Every Day is Marne Gras

Before we get started they need me to pee in a cup but I have diarrhea instead and I realize I am not feeling so nonchalant about this whole process anymore.  It takes fifteen minutes before I squeeze eight drops of unadulterated pee out. 

I am not scared until a half hour before the surgery, when I am sitting in pre-op in my little hospital nightgown that doesn’t close in the back (more like a smock than a gown, good for a first grader to paint in), with a blanket over my bare legs that are dangling off the gurney, with a gigantic periwinkle paper hairnet that goes almost over my eyes because even though I am an adult, I am not the size of an adult.  This includes the size of my head, apparently. 

Maria is sitting in the one folding chair they provide for your own allotted “support” person.  She has a gigantic plastic shopping bag filled with all of my clothes, that I very much want to put back on.  I am alternately relieved and miserable that it is Maria and not my mother sitting next to me. 

When they begin to install IVs in my half dressed little body, when the anesthesiologist, OR nurse, and doctor have all come and said their piece to me, when I am alone with Maria and the woman who is looking around for one of my lazy, indifferent veins pokes my left forearm for a first try at an IV entry point, I feel the bottom drop out of me.  I am so, so, scared.  I am suddenly three months of feelings.  I am suddenly very awake.  What am I doing?  I don’t want to do this.  I want to jump off the gurney and run out of this hospital in my half-down and hairnet and who cares who sees my ass as I scoot out the door and who cares if the recipient of the bone marrow I am about to donate will most certainly die if I change my mind at this very last second? 

I know I’m not allowed to feel any of this. I stare ahead of me and say “i’m scared” to no one in particular, as if I could say that and yet still feel as indifferent as I’ve felt about this whole process for the past couple of months.  I lie well when in crisis. 

They are medicating me at this point with something to “relax” me.  No one will tell me what they are giving me, and I am not interested in putting up a fight with modern medicine at 6:15 in the morning.  I am on their turf.  No one cares if I believe in natural healing and homeopathy.  They make everyone calm the fuck down before surgery, because even the coolest cucumbers, like myself, have these tender moments of panic, and it is better if they are heavily doped when it occurs to them to run away. 

They tell me to lie back, that the medicine is in now, that it will burn my arm (it does) as it enters, but that soon I will feel relaxed.  Maria makes no attempt at verbally easing my fears.  This is a scary thing.  Feeling scared means I am human.  Better to just feel it until they make me pass out.  She holds my hand instead.  I do not cry.

The relaxation meds work fast and I am not exactly “relaxed”– more like I am barely conscious as they tell me it is time and they wheel me into the operating room.  I know from prior consultations that they are going to put me to sleep before everything, and when I am safely asleep, they will intubate me and then turn me over, ass up, because that is where the doctor is going to drill into me to retrieve my bone marrow, my stem cells. 

The OR is large, white, grey, sterile, full of plastic and metal and so many more people than I expected, all in different versions of the same blue scrubs.  They run around like ants.  Before I am even there I am gone again. My only memory of the entire procedure is my surprise that the OR is much bigger and brighter than it seems on tv.

I wake up around an hour later, with a stir and a jolt.  Much like the last time I was under general anesthesia, I wake up defiant.  Eager to prove how cognizant I am, I try to respond to the conversation going on around me.  I hear two nurses talking above me, something about me being tiny, maybe that it was easy to move me, or they used the pediatric equipment to do a certain thing.  I have not yet opened my eyes, but I am awake, damnit, and I am okay, damnit, and from my mangled body I manage an “I am NOT tiny.” before drifting back into the semi-consciousness I float in and out of all morning.  I am constantly reawakening, trying hard to be present and okay, and drifting back into my hazy, medicated sleep. 

My petulance is a marker that I have done fine with this whole surgery thing, that I can have my support person back now, so they usher Maria back to her folding chair in my curtained-off corner of the recovery unit.  She does not recoil or gawk at my blood drained face or the machines I am hooked up to, or the awful gnarled look of exhaustion and confusion I can’t hide; she holds my hand again and says nice things that I immediately forget.  In one of my brief moments of clarity I ask her to read to me and she reads from Magic For Beginners for a long time, and it is like falling asleep with the tv on.

This is the easy part.  In my recovery area I have a nurse who has only one patient– me.  I have a friend who holds my hand and promises not to lose my pajamas.  I am only half awake from the anesthesia, I am numb from whatever pain meds they’ve pumped into me.  I cannot move yet, but I feel nothing.  There is a cool towel on my head.  There are socks on my feet.  There are pre-heated blankets, heart rate and blood pressure monitors, and someone mentions that when I am awake enough, I can order anything I want to eat.  The nurse holds a cup of apple juice with a straw up to my lips that I sip from, as fluids drip into my bloodstream through the IV.  I don’t need anything.

They pump me full of fluids in order to replace the liter of bone marrow they pulled from during the surgery (1100 mls, actually, but who’s counting?).  Though my throat is sore and my mouth feels like it has been suctioned dry from the anesthesia and the dehydration, the IV fluids make it such that I soon have to pee worse than I’ve ever head to pee before.  It is easily ten times worse than the worst time I’ve ever had to pee, in the car on a long trip, after waking up in the morning after a night of drinking, etc. I have only been out of surgery for less than an hour, but  If I don’t get up and pee in the next three minutes, I am going to pee all over my recovery bed… not that I have the mental wherewithal to give a damn.   

And that is where the trouble begins.