I had surgery this week. That may not seem too exciting to most people, but the only other time in my life I had surgery was when I was seven and had my tonsils out. I do vaguely remember waking up in my hospital bed and being angry with my parents sitting at my bedside for putting me through that; not the last time I'd be angry with them, of course. But this time I was fully aware of everything happening around me, and it was scary. I don't do well with the unknown, plus I think I watched a news report years ago about people waking up during surgery, and I was deathly afraid that would happen to me. I might have offended my anesthesiologist by asking him too many questions, but I had to know how he knew how much anesthesia to give me, and was he sure he'd done the calculations right?
My last memory was of the anesthetist holding a blue mask over my face and telling me it was pure oxygen and to "take some nice deep breaths". Liar. But that's okay; I did wake up from the "oxygen", after all. The weird thing is, when I awoke I "saw" two large computer monitors outside my recovery area, each with large blocks of text running across them. As I looked at them, I said, though, not out loud, "I write novels". Apparently it was very important to me that the (psychic) personnel attending me knew that. Had I been clear-headed and in possession of my phone, I could have whipped over to my latest novel's Amazon page and racked up a few orders.
I'm not going to try to draw some existential conclusion from my first post-surgery thought. I've got enough to worry about with wound care and blah blah blah...Maybe because I'm not a bestselling novelist, I felt that people needed to know that I actually do write...and well. Writing novels has been my existence since 2016; it's kind of what I'm (not) known for. I write under a pen name, so my secret remains safe from those who know me, but maybe I'm just damn ready to stop hiding.
Did I really need to endure surgery to learn that?
