#3
"Ten..." I said, slowly and deliberately. I was told to count backwards from ten, and I was told to do it slowly. I wasn't told to do it deliberately... I added that little bit in myself. 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, just as instructed. I could feel some movement taking place near my midsection as the man with the green mask came in close... Closer... VERY close to my face and examined me through safety glasses.
He looked up at a colleague. "Some sort of gibberish," the green-masked guy said. Well... Like, not those actual words. He didn't really say "some sort of gibberish"... He actually said something else, but it came out as gibberish to me. I was 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. He wasn't wearing paisley before... Strange. But paisley really did flatter 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... Which was strange, because I didn't remember driving to Alaska. I certainly didn't order any cold things to be placed on my thigh. "More gibberish," the man said in other words that I just overdubbed for you again, followed by "Even more gibberish - and gibberish on top of that."
He didn't tell me to keep going, but being an observer of trends and a keen intellect renown for his ability to detect patterns, 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 really an echo... It was more like a chorus... Or a flanger - YEAH! A flanger! Like I had a pedal and I was stepping on it and my voice was going all like Wah... Wah wah wah... Wah WHAAAA wah wah weeeooowwnnnn...
"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 now. I must be from Singapore. It doesn't really matter, does it? He's going to chop my knee up into little pieces. I can feel the cold thing on my leg, and he's going to chop my leg off and sell it, and I'm going to count to one backwards from ten even if it kills me. Watch:
"Six... Six six the number of the beast! Six Six Six, the number for you and meeeee..." Man, Maiden RULES. I fucking love Maiden. I'm so glad that Mike turned me on to them. As soon as I'm done counting backwards from ten I'm going to get up and go tell him, and maybe we'll play some basketball. He used to play, you know. He also likes Lemonade. That shocked me. Tongues in lightsockets... Never get bored watching that, I'll tell you.
"The backstroke of the west," the knee cutting masked guy didn't even come close to saying. I shouldn't have bought this video off the street vendor... The subtitles are horrific. I do not want... Heh. Do not want. That's funny. Someone should put that on a picture of a dog with some broccoli. I bet a lot of people would like that picture. I bet a lot of people like dogs. I like broccoli.
Um....
Wait... Why... Okay, like... Five, okay? I'm only at five. 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. That. I can feel that. I can... UM... HEY... I CAN...
FUCK. Okay, I Can totally feel that. THAT! Right there, that! It's cold and its 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. I'm going to be champion this year. Three out of four ain't bad. Like Meatloaf said. Only he said two out of OKAY STOP I CAN FEEL THAT OH MY DEAR GOD.
They said this was going to take three hours! I'm only at five, there's so much left to count... God... Something's moving. I can feel something moving. Is that... It feels like my knee is lifting into outer space. It feels cold and wet. I can feel the air. I can feel THAT RIGHT THERE I CAN FEEL IT. YOU HAVE GOT TO STOP. I'M ONLY UP TO FIVE...
****
And so it went for three straight hours -- A nervous just-turned-18-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 absolute strangest sensation I have ever felt in my life.
I can't really even remember the actual moment-by-moment experiences. It's like 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 you through the cushion 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 just seemed to take FOREVER and it was utterly agonizing trying to handle it. 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. I could hear the air coming through the vent just above me and to my left. I could hear the breathing of one... Two... 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 it was sounded 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 further 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 just above and behind me. I knew the voice. It had congratulated me on my ability to say the word 'Ten'. It sat behind a mask when last I heard it.
I tried to turn to face it. I could feel my butt clinch. 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 congratulatory no-longer-masked-man 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 just 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?" I heard the masked man ask from behind me.
"Um... Ummmm..." I said, mentally flipping through my rolodex of words in order to find at least two to string together to 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 just two or three weeks before he's up and around on it?" my father asked, clearly picking up from a previous conversation.
"Yeah," the previously-masked surgeon 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 just 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.
"Well, 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 just 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 (not asked).
"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 alright..."
"I really think that's a bad idea," my mother said.
"Well, It's really 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 his arm. My father removed his hand so that the surgeon could male-bond with me and give me a bit of a shoulder tussle.
It was so cold. I could feel the whole room... 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 top of my fingers... I could feel myself looking up at him. I felt my eyelids pop wide open and the air as it met my eyeballs. I could feel the air moving across the skin of my forearm as it whipped backward, and I could feel it change direction as it swiftly flung forward. 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 of the ground. And that's 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. He knew that I wasn't truly angry at him - after all, it was the anesthesiologist's fault (and, incidentally, he told me that he'd heard that that guy had lost his right to practice due to incompetence, although he didn't know for sure that that was the case), and that it was a mix of the dope and the confusion and the frustration of the whole situation.
But he wasn't too pleased when I told him "The Presbyterian Church like enjoys you not." Or something like that... Again, I suck at subtitles.
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