No worries

We used to be neighbours with an anesthetist. He told me once: people worry more than they need to about what might go wrong under a general anaesthetic. 

And then he said: twenty years ago people were not nearly as worried about it. And they really should have been.

I was all good last week with the prospect of pain and inconvenience but I was not entirely at ease about what might go wrong under a general anaesthetic.

Just to catch things up: this time last year I got scanned and the conclusion was: you don't have cancer, just an enlarged prostate and possibly we can reduce it with pills. Yes please, I said, pills sound like an excellent idea. I thought they worked a treat but the specialist looked at the flow results and said I don't think so. Off to surgery we went. Laser prostatectomy.

And a second bit of context: elsewhere here I’ve shared my amusing tale of the time I didn't get cosmetic surgery because the anaesthetist - learning that morning, off the bat, about my cardiac history and taking my blood pressure - said grimly: I don't like the look of that. Things just went from grim to comically worse that morning and no surgery took place because the patient ended up blacking out and being taken out the back door and away in an ambulance.

This time around the anaesthetist called to chat and we went through my entire history: the heart attacks,  the blood pressure, the blackouts, the general mayhem, and the dark comedy in a Takapuna clinic that might not mean I was a mediocre prospect, but rather a case of White Coat Syndrome. He was very reassuring, he was happy to go ahead. I was much more at ease.

And yet and yet. What if?

The morning comes, I gather my things, kiss Karren goodbye, walk down through the village to the ferry. You don't want to be melodramatic about this but, please, here: have shovelfuls.

You wave cheerily to familiar faces and think well that could be the last time. So long, maybe, seaside village.

Patty Griffin has some nice words, in Useless Desires

Goodbye to the old bus stop

Frozen and waiting

Weekend edition has this town way overrated

Say goodbye to the old building

That never tried to know your name

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, old friend

You won't be seeing me again

My other soundtrack  goes:

Get over yourself you’ll be back here the day after tomorrow

Onto the ferry, on with the mask, across the water and down into Britomart and no this account of surgery is not going to be minute by painful minute. Look, see! We’re already leaving the train at Greenlane and taking the underpass to Ellerslie, past the caged barriers of the MIQ hotel, and in through the sliding doors at Ascot Mercy and turning right before we reach the framed photo of appreciation from Keith Richard.

Hello my name is David and I’m here for Sister Morphine. 

Weighed, measured, and details all triple checked. It’s all quiet, warm, reassuring and efficient. 

My specialist arrives, robed up, we have a nice chat about walking the Milford Track and what's about to happen and then I'm meeting the anaesthetist, my old friend from the lockdown phone meeting. He’s telling me now, looking me up and down: You’ll be fine for a general and well fair enough then, we’re off to the races.

Now we’re walking to the theatre in my gown and theatre socks and chatting with my new best friend, the guy who organises all this and he’s quick and chatty and I assume likes to put you at ease by keeping you busy talking about your work. So he’s saying what kind of writing and I say columns and speeches and that sort of thing and he says what sort of area and I say political and now we're at the gurney and now I’m prone and looking around at a whole roomful of people. It’s a bit cold.

I am the object of attention here; the reason that everyone is in the room, like the defendant, like the guy strapped to the gurney waiting to hear from the Supreme Court, like the poor bastard in the Twitter pile-on. Except it's entirely different because they are all here to make sure nothing goes wrong and well thank you, guys, for looking so very serious and focused. Also, man they move fast, it’s happening almost alarmingly swiftly. Now they're all upon me.

He says have you written for Prime Ministers? and I say yes actually I have and he asks have you written for this one? and I say actually yes and that's about it because my friend the anaesthetist says okay here comes the injection and the wave comes rushing up and I barely have time to say yes I can and I’m gone. 

Will David be here after the surgery? Was he just making a soppy tragic fuss with that Patty Griffin carry-on? Let’s see what happens in the next paragraph. 

I want to be lucid but I’m kind of here and also not. I’m in quicksand. Apparently there is a conversation with the specialist who tells me the procedure all went fine although the laser equipment failed so they had to use the less fancy bit of equipment. No worries. 

All of this is immediately and entirely lost in the mist and I’m really just coming around as the nurse wheels me into my quiet room in my quiet ward and sets me all up and tells me dinner will be here soon.

I’m both beyond excited about eating for the first time in nearly 24 hours but also still so dislocated in my thinking that I'm not sure if it feels right to be eating, and should I be? I just don’t know. The tray arrives, and the doubts linger but I keep elbowing them aside in order to work my way through that tray like some poor starving sonofabitch just plucked from a liferaft. 

What follows is about four hours of slow dancing in quicksand. My brain is not at all sure where it wants to be, or what it thinks of the world. 

The nurse comes every half hour to take my vitals and I drift in and out of sleep. Also I am steadily coming to grasp that my function for the foreseeable is to drink vast amounts of water and not move an inch because if ever I do, the sense I get from the catheter that runs now from inside my bladder to a large vessel below my bed is: don’t for the love of God do it.

Drink and sluice, drink and sluice, there's a good bit of damage to be irrigated here, the nurse explains to me, possibly once, possibly 14 times.

It's a wound, there's pain, but there's also Tramadol, and it’s fine. And I'm also steadily clocking: it worked, you came out the other side, you can listen to more Patty Griffin.

And then somewhere around 11, just outside the finishing post at Ellerslie, the drugs stop kicking in and I feel myself again. I put in my buds and crank up the music. Start with The Byrds doing their Nashville thing because you ain't goin’ nowhere. Also, I’m watching ALL of my Ken Burns country doco.

This has always been one of my favourite scenes in all the world: hospital in the smallest hours  of the morning when there ain't no one awake but you and the night nurse and a few of your buddies on Twitter.

It’s happened to me a few times: admitted as a theoretical heart attack patient but in fact a coronary care ward imposter, there for the night. You plug in your music at 3am in the low light. You are the most free and unshackled you’ve ever felt and that might seem illogical when you're more or less tethered to a hospital bed but there you are: awake and alive. 

I keep looking back over my shoulder at where I’ve just been, thinking that was some weird unsettling shit. Your mind is doing things you don't want, and you wish to be uncoupled from it and you wonder: is this some sense of the chained torture, what it can be when your mind becomes your enemy? Our daughter said to us some years after she'd been to hell and back with her eating disorder: you can think you can imagine what it's like, but you can't. You just can't.

What follows is the steady path back out to normal, that puts you back into the street and upright from being this wholly dependent patient in a bed. The unhooking of the drips, the encouragement into the shower, the learning to move with the damn catheter but also counting the hours until it comes out.

And then, as surreal as it could possibly be, that hour arrives and you just happen to be listening to the Dolly Parton version of the Mule Skinner Blues with its high pitched whistles and and whip cracking and whirring banjos and just take my word for it: there could not be a better soundtrack for the removal of that particular item in that particular way.

The anaesthetist tells me: from here on you can contemplate general anaesthetic with no concern at all.

The specialist explains what to do what not to do and when we’ll meet next. We talk about the sample that can now be analysed to a cellular level, more than the scan could do last year, and obviously I would like it to be definitive about no cancer but we’ll just have to wait six weeks for that.

It never changes, never will: always there’s the next thing to fret about and worry if you let yourself.