An excerpt from INFECTED...
I was never asked to count
backwards or anything like that, and I don’t remember having any kind of a mask
placed over my mouth. They must have slipped the anesthesia into my IV. Or
maybe I just feel asleep. I really don’t remember anything concrete about that
morning.
I do remember waking up though.
The pain was worse than I ever could have imagined. I could feel a deep cut
along the full length of my abdomen, but that wasn’t the only thing that hurt.
My entire body felt like it had been carved open and turned inside out. It
probably had.
I didn’t dare move, not even my
head. But I did blink open my eyes. The only thing I could see was the ceiling.
I was in a large room near a corner. There was a wall a few feet to my left and
another one somewhere relatively close behind me head. It wasn’t to close
though, because several doctors and/or nurses were standing behind me. There
was a curtain hanging from the ceiling somewhere towards my feet and off to the
right. I thought I heard other nurses farther away to my right treating some
other patient. He may have been in the same room as me, or possibly just down
the hall.
A woman’s voice spoke near me,
“Welcome back.”
When I didn’t turn my head to
look at her, the woman’s face appeared above me. “I’m going to put some
morphine in your IV.”
I tried to talk, but I didn’t
know what to say, and it hurt too much to move my lips. An unintelligible croak
came out instead. I had no sense of time. The voices were talking about vital
signs and poor reaction responses. Nothing made any sense to me. I just wanted
to go back to sleep and have all the pain disappear.
The woman’s face came back. “Are
you ready for more morphine?”
I thought about nodding but
didn’t know what would happen to me if I attempted that much motion. I managed
to whisper, “yes.”
Sometime later, another voice
that I recognized rose above the rest. It had probably been there the entire
time. Everything was confusing. “Kate, can you tell me what you’re feeling
right now?”
It was Dr. Surgeon. He was
there above me, where the woman with the morphine shot had been before. “Pain,”
was the only thing I could say.
I got another shot of morphine
and Dr. Surgeon’s head disappeared, but his voice remained. He was
talking louder now, yelling at someone. At first, I thought it was the nurses
but when the other side of the conversation didn’t come, I realized he was
talking on a phone. “I need an IV of acetaminophen up here now…”
“…You’re a hospital pharmacy,
don’t tell me you don’t have it. Grind up some pills and dissolve it in saline
if you have to, just get it here…” I’d never heard Dr. Surgeon mad
before. He normally had the personality of a friendly grandpa.
I got one more shot of morphine
before the acetaminophen showed up. My pain was so intense, I couldn’t even
think. How could Tylenol possibly make that go away? None of it made sense. But
Dr. Surgeon was right. Maybe the Tylenol reacted with the morphine in
some weird way I didn’t understand. I didn’t care. All I knew was that as soon
as the acetaminophen entered my system a giant fog of pain lifted off of me.
Everything still hurt. But it
was a tolerable hurt. In less than a second, I dropped from an eleven to a nine
on the pain threshold scale. Moving my head felt like a stretch, but at least I
could think again.
Dr. Surgeon was back.
“Kate, are you with us?”
“Thank you.” My voice was week,
but I got out the words.
