UNCONSCIOUSNESS

It's a humbling experience to be put to sleep. My Kaiser doctor ordered an exploratory "upper endoscopy" to explore the inner workings with a miraculous camera (from above, not the other end!) after I had reported some difficulty in swallowing accompanied by intestinal pain. I arrived for the procedure with some anxiety, remembering how my sister had been diagnosed with terminal cancer after months of undiagnosed stomach pains, and soon found myself stretched out on a gurney, surrounded by those curtains they use in public wards to allow a measure of privacy, much aware of the throb and beep of medical technology everywhere around me.

The nurse was cheerful--as was everyone, it seemed, except for those who, like myself, were subject to their ministrations. The anesthesiologist stopped by to ask about the things that anesthesiologists ask about. The doctor stopped by to tell me more about the procedure. Then they wheeled me off to a small operating theater flooded with bright light and filled with the kind of sounds that are all too familiar from those television medical dramas. The attendants were chatting merrily amongst themselves as I watched the doctor don his sterile surgical gown.

Then... nothing. Until I struggled back to semi-consciousness, who knows how many minutes (hours? or days? it scarcely mattered) later. Slipping back a number of times into unconscious haze, I finally woke sufficiently to ask to see the doctor. Oh, the nurse told me, he has already been here to talk to you. It seems I had been talking to the doctor, or he to me, without my remembering even a scrap of our conversation, let alone its content. On my request, he returned and went over the details of the procedure with me. A slight reaming of a narrowed esophagus, it seemed, but nothing of more serious concern.

Since then, now nearly two days ago, I have been strangely dopey. For most of the day yesterday, I found myself stumbling and bumping into things, as though not yet fully returned to conscious awareness. As I say, a humbling experience, to be so suddenly and completely deprived of the faculty of the conscious mind, and to be so slow in recovering it. An experience to make me value that faculty even more.