"You just had surgery, Mr. Oliver! You need to lay back down!" The voice was masculine, firm, authoritative, and I was wondering if it was the CRNA that gave me the good shit a second before, which was really more like an hour before, but when you're coming to from a surgical procedure, time -and your perspective on its passage- becomes oddly skewed and basically unintelligible. One minute, you're flat on your back, bouncing your foot criss-crossed over your knee as an extremely friendly surgical nurse in a skull cap wheels you down a weird set of twists to an ice cold room filled with all the sounds of machines that keep you alive and monitor just how alive you are. The nurse (who reminds me of a slightly older [but equally sweet natured and gifted with the ability to instantly put someone at ease with her innate charm] Erin Spurlock) has probably gotten the job for the combined genius brain that one needs to properly assimilate nursing information to succeed and excel and this awesome bedside manner that some people can spend their entire professional lives striving to dispense and never make it: people such as this woman who led me into the sea of tranquil sensory deprivation (and Erin Spurlock) just have that natural bedside manner already. There's nothing you can teach them, and there's nothing more they need to know. That's an amazing thing. And thank Good Orderly Direction it's not something that was handed out the day I was passing through the additional personality characteristics line before making my way down the birth canal. Had I received it, then I may be forced to use it and subsequently be stuck with nursing in lieu of merely having had it as a temporary, but very necessary experience on my path toward true fulfillment.
...at some point, this post was tremendously lengthier. I somehow deleted its bulk at one of the points that it was saved. It was a pretty decent ramble about the days immediately following my surgery. I kept coming back to it intermittently to add updates.
I'm back to work tomorrow, and I hurt. And I'm off any and all narcotizing opiates, back on an opiod, which is not the same thing. And I hurt. I hurt like I never even had the surgery.
This isn't post-surgical recovery pain. This is pre-surgical pain, the same pain I had prior to the grand event that was supposed to have taken place on Monday, 20 June.
I'm back to work tomorrow, well - tonight, and I am already waiting for the next MRI (June 29th, with and without contrast -reminds me, they left me a message today, I need to call them back) and the reading of its results the following Tuesday to see what my next step will be. Do I really want to go through another surgery? Can I?
I have classes to consider. My advisor emailed me today to tell me that I'm right on track to graduate in a little more than ten months. Hard to believe.
I have too many other fish to fry rather than worry over some ridiculous back pain. I do see how people can become overly distracted by this, though. And depressed.
Maybe more later.
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