Contemporaneous: Chapters 25 – 26
25. Every aspect of my life seeps back in: the weight of my body; the tiredness in my eyes and my muscles; the imbalance in my mind, thoughts too quick; the way the nerve damage has scrunched up my right foot, and the break welded the ankle until it’s almost fused; and then the dissonance, of feeling I’m not fitting, and unsure what comes next. But that’s different, like feeling the onset of a bug, feeling it gradually worsen, feeling it become incapacitating, but that now happens so quickly, almost instantaneously, and only in feeling it come on do I know how far removed I am from whatever I shouldn’t…
13
I lay awake in my hospital bed after surgery, the priority right now that I have to prove that I can pee. The anesthetic can put the bladder to sleep apparently, and if it doesn’t rouse that means the insertion of a catheter. They fitted me with one during the initial surgery some eleven days earlier. I woke to find the catheter inserted you know where, and an external fixator fitted to my leg – that’s like scaffolding screwed directly into the bones to hold them in place while they wait for the swelling to go down so they can then perform the actual surgery. I wore the catheter for…