#3
I'd long since learned how to count by the day I turned eighteen years old. But for whatever reason, the doctors wanted to test my ability to do it that day, and I'm never one to disappoint a crowd. "Ten . . ." I said slowly and deliberately. I'd been told to count backward from ten, and I'd been told to do it slowly. I hadn't been told to do it deliberately; I'd added that little bit myself because I try to go above and beyond.
"Good," the man in the green mask and green skullcap said as he hovered over me. I didn't quite understand why he was congratulating me. I'd only just started. It's not like you can really gauge someone's overall performance based on a single digit. So I had to give him more to work with.
"Nine," I felt myself saying aloud. See? Two digits in a row, said slowly and with extra care. I could feel some movement taking place near my midsection as the man came in close, then closer, then very close to my face and examined me through safety glasses.
He looked up at a colleague. "Flibberty gibbit!" the green-masked guy said. I'm sure he didn't really say "flibberty gibbit." He probably said something else, but it came out as gibberish to me. I'm overdubbing for you, like in those Hong Kong movies you download over BitTorrent with the fan-made speech track.
"Keep going," he said to me.
"Eight," I replied. I suddenly noticed that the green-masked man was wearing paisley, which he hadn't been wearing before. Strange. But paisley flattered him. And he wasn't really wearing it; it was floating in front of him, kind of hovering on him. I could feel more movement near my midsection. A cold feeling settled on my left thigh. "Gobbledy poppycock," the man said in other words that I'm overdubbing for you, followed by even more gibberish—and gibberish on top of that.
He didn't tell me to keep going, but I decided to keep the tradition alive and say aloud the number seven. It sounded strange as I said it, as if it echoed, but without losing any volume. And it wasn't exactly an echo. It was more like a chorus.
"I was just made by the Presbyterian church," the man with the green mask said. Or maybe he didn't. Maybe I'm just really bad at subtitling. I must be from Singapore. It doesn't really matter, does it?
I could feel the cold thing on my leg. "Six."
"Klee mungle flubberduck," the knee-cutting masked guy didn't even come close to saying.
"Five." I'm only at five, I thought. I can't go any faster with the counting, okay? You're going to have to wait for me to finish before you do what you're doing there, on my leg with the cold thing, because I can feel it. I can feel it.
Okay, I can totally feel that, too. Right there, that! It's cold and it's wet and it's my knee and you're cutting into it and I know that's why I'm here and all but really, I'm not done counting and you can't do that yet. You can't do that . . . THAT . . . OH GOD. Gross. This is so gross. It doesn't hurt . . . Why doesn't it hurt? I can feel it. It doesn't hurt. That's . . . so weird! I can feel it and it doesn't hurt. Man, if I could do that with everything, I could be the best wrestler ever. I wouldn't have had to stop the match last year in the finals. I could have won state. Gone four years straight as the champion.
Okay, stop it, I can feel that oh my dear God.
And so it went for three straight hours. A nervous just-turned-eighteen-year-old mind racing through not enough anesthesia during a follow-up surgery on his birthday to remove the rest of a torn piece of cartilage from his left knee. It was the strangest sensation I'd ever felt in my life, and I can say with all honesty that it still is.
I can't remember the moment-by-moment experiences. It's as if every single one of them happened all at once, and my mind has put them into some sort of order based on how logic would dictate that they happened. Every scrape of the scalpel against bone, every tug of a ligament, every push and poke and application of pressure. It was like someone pushing on me through the cushions of a couch.
Awareness and wakefulness are two different things, and even though I was out, I was still aware. My mind couldn't process everything the way it normally would, but the one thing it could figure out was that at the end of it all, I was very upset. Not because it hurt—it really didn't. It was because it seemed to take forever, and I found it agonizing to try and reconcile the feelings I was experiencing. And when I "awoke," I was just cognizant enough to want to let everyone know that I was a bit upset, and just hazy enough to lack any self-control.
