Day 5 - The Awakening

In the course of human existence there are many feelings that are not great to experience: People dying in your family/loved ones, pets dying, getting busted for committing a crime (raises hand), and then there’s the following…

Day 5 starts around 7am with me finally reaching relative consciousness. The very first thing I remember seeing was the nurses desk, directly in front of my temporary room. What I didn’t see? My mother.

If you know me, you know I have a limited vocabulary, especially when peeved…my immediate thought (I still had a tube down my throat so verbalizing wasn’t a possibility) was simply: “Where the fuck is she?” I clearly remember it was between 7-7:30am.

I had no clue where exactly I was considering when I hopped on the gurney on Friday morning, I was in a different room, and clearly on a different floor. I knew this because after walking the entirety of the original floor I was on before I was allowed to sign-off on a surgical procedure, I knew that place like the back of my hand.

So, there I was at 7:30am, hooked up to every tube imaginable, in a strange room, on a strange floor, without seeing my mother. Brilliant. No television audio on either. Bollocks!

I watched this mindless television program and did some clock-watching, and at 9:17 (yes, I kept track) I saw someone who resembled my mother walk into the doorway. Me thinks someone had some breakfast. Sons a bitches…

But, I was glad to see her. And I was eager to get my shit together and my recovery underway. Soon after that my aunt came in to visit as well.

After it was deemed that I was conscious and I had a tube removed from my throat. Not the prettiest thing you would imagine, but not thee worst thing during my three-week stay. Then again, those lovely pain medications were pumped so high in the ICU that I could’ve probably been hit by a Mack Truck and not felt it.

During the course of the morning and the afternoon, I was beginning to get a tale and some shadowy details of:

1. Why I was in the ICU: Just one day prior I had an emergency second surgery, to which I was blissfully unaware. I remember being told this by my mother and saying one word: “Oh.”


2. Why it was 4 days after I first went under the knife and I didn’t remember ANY of the previous 3: Many, many sexy drugs.

3. And some hilarious details on when I took a phone call: This apparently happened before I became conscious-conscious, but there must have been a time I was awake enough to have the feeding tube taken out and accept a telephone call. I remember NONE of this and the person I talked to reported later to me that I made NO sense, and my mother said I was waving my arms and trying to write some hieroglyphs at some point. I was really fucked up on some good drugs, yo. I wish it would’ve been taped…that would have been gold. Comic gold.

At some point in the afternoon, the ultrasound people came into the room and did an ultrasound over the area in question. This only took forever, but wasn’t uncomfortable, just annoying. I was also told that I may get to move the next day back to my original floor, to which buoyed my hopes of progress.

After my mother left, I was left to lie in my temporary bed and ponder the possibilities of what the second surgery was for and what that meant for my immediate future. Was I in serious jeopardy of losing the thing I had so desperately desired already? What complication had occurred?

What I remember most is simply one long, endless night of watching the television with the sound on.

In the evening I was given a cup of ice chips. You never realize how heavenly ice chips can be until your mouth is incredibly dry, your lips have dried blood on them, and you’re in the mood to eat. I had some ice chips fed to me by the nurse who was taking care of me. She was incredibly sweet to, every 10 mins or so, drop into the room, pick up the plastic spoon, dig into that cup of ice chips and put them in my awaiting mouth of cotton.

However, she made one very grave mistake. I became, an ice chip man-whore. After the first cup, she asked if I wanted more, I said…”Hmmmmm, sure.” I remember swirling my still parched tongue around the interior of my mouth and thinking that even if my mouths feels fairly good now…if I dare say no, I won’t be able to get any later. It was a brilliant strategic maneuver!

After a while, she tried to cut me off by saying I now had to feed them too myself. This proved to be another grave mistake on her part. I only downed them faster. The nurse eventually had to cut my ass off because I was going until the wee hours of the following morning downing cup after cup of ice chips.

By this point, we are talking 3-4 in the morning, and this was the time that the damn women’s hair place ad and its song were freaking me out.

Day 5 never really ends because I never went to sleep that night. I was awake from 7am on that Tuesday, through 7am and beyond on the Wednesday.

Day 6 will start @ 7am Wednesday.