Thursday the 14th

[t_tarasova]

I still can't quite articulate the joy of getting back on the ice. I'll risk the cliché and say that you truly cannot fully appreciate something until it's taken away from you. The surgery and recovery comprised a much more complex psychological journey than I ever expected. For much of the last two months, I felt as if I were in a partial state of suspended animation. But as usual, I get ahead of myself in the story.

Part I

On the evening of Wednesday, December 13, my friend Lisa H. and I went for a final skate at a seasonal outdoor rink just north of Houston, to celebrate my graduation to freestyle. We stayed for hours, laughing, playing with the kids, practicing spins, and pseudo-racing (not very fast, or dangerously) and teasing each other. As much as I was enjoying myself, there was a twoness in my mind the entire time. I recognized the feeling, although it had been a long time. I last felt it on May 31, 1992, during my last collegiate church service.  I was a choral scholar, and I had spent six mornings per week in that choir loft for four years. It wove itself into the fabric of who I was, and still am. Oblivious to the sermon, I sat staring at the ornately engraved ceiling, deliberately trying to etch it permanently into my memory. I knew I was leaving a part of myself behind forever that day.

It's not the same thing, I promised myself. You'll be able to skate again in just a few months. But I was worried. I worried that my right side might never be really strong again, worried that my doctors and my family would try to discourage me from returning to skating, and worst of all -- the repressed thought pawed softly at my shoulder like a kitten -- worried that over such a long break, I might just lose interest. I have had a lifetime of little enthusiasms, enjoying something intensely for a year or so, and then moving on.  After our skate, we hurried to have dinner; I had been instructed to fast after midnight. As we ate our soup, salad, and (only) two bread sticks at the Olive Garden, I imagined that I was attending my own version of The Last Supper.  da Vinci should be here to capture this, I mused, as my iced-tea glass morphed into a chalice.  I've always been a bit melodramatic.



The morning of Thursday the 14th, I packed my Zuca bag with a few essentials, and accompanied by my little entourage -- my mom, dad, and my nephew Aidan (the one I wrote about in the letter -- I arrived at the hospital around 10 AM. My mom, a retired teacher of gifted children, home-schools Aidan, and they brought their work for the day. He was such a comfort. He held my hand during the intake paperwork and asked about what I was signing. (I avoided explaining my living will and medical power of attorney; I didn't want to think about them!) In the waiting room, he lay down with his head in my lap and let me stroke his hair, which he doesn't allow so much anymore now that he's a big boy, almost six. As I went back to the pre-op area, he made the nurse promise to be careful with me. I told her that I had a horror of needles and that I was really scared. She kept her word to Aidan, and I hardly felt the IV.

Once I was outfitted in my surgical gown, cloth shower cap and shoes, and connected to all the necessary machinery, she left to get the anesthesiologist. And lying there alone, feeling like a Borg, is when I fell apart a little. All the stress, fear, and resistance that I had been holding back broke through, and I cried.  I knew that my shoulder and foot were damaged, and had been getting more painful, but at least it was a known state. I could still function -- I could wash my hair, and walk, and go about my day.  I knew that after the surgery, without a right arm or right foot, I would be significantly "disabled" for a while.  I felt as if I were stepping from a manageable situation into a wildly risky one.  My natural penchant for drama aside, I did truly feel that life as I knew it was ending.  I prayed.

I hadn't quite finished collecting myself when the nurse and anesthesiologist returned.  They were surprised (I suppose most grown women hold together a bit better), but tried to reassure me.  I was further dismayed to learn that I also needed a nerve block injection between my neck and shoulder, but we got through it, and then I asked for my mother. "Hurry," I heard the anesthesiologist whisper to the nurse, and vaguely wondered why. When my mom came in, I tried to say something, but I couldn't form words. So I held out my hand, and she took it. I looked up and saw my dad poke his head in through the curtain, and then I woke up in the recovery room.  Actually, it wasn't until a few days after the surgery that I recalled my mom coming into the room, and the memory is soft around the edges, like a remembered dream.  She told me later that I was still awake as they wheeled me down the hall to the OR, and that she walked along with us, but I can't retrieve even a latent fingerprint of that event.  The nurse told me later that the particular anesthetic they used sometimes produces amnesia for immediately surrounding events.

I awoke in a quiet, slightly darkened room.  I felt alert enough, just rather tired.  I turned my head slowly to the side and saw a few other still-sleeping people.  I hoped that they were all right.  Then I took inventory of myself. My shoulder and foot were bandaged, and I couldn't feel them much. A kind older lady, the recovery nurse, smiled at me and asked how I felt. I intended to ask what time it was, but the words "my throat hurts" came out instead. "Oh, that's because of the breathing tube you had," she said, and fed me some ice chips. They helped a little.  I hope that's the ONLY thing no one told me about, I thought. Soon they took me back to my room, where the discharge nurse packed my shoulder with ice, gave us some instructions, and helped me get dressed. Aidan -- who had interviewed the surgeons thoroughly when they came out to talk to my parents just after the operation, I learned -- gave me a kiss. And within about 20 minutes, my dad had pulled the red truck around to the day surgery exit, and we were gone.

Tomorrow -- Part II: Girl, interrupted