I felt my eyes blink. I felt hyper-aware, like Daredevil. I could hear the air coming through the vent above me and to my left. I could hear the breathing of one, two, three . . . three people in the room. Each and every air molecule bounced off my tingling skin like marbles on a snare drum. I could feel each point on my body that rested on the plastic-covered foam mattress of the hospital bed.
"There he is," I heard my father say from above me. Every word was clear, almost as if they were being played through an incredibly high-fidelity speaker. I felt him stand up. I tried to turn my head to face him. I felt my left hand move. I tried to turn my head again. My right arm twitched.
"Oh, my poor baby," my mother said a bit farther to my left as she stood to come near me.
"He's going to be a bit hazy for a while," the one strange voice said from above and behind me. I knew the voice. It had congratulated me on my ability to say the word "ten." It had sat behind a mask when last I heard it.
I tried to turn to face it. I could feel my butt clench. I tried again. My left hand moved again."Ohhhhh . . ." I said, writhing around.
"Can I help him up?" my father asked. My mother stood beside him.
"Go ahead, he should be able to sit up," the doctor said.
I felt fingers sliding under my right shoulder blade and then my left. I felt pressure pushing my back upward. I felt as though I needed to engage some sort of muscle function to assist, so I flexed my whole body. Somehow I ended up upright. I shook my head, and my eyelids shot wide open. I scanned the room. I saw posters and charts illustrating the internals of my knee.
"How are you feeling?" the masked man asked from behind me.
"Um . . . uhh . . ." I said, mentally flipping through my Rolodex of words in order to find at least two to string together that would form some sort of answer.
"Oh, you poor thing," my mother said, placing her hand on my left shoulder. My father left his hand on my right shoulder, holding me steady. "You poor, poor thing . . ."
"And you said it'll be two or three weeks before he's up and around on it?" my father asked, clearly picking up from a previous conversation.
"Yeah," the said, "I don't think it'll be much longer than that. This was just a clean-up job. He should be fully functional in a few weeks."
"He's going to be able to wrestle on it?" my father said. "He was out for months after the last one." I wobbled a little. My father steadied me.
"I think so, with enough care and a little physical therapy," the surgeon said, walking around from behind me. "Because he didn't sustain any injury to the area this time, there's not really much recovery taking place. He needs to heal up at the incision site, which will be plenty enough time for the site of the removed meniscus to get healed up. He'll be good to go for the state tournament, I'm pretty sure."
"But he's going to miss the Southside Classic," my mother stated plainly.
"He should be fine for that," my dad said, "if it only takes—"
"He's not going to be in it," my mother stated again.
"Oh, I dunno," the surgeon said, coming closer. "That's in March as well, isn't it? He should be all right."
"I really think that's a bad idea," my mother said.
"Well, it's going to be up to him," the surgeon said. "He's pretty strong. Very resilient. Besides, he'll want the practice. Won't you, champ?" He reached out, and my father removed his hand so the surgeon could male-bond with me and give me a pat on the shoulder.
It was so cold. I could feel the whole room and the volume that each object took up; the air moving in and out of everyone's lungs. I could feel myself looking down at the surgeon's hand on my right shoulder. I could feel my left shoulder tense. I could feel my elbow push backward, and my fingers wrapping tightly into my palm, and my thumb wrapping over the top of my fingers . . . I could feel myself looking up at him. My eyelids popped wide open and I felt the air hitting my eyeballs. I could feel the skin of my forearm wrinkle slightly as it whipped backward, and I could feel it change direction as it flung straight ahead. I could feel myself lurching forward.
I felt his jaw buckle under my fist.
I could feel myself falling. I could feel him falling. I could feel my father pulling my groggy body up off the ground. And that was when, of all the times that day I could have possibly done it, I passed out completely.
Was he upset? Well, sorta. He didn't have me arrested or anything, but I was restrained and then escorted off the premises that day. It took a few years, but the surgeon eventually accepted my apology when he ended up having to fill in for my regular orthopedic for a routine scoping of my knee. He never got the full story until that day, and once I told him what had happened, he understood completely. But he wasn't too pleased when I told him "Mega googly zapperdap." Or maybe I just called him a cocksucker. I can't be sure. Like I said, I suck at subtitles.
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