I had my knee surgery today. They took a tiny little bulbous mass of ... something out of the point of my knee. An odd little bulbous mass that killed me every time it hit something and creeped out my friends when they touched it and began to obsess me as soon as it got to be time to wear shorts out again.
It started to grow after I lacerated myself on coral in Puerto Rico, and it was one of my last momentos. I will be so very glad to see it gone, though.
They overmedicated the hell out of me. It must have been a centimeter-incision and they practically knocked me out. I started talking the second the IV hit and didn’t stop for two hours straight. I can barely remember waking up; telling the anesthesiologist he sucked when he stuck me and then apologizing for that every five minutes for the rest of the afternoon; screaming to my surgeon that he rocked from across the recovery room; trying to change the graph of my heart monitor by moving my finger; describing this apricot facial scrub I bought to my mother; and trying to explain a particle detector drift chamber to an RN because they brought up duct tape.
I felt hung over the rest of the day and couldn’t stand up for more than five minutes.
My mother and father came down to help me, and I could scarcely explain to them how thankful I was, though before the fact I found it something of a moot point. I got to talk to them the entire time as my drugs were wearing off (“You were mighty chatty”, my mother puts it mildly...)
My relationship with my father has transformed this year. Maybe he has a little too. Maybe I have. We conversed like reasonable people today. He doesn’t tell me that I’m stupid anymore. I think that I asserted myself and my own choices (to my indescribable terror) for the first time in just this past year: becoming a vegetarian, changing my major and staying an extra year in school ... and that has made all the difference. We’re equals now a little. That or it’s finally reached that point where my mistakes are mine to make, and his approval is a thing to enjoy and to know I have somewhere down below, but not to be sought like a hopeless salvation I’ll never have.
I’m constantly amazed by how much his father’s death last week affected him. I’ve never seen him sentimental before, as today when he pulled from his pocket the lucky silver dollar his father carried every day for fifty years.
I still feel like shit. Man I hope these drugs wear off by tomorrow...