When I read this story on Rachel Lucas' blog, I shuddered, visibly.
Because for me, this kind of pain is not a memory, really, because it never leaves me, the remembering. It may be past, but it is past present. Not a memory at all--this is what I live, churning.
To tell of unanesthetized surgical pain is to tell about longing for death to save you. It is to tell of a grand paradox: save me/kill me. Anything but this. I will barter with my life if you will please make it stop. I will give you all I have--me--to stop this moment, this second, this instant. How can I undo myself. Undo this, undo me.
Understanding this kind of pain requires that you let go of all constructs of time--this kind of pain lenghtens the ticks between seconds. This kind of pain has no voice.
No lights, cold cold cold, blankets like lead weights, where does the table end and where do I begin?
Where do I begin.
With an operation that took more than six hours. With emergency surgery, surgical staff and panic swirling like whirlpools, bringing me down, down to the OR. With wondering, will I ever see my 9-week-old baby again, or will she see me? The pain in George's eyes, mine reflected back.
And none of that even compares to the pain waiting for me when I woke up, still in the operating room, without a stitch of pain medicine in my veins. Them finishing, pulling up the rails, getting ready to wheel me to recovery, a ride I take in my mind again and again.
I can't go any further down into it, not now.
Fire, red orange, yellow hot burning cascading waves.
I can't tell you that the tears in this woman's eyes, the inability to speak, to have no voice left with which to cry out, to whisper only one word, too shallow, no breath, throat raw from tubes: "help." Too softly for anyone to hear, but me. Me recognizing my own screaming silence.
I can't tell you about ears that can't receive the human voice, can't hear "Hang on--we're going to get some pain meds in you," instead ears that speak, because the mouth cannot, don't do that, please kill me. I can't tell you what that's like.
To wait.
In my case, there was no one to blame. I had run out of blood, out of fibroid tumors, and nearly out of time, hung in that delicate dance of anesthesia, between death and waking, too long. It was for my own good that I woke up too soon, you see. "That happens sometimes," the doctor said. "They have to keep it light toward the end. Six hours is a long time."
Six nanoseconds of live remembering of every slice is longer.
And the living memory of that pain doesn't go away, or at least the memory of having no voice to cry out won't go.
In a flash, I am there, me seeing her seeing me, looking up...so bright, oh please, please no:
"help."
