go away.

I remember wanting to just get moving and finish everything before it drove me crazy. I tried to move my arms, my legs. No luck. I tried to sit up. No luck. I tried to talk, and I remember there was a sound. But I don't think the sound formed words.

The sweet face and voice of the nurse was my introduction to the new reality of the recovery room. The gentle insistence of that voice and her constant presence helped me get shut of all that imagined responsibility and inadequacy, and I just relaxed into the pillow. Slowly I came to recognize the world around me and my place in it. And I liked it.