“Steph, Steph, you can
wake up now.”
I stirred and tried to
slowly open my eyes.
“I thought Steph was a
girl’s name,” she chuckled in a thick African accent.
I turned to my
left. My left eye was bandaged but with
my blurry right eye I could make out a large black woman with a friendly smile.
“It is a boy’s
name as well, but not often.” My throat was dry. “I sometimes go by Steven but my mother called me Steph.”
“I guess it’s more
common in America?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Where are you from originally?”
“Nigeria.”
“Ah… the East side or
the West side or the North?”
“Lagos. The West Side.” She seemed impressed.
“The reason I know
this is because I used to have a guy working for me who was from the West side
who married a girl from the East side.
His family weren’t happy about it at the time but I think they get on
fine now.”
I was in a recovery
room in the middle of a line of beds. I
could see a couple of other patients, each one with a nurse in attendance. Just then, the anaesthetist walked past
rushing to his next operation.
“How are you feeling?”
he asked cursorily.
“Well I’m still alive
and my brain seems to be working, so all good.”
He smiled and wished
me good luck.
I had been under for
about an hour but it seemed like no time at all.
What felt like a few
seconds earlier I had been on the operating table with my right forearm shaking
uncontrollably as he inserted the cannula in my right hand.
“That arm is the one
with the tremor,” I had told him. I only
occasionally have tremor but it is exacerbated when I am nervous or tired. We had of course discussed my Parkinson’s
medication and he had adjusted his anaesthetics accordingly.
The first to be
administered had been morphine which made me immediately light-headed. My mother, a child of the sixties, has told
me how she loves the sensation that an opiate gives her, but for a person like me
who does not really like taking drugs of any kind, I had found it
disorientating and unpleasant.
“Do you want me to
count down from 100?” I had offered. But
I hadn’t heard the answer as the next drug, Propofol I think, was already
entering my nervous system. There had
been no time for any final contemplative thoughts of the miracle of technology surrounding
me, or of loved ones, or of what would happen next. I was out cold.
General anaesthesia is
one of the many wonders of medical science.
Broadly speaking we spend our lives in one of three states: awake; in
REM sleep (i.e. dreaming); and in non-REM sleep (i.e. deep sleep). Each has quite distinctive brain patterns and
physiological characteristics. Being
under general anaesthetic is to be in a fourth state of being where the brain
is essentially inactive but, unlike sleep, you do not wake up feeling rested.
The truly remarkable thing is nobody knows for sure how general anaesthetic actually works. This is not really surprising given that nobody knows what causes consciousness itself, so it is all the more remarkable that doctors can seemingly switch consciousness on and off at will. As with a lot of things in medicine, the drugs have been developed over many years largely through trial and error, and are now highly effective.
I wore an eye patch
for the rest of the day and through the night.
My left eye is bruised, sore and blooded, but a bit of ibuprofen works
wonders and I feel surprisingly good the next day as I write. I need to regularly administer eye drops,
protect my eye at night and be careful in the shower for the next week or
so. I will be off work for the rest of
this week and most likely work from home next week.
Has it worked? My eyes are still a bit blurry and I have a
mild headache as my eye muscles adjust.
Perhaps my visual cortex is busy recalibrating itself to the change of
sensory input as well. From what I can
tell so far, my field of good vision has improved but by how much I am unsure.
I will be seeing Mr A
again in a week or two for a follow up consultation. Whatever the outcome, I think I will be
telling him I that I am not in a hurry to have more surgery. I will be living with my new eyes, hopefully
for the better, for the foreseeable future.
