Monday, January 13, 2014

Everything I Know


The awesome Jen Violi provided this prompt: "Everything I know about_____" with some fun-looking directions about picking a book, opening to a random page, pointing to a word and then writing about that word for five minutes.  I'll do that sometime, but I'm not going to do the book/word thing because my writing prompt already came from a wise and compassionate and surpassingly lovely doctor.

I had this  bladder surgery on Monday.  It's day surgery, which means that after an anesthesiologist says "think about walking along the beach in Maui," and you try but you can't because you're asleep already and before seemingly any time has passed, they wake you up and send you home with a few little incisions and some very powerful drugs.  On Tuesday, I was still loopy from drugs and pain, so my mom drove me back to the office for the one more little thing that needed doing.  And that was supposed to be it until my scheduled follow-up at the end of January when the doctor (wise, compassionate, lovely) will clear me to resume, ahem, all regular activity.

But on Wednesday night I felt weird, and on Thursday morning I just didn't feel right and at the advice of my husband I called the doctor and the gal at the front desk said she could get me right in.   My niece drove me this time, because even though I am off the narcotics, I haven't quite passed the "could you slam your foot on the brakes if you had to" test.  And someone looked at some fluids and took my temperature and then the doc came in and smiled at me and touched my incisions and said everything looked great and I said I was embarrassed to put everyone to all this trouble.

And my wise and compassionate and lovely doctor said, "Oh, you know everyone needs different things.  And there are some people who can just put things in the background, and some people who can't."

Which you will know if you ever put me in a room with a moving television screen, or an interesting poster, or a crying baby, or a small sticky spot on a table top, or an open book, or a couple who have just stopped squabbling long enough to put on their company faces.  And those are just the things you can see.  Imagine all that you cannot see - feelings, ideas, worries, thoughts, regrets about yesterday, anticipations about tomorrow - all of that is front and center too.

Everything I know about me is this.  I'm one of the people who can't put things in the background.  
x

4 comments:

  1. I was so happy to see that you've blogged, you could have written your grocery list or something and I would comment on it.

    I miss you.

    Sending you healing thoughts, and saying "I resemble that remark."

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  2. That above comment is me. Don't know why blogger went with that outdated identity.

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  3. good doctor.
    great patient.
    awesome writer.

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