Drowning in My Own Blood, or: Where I've Been This Past Week

Surgery's never fun.

But hey, when it's your time, it's your time. Last Wednesday, the day after our 10th anniversary, the Bride and I found ourselves getting up at the ungodly hour of 4:30 a.m. so we could make a 6:00 a.m. appointment so I could be shot full of narcotics and mauled with a blade and other cutting tools for an hour or so.

They call it "minor surgery."

And in the grand scheme of things, it really is. I'm lucky. My ailment was something laughably minor. Non life-threatening.

But I'd also argue that no surgery is minor. It really has a way of screwing with you for a while.

Take the first day. I got home, tucked into a reclining chair, and thought: You know, not so bad. I mean, it felt like my face was hit with a tire iron, right after I decided to snort a pile of cocaine cut with pool chlorine. But I felt a lot better than I thought I would be. Heck, I didn't even need to take all of the nice little prescription painkillers they sent home with me. Who wants to get hooked on that junk, right?

The next day, the residual anesthesia must have worn off, because that's when I really started to feel serious pain.

I wanted the painkillers.

I WANTED THE PAINKILLERS NOW.

FUCKING NOW

But the painkillers turned me more or less into a member of the walking dead. The Bride would ask a simple question, such as, Would you like more Vitamin Water? and I'd act like she just asked me to describe how nuclear fission worked, showing my math.

Another fun part of my post-surgical world has been my inability to read. For days, I couldn't drag my eyes across more than a sentence. Thank God for my iPod, and the loads of Behind the Black Mask, Out of the Past, and The Future is Bleak podcasts I had saved up. (Ben LeRoy's voice, in particular, is especially soothing for the post-operative individual.)

Today's the first day I've been able to sit in front of the computer and do some writing. So far, so good. Working on the next novel and the plot for a new comic book.

But of course, every so often I have to pause to go flush away the blood clots.

Like I said: surgery's never fun.