white pills

I wrote bits and pieces of this entry over the last four days, Friday through Monday. I was alternately tromping through the mists of anaesthesia, sliding down the slippery slopes of unconsciousness, or drunk driving through Vicodin land.

White pills. itty bitty little pills. They're shaped like sausages. Chop 'em in half. Chop chop. Chop.

Yay, pills! Little pills.

The parts I wrote during my drug-induced hazes are rather painfully obvious. Just in case they're not -- don't tell me, please; I've always suspected taking drugs would be redundant but I don't know if my ego could take the blow -- I've italicized them.

The Vicodin packed a wallop. Knocked me out for a long time, right before I woke up and discovered I had a, you know, Sensitivity.

White white white white half chop chop white. . .

Hi!

'Sensitivity' in my case meant unconsciousness followed by acute dizziness, nausea, and spasms of acute pain. And sweating. Lots of odd, erratic sweating. I flattened myself on the sofa like an overboiled lasagna noodle and thought, "So this is what menopause is like."

In between the Downs I had brief periods of Up, which sent me careening from brunette to blond in under a minute. I was like a comic strip: before color, after color. Look, Little Orphan Annie really didn't have any eyeballs! How freaky. Are Asians supposed to be blondes?

Vico vico vico-din. Chop! Hi! Chop!

Friday was a rocky, adrenaline-fed day. The surgery instructions stated that I wasn't allowed to eat anything as of midnight the night before. Only water. "And a very little amount of apple juice if your blood sugar drops too far," the nurse conceded reluctantly, after I'd grovelled at her feet and played the diabetes card.

What with anxiety over the upcoming surgery, no food, and an abnormal intake of water -- which does not, by the way, replace a good healthy breakfast and a cholesterol-killing six inch roast beef-and-horseradish sub -- I spent most of the morning in the bathroom, making up for the time I spent in front of my computer morbidly investigating "hideous deformity" on google. You'd be surprised at the fetishes people have out there.

Unfortunately, I had a presentation to do at 10:30 to a group of potential customers. Halfway through the demonstration, wracked by nerves and raging starvation, I abruptly lost all grasp of the English language. I finished the demo at 11:45, wielding a dangerous bludgeon of Japlish and assorted psychological disorders. What I should've done is stopped midway, apologized for my disorganized thoughts, explained my situation, and then continued where I left off.

What I did instead was, "And this is . . . um . . . and, you can using it for . . . you know, children. Children. Measuring their girth and . . . um, things."

'Girth and things.' I could remember the word 'girth' but I couldn't dredge up the word 'growth.' 'You can using it for'? What the hell was that?

My surgeon was gorgeous. Beautiful. I think she might have been 18 years old. Gorgeous gorgeous. Why's she a plastic surgeon and got all resentful. I think ugly people should be plastic surgeons. Beautiful people should be married to David Bowie. Hi!

It's possible that the customers thought I was a floor show. After the first thirty minutes of gibbering, they fell ominously silent. I suspect they had the mute set on the phone and had called security to dispose of it.

Can't really blame them.

The Guy came to pick me up at 1:00. My appointment had been moved up to 1:45. Hugging a water bottle the size of my head, suitable for the extermination of any medical professional who came near me with a scalpel, I climbed into his car and we headed for Santa Clara hospital.

She prescribed me Vicodin. Little white pills. Yay! Chopping them in half.

Hello there! Hi! Hi!!

I was admitted still clutching my water bottle, which the admitting clerk appeared to find completely natural. With the Guy seated as chaperone and guard nearby, we reeled through the piles of information that Kaiser appears to think necessary to the admission of a patient for surgery. The clerk showed a remarkable nonchalance towards spelling, which my uninitiated mind had never before perceived as a creative outlet. Corrections she accepted with sanguinimity, obligingly blotting out a letter at random to show that she was, in fact, open to our suggestions. To say that the final result held a passing resemblance to reality would be grossly overstating the case.

A plastic wristband was fastened on one hand, its twin was cuffed around the Guy's wrist, and we were herded upstairs. "They're calling for you," she announced. It was 2:10.

We followed limp green arrows upstairs and around some particularly institutional corridors to the pre-op prep room, where the medico from the initial consult was waiting for me in green scrubs. The bottle that the clerk had accepted without a blink almost caused a coronary in the surgeon. "What," she flared, dramatically pointing, "is that?"

"Water?" I said blankly, and clutched at my bottle.

I had roused the surgeon's wrath, who knows how. "You're not supposed to drink any water for Three Hours before the surgery," she scolded, and pointed at the Guy. "You. Take that away from her."

We were herded to a waiting bed, a portion of the long room that was banked by curtains and nothing else. A nurse closed the drapes to give us a semblance of privacy, and directed me to change out of my clothes into the embarrassingly scanty hospital gowns they always provide for the titillation and entertainment of onlookers. They handed me a shopping bag and directed me to put my clothes in it. "Look, it has my name on it," I told the Guy with a proud feeling of importance.

