The laters, part 1

It's probably a good time now to backfill a bit, share another perspective of the situation and bring some clarity to what happened. It was the first major surgery, the first surgery period, that I'd ever had, and it was the ultimate in traumatic. Obviously.

My sister filled in some of what she witnessed, and it will add another perspective.

After they took me in, she waited around for some time before they came to tell her how to suit up. She donned the protective things, was covered head to foot in egg-blue scrubs, mask, etc., and ushered into the operating room.

She said she was overwhelmed, immediately. She didn't see me at first among the multitudes of people and machines, it was so overwhelming. Then she came over to stand near me.

During the operation, she said I wasn't screaming as I thought I was, but muttering. She was the one who told the assembled medical professionals what I was saying when I was moaning in pain. She translated my thanks to them for saving mine and my baby's life (the baby I knew would die).

At one point, she had moved aside, worried she was in the way. When I began to beg for her hand, she came back.

And when Ella was born, she saw her lifted above the gape in my body. She said the baby was miniature, but perfectly formed, very clean aside from a spot of blood on her leg. They took the baby to the room next door to put her into an Isolette and administer immediate care.

And when the doctors began to sew and cauterize me closed, the smell made her woozy, so woozy that a nurse urged her to step away.

After Ella was whooshed by and briefly shown to me, she followed the baby contingent out, to see where they would take her. Then she went to my recovery room, wrote me a note and headed home. I'll try to upload the note for the next post.

As for myself, during the operation, I was pretty aware of what was going on, and I was in acute pain. It was later explained, when the anesthesologists were trotted in to apologize for it and for the "comfort the patient" dialogue, that it's impossible to know how a person will react to pain medication, or how much would be enough. They'd given me all they could and I was still in pain. I felt the tearing, the cutting, as I wrote in the last post.

But perhaps it was the blue drape in front of me that really affected me the most profoundly. I thought I would be able to see at least the doctors' heads above it, but it was literally a few inches from my face, hanging vertically. The post-op visions that repeatedly danced across my vision, the "Vivid blue lines with whisps of thread tendriling about them, evenly spaced around darker squares muted at the edges," were, in fact, of the too close curtain. Take a cloth and hold it as close as you can to your eyes. See how it patterns? See how the threads whisp and blur the edges of the spaces between?

On top of everything, I was told later that the operation itself was much more difficult than they had anticipated. It lasted three times as long as is normal.

I've still not recovered emotionally from the operation (along with everything else I've not recovered from.)

As for the hallucinations. I'm sure you'll dismiss them with the notion that they're attributable to the drugs I was pumped full of, and I've no doubt that's a reasonable conclusion. But why would I bring my grandparents to join my great aunt, for whom my daughter is named?

I do believe their souls came to me that horrific night. I don't know if they came to comfort me in my emotional and physical suffering, but I do believe they came to claim Ella and that their presence was meant as solace that they would care for her.

There was no fucking way I was going to let them simply take her.

And so I begged. And did not care if my daughter would be whole. Rational thought was torn away when my daughter was ripped out of my body.

And so I begged.