As I follow the nurse into the operating room my nerves from the past few months start to get to me. I've been waiting months for this surgery, I know at the other side of this surgery I will finally be on the road to recovery and that my mouth can finish it's healing. But now I'm just thinking of that strange sterile room called an operating room. As I go through the doors it's as I remember it from the last surgery a few months ago.
There's a table with a sheet on it and an extension for the left arm to rest on, though my IV is in my right hand. The walls are a 70's green tile, there are several machines in the room, even more doctors and nurses. The nurse gets a step stool so I can climb onto the table and the doctors start to hook me up to stuff. Now I can see the operating lights - 3 giant lights on hinges so they can move around to provide optimum light for wherever the surgery is going on. I remember operating rooms from when I was a child, they had a center light with lights all around them. The lights now are similar to those, but single bigger lights and more mobile.
Then I hear it, my heart beating. It's fast, even I know it's really fast. I'm nervous about the surgery, who wouldn't be, but the fast heart beat sounds worse then I feel. I calm myself down, and the beeping of my heart rate that everyone in the room can hear slows to a near normal rate. Wow, if I can calm myself down like that then how did it get so fast in the first place? I make small talk with the doctors, they'll use my left leg to harvest the bone instead of my right leg, so I can drive - it's so simple.
Why are they waiting so long to give me the anesthesia? Don't they know how stressful the waiting is? I don't need the small talk that precedes the surgery, just let me sleep while you do the hard work. Then blessedly they tell me that I will start getting drowsy. At first I want to close my eyes and help it along, then I think they might think I'm asleep and I'm not. I open my eyes, but quickly the fight ends. The next thing I know, the surgery is over.
I had bone a cleft palate repair and graft surgery in late July. While this post isn't about travel, the hyper sensitivity to my surrounding and the beating of my heart reminds me of how present you can be when you travel so I thought I would post this. The surgery went well, some minor hiccups, but nothing keeping me from recovery.
