Even a small surgery makes me nervous and introspective.

The last time I was in surgery (2016) my vein had just blown and I woke up on the operating table, early. I remember hearing people talking in loud voices over one another, before opening my eyes and seeing the blurry, busy scene. Someone shouted, “She’s awake!” and the poor male nurse leaning over me was really panicking, furiously massaging and searching my arm, trying to find somewhere to stick the IV. My infamous thin veins along with the Heparin I was being given weren’t helping at all. That face. He looked truly afraid. I think that was the first and only time I’ve ever seen that kind of fear in a nurse. It doesn’t sit well with a patient. But I get it. Poor kid.

My surgeon, though, she was calm.  She was down by my knee and I had to lift my head a little to see her. She told him to try something. He said it wasn’t working. Then she spoke again (for the life of me I can’t remember exactly what was said) sternly and confidently, and marched around the table. The male nurse vanished, and she did something (again, both sternly and confidently) and I was out. Asleep.

Tomorrow I’m going in for arthroscopic surgery on my elbow, a cracked bone spur that won’t allow me to extend my arm all the way, along with some other stuff I’m a tad unclear on. The doctor wanted me to go in for a week, general anesthesia, so he could ‘really clean up the joint’. He said he wouldn’t ‘imagine such a bad elbow on a 70-year old construction worker’. But my fear of general anesthesia and possible blood clots again, together with the fact I don’t get sick days at my job *, has me going in for an outpatient surgery. It’s not a big deal.

But like I said up there: Even a small surgery makes me nervous and introspective.

The good news is that for the past week I’ve been thinking about all the different hats I’ve been wearing – or not wearing, as the case may be – and I really miss that writing cap. Not the podcast kind of writing, but making up a new fiction story from scratch and exploring that world and those characters. I had something in the drawer for years and was recently able to dust it off when the Asahi Weekly Newspaper approached me to do a serialized horror piece. It’s a good story and I think it could be something really good given more time and some fleshing out. So I’ve been playing with the idea of turning it into something longer, possibly a YA (young adult) novel, and submitting it to my agent. Not being able to sleep well has it’s advantages. I now have all kinds of notes about how to work on this story. I’m giving myself the deadline of the end of this year to have a decent first draft.

I hope everyone is well and I plan to write the occasional short post here to keep me honest.

XO,

terrie

 

P.S. Aren’t dragonflies lovely?

 

* More accurately, I get the kind of sick days where I have to make up all the hours a week later on my own time, which I don’t want to do in a sling.