Memoir | The Extrication
From the fallow fields of my effete recollection a road emerges; a trodden lane of alternative and infrequent travel. Like a trail etched into the woods by the patter of curious footsteps or a scar smooth as wax where hair no longer grows, this is my way back.
With a purple marker the surgeon plotted points across my abdomen where later the constellation would be cut away and removed. I stood facing the supply cabinets looking off into the murky depths of betadine, which reminded me of rust water, or the ochre of an aged puddle of blood. I thought about his scalpel slicing into me, my skin filleted and fleshed away like hide from a hooved animal. I imagined forceps and hemostats lost and left behind corroding within. The taste of iron suddenly filled my mouth and I asked if I could have a soft drink before the surgery. He moved over my body as if it were not my body or the body from which the question came.
I was told I could rinse my mouth with a saline solution. “Swish and spit Paul, it’s necessary that you don’t consume any liquids prior to the operation”. His hair was voluminous and shiny like a fox’s fur, and he smelled like a warm ATM withdrawal. His smile, a radiant flash accompanied by the sound-effect of two swords striking or a star being born, made me feel yellow inside.
I dropped the paper cone into the trash, and then slipped back into my robe, which hung loosely over my body like linen used to cover the dead or indecent. I felt the cool breeze of gurneys icing by and sheets being removed. We arrived and checked-in at the registration desk where three tanned, torpid women attempted to look busy.
Two large doors opened before us, and I was led into a large porcelain room equipped with plastic wrapped apparatus and fixtures fitted with hoses and tubes. The operating table reminded me of a movie I had once seen where a frightened, remorseful subject of a lethal injection was fastened with both arms outstretched and secured to separate boards. The anesthesiologist and surgical nurse showcased the padded crucifix with glamorous waves and gestures of the hands as if I was in the showcase showdown or that was my cue to climb up.
I stared upward into a large, round bank of lights above me, and then surrendered to the table’s Christian design. The cool prickle of antiseptic diverted my attention from the face of the anesthesiologist, an Indian woman looking lovingly at me from behind a mask that, if removed, would reveal a thin set of lips and a fine, dark mustache. She moved over me like a mother while the surgical nurse slid an IV catheter into my left arm and inflated my artery with barbiturates. My eyes rolled sideways like two olives in tandem beneath the brine and vodka of my bleared vision, then came to rest against the glass of the Indian’s gaze. I focused on her forehead where a red bindi dot burned in vermillion versus of things sacred and concealed and began counting backwards from ten.
Ten, nine, eight, and I could feel the body’s wires course with the current of integers and amnesia. Seven…six…five… and I met with the warm embrace of ambrosia, the anonymity of the self separating, like a locust from it’s thin papery larvae luggage, and I spread my wings, falling gracefully from the outer bark of inauspicious surroundings into the warm romantic breeze of altered consciousness. The cacophony of surgical sounds rippled through my cortex and transformed into an unbroken ocean upon which I stood, a sea snake with scaled skin coiled and contemplative, reposed in it‘s pre-shed state, then suddenly I was a Portuguese man of war pirouetting down into the smeary blue depths of unconsciousness. Five…four…three… I tired hard to hold on, opening my eyes one last time meeting with golden gilded smile of my sleep keeper and the corona of a salty half inserted sun.
Black is a word too big to fit into the box in which I was buried. I laid for ten hours, unresponsive beneath the bale umbra of unconsciousness and lost to an unaccountability so profuse and profound that the deepest trawlers and draglines could never touch bottom or snag a survivor from that nadir of nothingness. There, at the bottom between oblivion and abyss, my body laid in suspension like a lipid buoyantly bobbing between two worlds. The one that hurt to touch, and the other one waiting to receive me like a deep blue embrace.
After the operation, I never really woke up. It was a slow ascent, a surfacing, a decompression back into reality where the pain issued and ebbed from an unidentified source; rising within like bubbles from the seal of something broke. I was wrapped in blankets and set to thaw under a set of pale fluorescent pillars that sizzled like mist or speakers unspoken through. Over the intercom doctors were paged and cryptic codes were corresponded in grated voices that sounded like transmissions from Mars. As the anesthesia lifted from my limbs and released me to the custody of corporeal sensations I attempted to speak.
I tried to call out but the air escaped without inflection. Panicked, I tried again and encountered a clot of congestion knotted and lodged in my throat from ten hours of intubation. Taking in air around the obstruction and clenching my throat tightly in an attempt to cough, I thrust the nest of callused crimson and gelatinous grief from my hull until my mouth overflowed with the stuff. A nurse responded to my distress, firmly placing an oyster colored pan beneath my chin and telling me to cough. She asked me to rate my pain using a scale of one to five. I held up five fingers then slumped further into the sheets as I watched as she injected narcotics into my IV line.
If truth is a road, then pain is a way back and scars are not testimony to truth or fact, but to how we once felt. I had felt nothing there in that darkness of an unaddressable world, not the cold steel table ready to resist my stains nor the bulge of my newly stitched navel – not even the relief of a retired, unwanted former self snipped away. And, suddenly, as the slow drip of drugs smuggled back across my borders, I was back at the bottom of the abyss with the creepy antennaed crustaceans and pale fish, floating beneath myself, beneath the pain of plastic surgery and magic tricks gone awry. From my box, my separated and sawed-in-half-self sown back together again, I stared upward through the vitreous bottom water and tried one last time to touch the surface where it always seemed to hurt the worst.
