I AM awake!

Am I? I'm not so sure. Maybe this whole messy business has been a dream after all.

I can hear the lady next door, a curtain's breath away, asking for a hot water bottle for her period pains. The nurse kindly agrees to fetch her one. Then a conversation, in muted tones, occurs between her and her doctor, in which she frantically asks after her baby, the tone of her voice raising an octave as panic begins to swell.

'What baby?' the doctor keeps asking.

The voiceless woman in the bed next door sounds in her sixties and has just come around from her anaesthetic.  There has been no baby for a long time in her life I imagine.

My eyes are still closed and I wonder if I was lucid or delirious post operation.

I firmly press my lips together, hoping that I have not said anything inappropriate in post surgery haze. Images of me having an episode of tourettes in the recovery ward flit through my head. I think I can feel my mouth twitch in an almost smile.

My head feels disembodied from the rest of me as I zone in and out to the voices around me. I try to do a mental inventory on my body parts.

Can I feel my breast, the place where my breast used to be. Is it painful?  Is it flat, is it hollow, is it dead?
I can't feel anything.

It is nothing.

I wonder at the importance of the whole thing, the minutia of my situation in the lives of these people around me, the lady in the bed next door, loudly sobbing for her baby, the nurse who I can feel standing at my bed side, reading my chart, the doctor, who's hushed voice I can hear at the end of my bed.

Yet to me, it is everything, it is the magpie of my life, the big C has pushed all other things which were once of importance out of the nest. Even in my haze, I know it is there. I close my already closed eyes on it all and drift back to sleep. Morphine is my friend.

I smile when I come around again, one of the nurses, who's friendly face I recognise is at the end of my bed, ready to wheel me back to my room.

I feel good, I feel awake, a little in control, of my speech at least.

They wheel me in to the lift, up three floors. Oh god, I think I'm going green, they wheel me down the corridor, another corridor, another lift, and some more corridors. I close my eyes, as I can't look at the large, florescent lights whizz by over my head without my stomach lurching.

Please stop, sometime soon. Dear god, how big is this hospital?
Another corridor, then safety. Stable ground, the final pit stop.

Ahhh.

My sister pops her head into my frame of vision.

'Hello', I smile, gooey.

Wow, morphine is good stuff.

'Where's my lipstick?'

She smiles.

I pass out into oblivion.

Oblivion is nice, I sometimes wish I could stay there.

When I wake up next time I feel a bit more human. My breast is bound and bandaged, it is huge. Firm and round. It is huge and I have drains. Three plastic tubes hanging from underneath my armpit, dripping into plastic bottles, which sit on the floor.

My stomach heaves a bit, I am not squeamish, so I reckon it's the post surgery blues. Or greens, as according to my sister, I'm a nice shade of.

The next twenty four hours are punctuated with blood pressure checks, drain checks, eating medication, pain killers, anti-inflammatory pills and antibiotics.

So far these last few days have been full of new experiences.

My next challenge.....a bed pan. I imagine this monstrosity of a thing coming towards me, but when the nurse whips it out from the trolley, it doesn't look too bad. A simple and all as it is, I'm slightly confused as to which end goes where.

To preserve my modest, which amuses me, considering I have been flashing my boobs at them all for the last thirty six hours, she pulls the sheets up around my legs, so it looks like a sort of tent on my bed.

I have performance anxiety.
I can't pee with her in the room.

She kindly offers to give me and my bed pan some alone time.

My muscles are a bit weird from the anaesthetic so it takes me a little bit longer than normal, I turn my attention to the telly, oh look, Harry Potter is on.

A nurse is standing at the door, about to wheel in the blood pressure machine. She stops mid sentence, her left eyebrow raised quizzically at my unusual position in the bed.

'You're on the bed pan, aren't you?'

'Ummm hhmmmm', I reply, trying desperately not to laugh.

Apologising profusely she scurries out of the room.

I turn back to Harry Potter.

I'm still peeing, slowly but surely.

My boyfriend stands at the door.

ARrrrggghhhhhhhhHHHH

'I'm on the bed pan', I bellow at him, startling him with the ferociousness of my response. He turns on his heels and exits the room with far more dignity than me, perched on top of my newest experience.

Please, please, please let me stable enough tomorrow to go to the toilet unaided, I think to myself.

It's the little things in life......