Excerpt from Memoir

Count backwards from 10. Think of a peaceful scene. Take a deep breath in and out. Repeat. 10, 9, 8, 7…

My body is a doll. Limbs moved side to side, poked and prodded, sliced and stitched. No matter what is done to me, my expression must remain the same look of restful sleep while my consciousness is somewhere else. Where am I? Gowns are removed and then thrown back on. My hair once pinched into a neat bun underneath a surgery cap has become loose once awakening. I wake up to sores, scratches, teal-blue bruises on my thighs, my arms. Soreness in some areas, groginess like a weighted blanket. Yellow-orange dye by the surgery spots. Bandages. Gauze. The constant chirping of beeps around and shuffle of nurses and doctors and mumblings of others waking up. This is a familiar landscape.

Somehow there’s the consensus that not knowing is better. Certainly if you asked if I wanted to be there to witness my body being sliced open while organs are snipped out or tissue ripped out or bones reinforced with metal plates, I’d snort and say no way. But what about the option of knowing, being present? Instead of an inanimate doll, what if I was a participant patient? Wouldn’t it be a whole other journey to be a present witness to what your mind had signed you up for? I try to really imagine being that someone in an operating room with local anesthesia making small talk with surgeons and assistants while being sliced open.

So… how accurate is this experience to Operation? You know, the board game? No misplaced apples or wrenches floating about down there?

But I’m not given this option and I believe that I don’t want this option. So how could I even talk about the body while under when A) I’m not there and B) I’m still there?

It is exactly in these moments where my body is the only witness, my conscious mind privy to nix. All that remains is the body’s soft ache. I am left with new scars to piece together what happened. I must listen and simultaneously feel - a feat equivalent to climbing Mount Everest for me. Yet, if I don’t listen and feel, then the ragdoll with the frozen, calm expression becomes my modus operandi. I wake up from the surgery and ignore the evidence that something major has happened to my body. I am changed but I refuse to acknowledge it.

Not exploring is not an option.