A few minutes later, a young man in white appeared to insert an IV in my arm. As skilled as he was, my stomach revolted at the procedure. I had to swallow repeatedly and think happier thoughts to keep from barfing… as if there was anything in my stomach to throw up anyway. Soon the needle was taped into position on top of my hand. I didn’t know what was in the IV, but it crept coolly up the veins in my arm. I thought about all the convicts on death row. This is how executions start.
I began to shiver, and Paul rang the nurse for another blanket. As he tucked it around me, I said, “I’m frightened, Paul. I keep thinking about them cutting me open. I imagine how I’ll look, spread out and naked. I picture them making the incision, the blood welling up, the surgeons pawing through my insides.”
Paul rubbed my arm, the one without the IV in it. “You’ve been watching too much TV, not to mention being cursed with a vivid imagination.” Paul seemed to sense the source of my fear. “Don’t worry, Hannah, you’ll be fine. Think of it this way-in a few minutes you’ll drift off to sleep and when you wake up, it will all be done.”
Something good was in the IV. I was barely able to keep my eyes open. I laid my palm flat against my chest, feeling with my fingertips the familiar ridged scar under the thin cotton gown the hospital had provided. “I hope it will be worth it.”
The nurse peeked around the curtain. “Why don’t you go get some breakfast, Mr. Ives?”
“I’d rather stay, if you don’t mind.”
“Suit yourself.” She grinned. “The cafeteria’s no great shakes anyway.”
An hour later, when they wheeled me and my bed to the elevator, Paul walked alongside, still holding my hand. They allowed him to stay for the short time I was parked in the corridor outside the operating room suite. Before they pushed me through the swinging doors, he laid a gentle kiss on my lips. I was barely awake, still savoring that kiss, when they transferred me, limp as a rag, to the gurney in the operating room. I remember someone strapping a blood pressure cuff to my arm, and then the sweet taste of garlic in my mouth. A clock on the wall was stuck at nine, and I drowned in waves of darkness.
I first awoke in the recovery room, but it’s hard to be sure. Conversation whirled around me like autumn leaves in the wind. It registered in snatches. A date someone had for the movies that night. The creep some soft-voiced person was married to. The bargains to be had at somebody’s close-out sale. Somewhere among the babble, I recognized my doctor’s voice and struggled to open my eyes. Something puzzling about a purse. I did need a new purse, but what had Dr. Bergstrom to do with it? “The surgery went well,” her voice told me, as reassuring as a mother, and then it, too, swirled away.
Then, I don’t know how much later, I was back in my room. I recognized the flowers Emily had sent. A dozen red roses, with one yellow one from baby Chloe. My daughter was getting sentimental in her old age. I didn’t see Paul.
When I woke again, the TV seemed stuck on the Discovery Channel. I watched a turtle lay eggs on the beach and cover them up with sand, then my eyelids slammed shut.
When I awoke, that same damn turtle was lumbering toward the water and God-knows-what was making a hideous noise like a vacuum cleaner under my bed. Something squeezed my legs, and I wondered, What the hell? but my mouth was so dry it came out Whada ha?
Paul’s face appeared in my field of vision wearing what could be interpreted as a reassuring smile. Relief shone from his eyes. “Hi, love.” He smoothed the hair from my forehead and kissed the spot he had cleared. I managed a lopsided grin. Then the vacuum cleaner cranked up again and something squeezed my legs.
I tried to raise my head, but it felt as if it weighed fifty pounds and belonged to someone else. “Whah?” I nodded toward my feet.
Paul lifted a corner of the blanket, revealing plastic sleeves resembling water wings encasing my legs. “It massages your legs,” he explained. “Keeps blood clots from forming.”
“Oh,” I mumbled. “That’s good.” The compressor cycled off and the cuffs deflated.
“The operation went well,” Paul told me. “Very well.”
I was afraid to look. With difficulty I raised my head until my chin touched my chest. A lovely mound of bandages gave shape to my hospital gown. I reached up to touch the mound on the right but was caught up short. My arm was attached by a tube to another machine with dials, buttons, and a bright digital display. “What’s this?”
Paul lightly touched the tube leading into my arm. “I don’t exactly know, honey.”
A new nurse materialized in the dark at the foot of the bed. “It’s an I-Med pump, hon. It delivers your pain medication.” She fiddled with the dial, then handed me a button on the end of a long cord. “Just press this with your thumb when you start feeling pain.”
Since my abdomen had been burning for the past ten minutes, I pumped the button. In seconds, the pain was reduced to a dull throb.
“It’s morphine,” she said.
I twisted my face into a maniacal grin that might have been mistaken for a look of pain. She patted my leg sympathetically and laid another gadget that looked like a TV controller next to my hand. “Push this if you need anything. It’ll ring for me.” I wondered what would happen if, in my confused state, I started ringing for the nurse and pumped myself full of morphine instead. I held up the morphine button. “What if I keep pumping?”
“Sorry, hon. We thought of that. It delivers a measured dose and it’s on a timer.” She tucked the covers around my hips. “Wouldn’t want anyone to overdose.”
“What a party pooper! Just when I thought there might be a silver lining in all this.”
The nurse fussed with my ice water pitcher, set it on my bedside table, then breezed out of the room.
After she left, Paul dragged his chair closer to my bed. The legs made a screeching sound on the linoleum. The dinner cart rattled by, leaving an aroma of overcooked broccoli and fried chicken in its wake. My stomach revolted. “Oh God, I’m going to throw up.” Saliva filled my mouth and I swallowed repeatedly, fighting the sensation, trying to keep everything down, although what there could be to throw up after not having eaten for a whole day I couldn’t guess.
A plastic, kidney-shaped basin appeared under my chin, but I only heaved wretchedly, spitting up a trickle of yellow bile until I fell back on my pillow, exhausted. My nose was stopped up so I could hardly breathe. Tears slid sideways down my cheeks and into my ears. “Oh, Paul, I’m so tired.”
Paul laid a damp washcloth on my forehead, momentarily making me forget the cuffs pumping up and down relentlessly on my legs.
“Here, dearie.” The nurse reappeared and pressed a small pillow into my hands. “Press this against your stomach if you have to throw up, cough, or sneeze. It’ll support the incision and help lessen the pain.”
I placed the pillow against my stomach and held it there with both hands while I retched miserably and fruitlessly into the basin. Chemo redux. I remembered proclaiming to Joy’s therapy group that I was bulimic, and decided that anybody who’d purposely stick a finger down her throat to make herself feel this way had to be crazy.
The nurse wiped my chin with a tissue. “This is another reason we don’t want you to eat anything before surgery, dear.”
I flopped back on the pillow and pushed the hand holding the basin away from my face. “I think I’d feel better if there was something down there to throw up other than major organs.”
“How about sucking on some ice?” A spoonful of crushed ice touched my lips with healing coolness. I moved the chips around in my mouth with my tongue, enjoying the clicking sound they made against my teeth. Paul bathed my brow again with a cloth soaked in cool water. I pumped the morphine button a couple of times and closed my eyes.