Post-Op

by Rob

The phone rang just shortly after Nate and I got home. Kim and I had just gotten Nathan settled into the over-sized red chair in the living room. He was a little agitated about being told he had to sit and stop trying to talk. The gauze in his mouth made understanding him nearly impossible, but that was beside the point since he was supposed to be clenching down on it anyway to make the bleeding stop.

"You have a text to land-line message from 5-1-8-6-3-0-7-9-7-0..." The voice on the phone wasn't a live person or even a recording, but rather one of those computerized versions of a man's voice. Frankly, I don't remember what the synthesized speaker said next, but I think I'll always remember the expression on Nate's face as I turned around in the kitchen to look at him out in the other room. His phone was held by two hands in his lap, his eyes were fixed on me, and he was smirking ever-so-slightly with an expression that seemed half annoyed and half amused, a sort of non-verbal, passive aggressive, "Fine!"

The phone rang and the messages continued for the next several minutes before Kim had had enough. We handed him a pad and a pen instead.

His surgery went well. The nurse who escorted me to him from the waiting room after the procedure seemed almost upbeat. She never said so, but I got the sense that she had been charmed a bit by him. When I first saw him, he was still emerging from the sedative, but he spoke right away; "That was wild," is what I remember.

I'm not sure who laughed first, him or me, but within a minute or so, it was contagious. He kept trying to talk. The nurse and I kept trying to tell him to stop. He kept right on talking. I must have laughed at him, because the whole thing amused me so much. I kept thinking, "Shut up, Nate," all the time thinking he was so funny. So he kept talking. The nurse played interpreter (I guess it's a skill one acquires when working with people who have their mouths filled with gauze), and we all just kept giggling.

Once the nurse had rattled off all of the post-op instructions, we got Nathan into a wheelchair, and she took us out to the parking lot. By the time he reached the elevator, his face was red from laughing so hard. At that point I figured he was about to start tearing up, or choke to death on the gauze. The nurse just looked at me and smiled. She genuinely seemed to be enjoying the whole thing.

On the ride home, still he talked. I tried again to reason with him, repeating that he needed to stop the bleeding and I couldn't understand him anyway. So he picked up a pad of purple post-it notes and started looking for a pen. I decided to dig one out of my pocket rather than let the search continue.

Nathan has never been known for having great hand writing. It turns out, Nathan's writing in a moving vehicle while withdrawing from sedation is not much better than Nathan's speaking with a mouth full of gauze while withdrawing from sedation. The advantage here was that I could read each note several times, working it out more slowly. I decided to treat these messages like little puzzles to be solved. I'm sure that it makes no practical sense to keep these pieces of paper, but when I gathered them up off of the car floor when we got home, I decided to share them with Kim.

Here, without my verbal responses, are the messages that he scratched out onto three post-it notes:

"Did they give me Novocain?"

"It's hard to swallow. Is that bad?"

"So am I stoned? Or medically stoned?"

"If this is what stoned is, it's quite disappointing. The high lasted 5 minutes."

"I just got wisdom removed. Orally. I already feel like a dumb-ass."

"And I still can't swallow."

Today will be a day of pudding, ice packs and pills. Kim told me he was up in the middle of the night, overwhelmed by the pain. Fortunately, we don't have anything else to deal with today.