Heading into the hospital for Day Surgery—such an innocuous name for a regularly serious and occasionally devastating experience—I felt well prepared for what was to transpire.
Can one “well prepare” for what is often unknowable?
As I learned several weeks ago, living on the cusp of the horizon is a balancing act well beyond the rigors of Tree Pose. In my minimalist yoga practice, Tree Pose is rarely tree-esque unless one imagines it as standing on one leg through gale-force winds and an earthquake. Remaining on the threshold of a known past and an unknowable future is a task often labeled by those considered “gurus” as “being present.” Rarely do these gurus mention the importance of embodied presence. Embodied presence is not only an act of witnessing a present moment but wholly occupying it with gravity boots. This is a concept I have grown to understand after noting my clever ruse of “being present” while rockstar-level dissociating.
A year ago, I explored an online class. It was a therapeutic “family systems” model alongside meditative spiritual awakening practices. These two vastly different approaches were brought together for individual, collective, and ancestral healing. During three months of lessons, I discovered my clever dissociative-presence hybrid. I also realized that I’m not the only rockstar of this method, and many “mindful” exercises can bring on similar dissociative-presence outcomes if embodiment isn’t grounded at the start. Consider it an embodiment tree that includes branches and leaves of presence practice.
Growing my own version of a mindful, present, and embodied tree has taken time, and the roots have been tested. While endeavoring to live this practice, I lost friends. Some moved, and some moved on. Two died. Pi Man, my love-shadow dog, the most recent. Remaining present and embodied through these changes has been difficult. Zipping out by dissociation when things hurt is an adaptive fight or flight response. Zipping out can feel like the best option when pain enters an embodied building.
Heading into the hospital for Day Surgery, I felt prepared. I’d managed to remain embodied through several weeks of an unknown diagnosis. My ovaries were scheduled to be removed for housing lemons, otherwise known as “lemon-sized masses.” Musing whether something cancerous this way slithered while removing organs prone to growing lemons can be “ripe” (pardon the pun) for dissociation. This was possibly a life-or-death situation, ergo, fight or flight, unless there’s an intervention. The practice I had undertaken intervened.
Conscientiously remaining present meant I hoodwinked my anxiety-inducing, “cover every possibility” survivalist into a relaxed state. On the morning of surgery, when the anesthesiologist introduced themselves and I told them how my body doesn’t react well after anesthesia, my survivalist dosed through the doctor disregarding what had been said. Instead of giving them a full outline of each anesthesia experience, the anesthesiologist left, and the survivalist never mentioned that I live with claustrophobia and PTSD. This became a problem in the surgical suite when the oxygen mask was introduced and no relaxant medications had been administered. By the time a nurse returned with the syringe, I was hyperventilating. I went into a surgical stupor in a full panic.
When awareness returned, I heard someone ask, “Do you know your name?” I couldn’t open my eyes, but a light on the outside of them was intense, and it pushed through my eyelids. Next, I was asked what day it was and if I knew where I was. Each was answered without opening my eyes. The bright light dimmed, and a lengthy period of nothing entered. My eyes remained unable to open, and seemingly, I did not have the ability to speak unless asked a question. I was embodied in nothingness. More time passed and awareness grew that I was shaking, almost to the point of convulsing, and my teeth chattered.
When my eyes opened, they did so as a marionette doll, clicking open as though managed by a puppeteer. The small cubicle I was in was dark, with a dim light entering through a crack in the curtains. I could see a clock. It had been over two hours since I had been taken into surgery. I wondered why the procedure lasted longer than expected. I wondered where the nurse was as I began to understand how deeply cold I felt. Frozen. Numb. I imagined there was pain somewhere in my body but couldn’t sense it. Someone walked past the crevice in the curtain, and, a while later, another. The clock hands moved in jumps. When I looked away and remembered to check again, ten minutes or more had elapsed. I shook until my legs and arms ached with fatigue. I am unsure how much time went by before my mouth opened, words came, and I yelled for a nurse. When one arrived, I told them I was cold, and they asked about my pain level. When I couldn’t apply a number to it, they decided I was in too much pain to know I was in pain. They administered fentanyl and gave me two blankets. My mouth stopped working again, and the nurse disappeared. The shivering continued.
When I again noted the clock, nearly an hour had gone to the ethers, and a new voice shouted.
“eMMe! Take deep breaths!”
I heard a shrieking beep in the background. It was the machine documenting my blood oxygen level. In the room, I was alone. The command to breathe seemed ethereal, as though an angel from the next place was shouting. My lungs were unable to accommodate the demand as they were lethargic and sleepy. A thought came into my embodied state.
“I might die for a stupid and negligent reason.”
Unable to bring words out of my mouth, sit up, stop shaking, move my arms or legs, or force breaths, the machine continued to bleat warnings. A nurse, not an angel, continued to shout. In that nothing-something place, there was a sense of friends and family who had said they would be thinking about me during the surgery. I felt their care at the exact moment I was feeling a lack of care in the post-surgical unit. I felt completely alone, possibly on the threshold between alive and not, and also deeply cared for by people who weren’t with me.
Interrupting my existential soliloquy, the curtain was fully yanked open, and the shouty nurse swarmed into the cubicle. I managed to whisper.
“I’m c-c-c-c-old.”
Finally, someone brought warmth.
After the warming air machine was applied and the shivering had lessened, my temperature was taken. It was nearly two degrees below normal. If it had been taken earlier, it’s not a stretch to imagine that I had been hypothermic. Symptoms can include shivering, mumbling, slurred speech, shallow breathing, a weak pulse, drowsiness, lethargy, and loss of consciousness.
From the winged, the enlightened, and the dead by Chloe Hope:
“I quite often close my eyes and imagine what that must be like—what it must sound and feel like to soar through an expanse free of the material, flying at speed and at ease in a sky your very own. I hope that this is what Death feels like, that whatever part of us which is eternal experiences a sense of release and relief as the final exhale returns it to a state unbound by matter—an ecstatic liberation, reserved only for the winged, the enlightened, and the dead.”
***I recommend reading the full piece via the link above.
An emergency room doctor posted on social media that hospital personnel should pay attention when a patient says they think they may die. In his experience, they’re often right. It’s impossible to know if I was close to death. It’s certain I was closer than I was when I walked into Day Surgery. Defined and unsettled feelings came with me after leaving the hospital.
Factually, my forary into the frozen medical tundra is over and the body today is healthy and minus two benign lemons. I am grateful for the exceedingly kind, knowledgeable, and highly skilled surgeon and have spoken with hospital team leaders to unravel what went wrong with my care.
Existentially, I didn’t arrive at a sense of “ecstatic liberation” offered by Ms. Hope. I did feel an eternal sense of peace in the space between my soft inhales and exhales, mingling with thoughts and prayers held by friends and family. It was very much an “expanse free of the material, flying at speed and at ease in a sky your very own.”
My body has not fully accepted that the unrelenting cold will not return. It has seemed to be looking over its shoulder, expecting the anesthetic tundra to leap when we’re not paying attention. Nearing three weeks after Day Surgery, the chill does not feel behind me but deep inside. At night, I bundle in layers and load wood in the fireplace until the inferno brings sweat. Only then does the chill quiet. Something happened in the cold, nothing place, and I have yet to entirely understand it.
May “the winged, the enlightened, and the dead” fill me in. I’m certain it’s important.