Stripped down and changed, I lolled on the padded bed in the little room made up entirely of curtains. "There's cold air on my ass," I complained to the Guy, when suddenly the curtains were drawn back and I was surrounded by people in scrubs. A barrage of questions attacked me.

"Have you had cough, fever, runny nose, aching in the last two weeks?"

"Do you drink alcohol regularly? Do you use tobacco? Do you use any illegal drugs?"

"Have you an allergy to any medication, antibiotic, topical cream--"

"When was the date of your last period?"

"Have you been exposed to Hepatitis, tuberculosis, malaria--"

"Do you snore?"

"Yes," answered the Guy for me, with what I thought unnecessary emphasis.

"When was the last time you drank water?"

They all paused expectantly. I lied. "Twelve o'clock?" I said, meekly.

Instant chagrin amongst the scrubs. You would've thought I'd just confessed to having regular unprotected sex with African monkeys being used for HIV drug tests.

"It was good monkey love," I said in a small voice.

After much deliberation, meaningful glances at each other, and muttered conferences outside my curtains, the attendents eventually decided not to cancel the surgery. An IV was inserted at my left wrist, and the anaesthesiologist injected it with happy juice.

The world immediately began to spin. "It'll be like getting drunk without the hangover," she assured me.

"I've never been drunk," I announced, watched while she split into three or four people, and added happily, "but if this is what being drunk is like, I should start doing it."

Boom. Boom. Hi. Guy. Hi Guy!

Of it all, it was the local anaesthetic that hurt the worst. They wheeled me down long depressing corridors into a larger, jollier room, at which point a group of cheerful people in more scrubs swaddled me like an obese baby and poked painful needles in my cheek.

"Ow."

"Sorry. This'll only last--"

"Ow. Ow. Ow."

"--a second. I just--"

"OWOWOWOW."

"--have to finish this one--"

"OW!!!"

"--spot. There. Now that wasn't so bad, was it?"

I had more dignity as a three-year old. Now I know why my Mom was so impressed.

Poke. Pokey things. In the cheek. They hurt. And then, and then, yum.

The rest of the procedure passed by in a haze, a drowsy sensory deprivation without sight -- they dropped a large cloth over my eyes, presumably because my earlier behavior hadn't instilled in them any hope that I'd behave well upon seeing a scalpel, happy juice or no -- or feeling. The chatter of the scrubs around me had little impact on my mood, which was one of sleepy contentment without ever actually falling so deep as actual sleep. They were lucky. The Guy wasn't kidding about the snoring.

After the surgery they wheeled me back into the pre-op ward again, now designated a post-op ward because I was at its other end and Kaiser is cheap. They informed me that they were going to keep me for about an hour for observation, "Although she was already chirping by the time we finished," the anaesthesiologist told the nurse in what she apparently thought was a whisper, "so we could probably release her earlier than that."

Chirping?

The nurse stuck things to me and wandered away, and I watched with interest as the monitor over the bed began recording things. I managed to establish that the meter at the top of the display was my heart rate. The one in the middle I couldn't establish. A number at the side recorded my blood pressure, and the one at the bottom was my respiratory rate.

Being me, and already being bored, I instantly began trying to mess with the readouts. My normal respiratory rate is 15 breaths per minute. I can comfortably go to 7 breaths per minute. The monitor alerts at 9 breaths per minute. And then there was my heartbeat . . . .

The nurse wasn't amused.

By the time the Guy came to pick me up, I was exhaustedly chipper -- yes, chirping -- over a cup of jello and chicken broth brought to me by a maternal nurse. They popped me into a wheelchair for the ride down, over my weeble-wobble protests. And that was that.

The rest of that day, my head nodded on my neck like it was barely hanging on by a thread . . . but I was happy, oh yes, I was happy. On Saturday, I ate most of the kitchen. And on Sunday--

--on Sunday, I learned I had a Sensitivity to Vicodin.

I'm all better now.

Hi! Hi! Hello! Hi! How are you? Hi!

Incident...

I went to bed on Saturday night and found a clear sticky round thing planted right between my breasts. It had a metal nipple. I shrieked.

"STICKY THING!"

I started to peel it off while the Guy chuckled. "It's just the pad they use to monitor your heartbeat. They must've forgotten to take it off."

It was painful to remove. I rubbed the skin left behind and it was sticky and plastic with leftover goop. I climbed into bed. "They left it," I said sulkily and more than a bit idiotically. "Sticky thing."

I'd forgotten to put on a pajama top. Something on my ribs itched. I reached to scratch, and my fingers came in contact with--

"ANOTHER STICKY THING!!" I shrieked.

I investigated further on the other side while the Guy dissolved into mirth. "ANOTHER ANOTHER STICKY THING!!"