Awakening

Eileen Vorbach Collins

I’ve been here on this gurney for an hour. The red nonskid socks are warm. Someone has given me a preheated blanket that was cozy at first, but now I’m too hot. My clothes are in a plastic bag, and the bracelet that tells the hospital staff who I am is fastened to my wrist. I wouldn’t mind the wait, but the background noise and flickering lights in the busy pre-op area have joined forces to turn my nagging little no-food-or-caffeine-after-midnight headache into an evil, throbbing thing like the migraines I used to get years ago, when my children were young. A hive of medical personnel rushes from one curtained cubicle to the next, bagging up clothes, starting IVs, taking vital signs. I’m all set and left alone now. Every sing-songy voice is an explosion of sound an octave too high. 

Finally, I’m being wheeled to surgery, and suddenly everyone’s in a hurry, getting me set up for what I’m told will be “light sedation.” Here’s the oxygen tubing with the toxic smell of plastic. It’s so cold in here. I answer their staccato questions. Name. Date of birth. Left carpal tunnel release.

What seems like seconds later, someone is shouting at me.

She is angry because I won’t do what she tells me. I won’t take a deep breath. I won’t open my eyes. I shake my head no. I am frantic. The sedative-hypnotic has sliced through the veil, and my daughter, here in this in-between place, is about to talk to me. I am making tea, the way she likes it, with lots of milk and a little sugar.

Angry One wants me to leave this place—to return to the chill of what is called recovery— but I won’t. I want to stay here. Just long enough to visit Lydia. It’s been so long and I miss her so much. This is the closest I’ve been to my dead daughter in twenty years. I know she’s not fifteen anymore, the age that she died. I don’t actually see her, but I feel her presence as another woman—someone I want to know better. I’ll stay here forever if I have to. I refuse to open my eyes. I will NOT breathe. But I’m sobbing so hard because my daughter is gone now, and the angry shouting continues. When I sob, my body gasps for the breath I don’t want. The breath that’s pulling me further away from my daughter. From this place between places where we met so briefly. 

I open my eyes for a second and see a youngish nurse with a bouncy blonde ponytail stomping away. She leaves me alone for a minute, and I try to get back to my daughter. I close my eyes and hold my breath. The shouting resumes.

“You only had a carpal tunnel release! No one else is acting like this! What happened to your daughter? How did she die?” 

I wonder what I’ve been saying. What I’ve been doing. Clearly, Angry One thinks I’m insane. I consider telling her that my daughter died by suicide, but the stigma of that persists when I am at my most vulnerable, such as this moment.

Instead, I sob, “Why do you care?”

This makes Angry One even angrier. 

“I don’t know what your problem is, but you’re not gonna take it out on me.”

She leaves me alone with my handful of used Kleenex. I am so very thirsty. Here in the recovery area, where the morning’s surgical cases have been wheeled into tiny cubicles, the curtains around my gurney are open, facing the common area and nurses’ station. Everyone who walks by stares at me. I am that mother ape whose baby died, and they’re making a documentary as I carry my infant’s corpse. Maybe I am insane.

Angry One returns and I choke back sobs, apologize. Tell her I’m sorry if I was rude. But she is still angry.

“I’ve got another patient coming in two minutes. Sit up! You need to get dressed.”

She thrusts the plastic bag with my clothes at me. Says I don’t have to put my shoes on, I can just wear these nonskid socks the nice nurse in pre-op gave me. I need to use the bathroom, and I’m feeling unsteady, but she just points. I make it, swaying.

My face in the bathroom mirror is red and swollen. I want to lie down on the cold tile and close my eyes, dream my daughter back. Unlike those rare, precious dreams I’ve had over the years, where I visit that ethereal place where my daughter lives, there is no recapturing the moment this time. The doorway between our worlds, opened by the drug, has been slammed shut. The veil is already knitting itself back together. Soon, there will be no trace of the severed threads.

The bathroom floor is cold, and I have no blanket to wrap myself in with my nebulous daughter, who flashed like a supernova through my world. My sadness is heavy, pushing down on my shoulders, keeping me from raising my head and looking forward. I see my red socks, but I don’t know where they came from. If only I could have woken up just a bit more slowly. The surgery was so quick, maybe the drugs didn’t have time to clear my body. Whatever effect they were having on my brain is still happening. Where am I? 

The surgery was minor. Laparoscopic. Not even a stitch needed in my wrist. Yet I have been cracked wide open. I run my finger over my sternum expecting to feel wires holding it in place, protecting my heart. 

As I splash cold water on my face, I think about religions I’ve tried on over the years that were a bad fit. They’d bind or itch or chafe. I’d pull them off and toss them on the heap, always disappointed I couldn’t muster that blind faith others seem to have. Knowing, proclaiming with such confidence, that they will one day be reunited with their beloved dead. And just when I might have come close to believing, just when my heart and mind were in agreement, Angry’s voice, hard and harsh and loud, was as shocking as a slap.

“I’ve got to get ready for my next patient. You need to stop feeling sorry for yourself. Get dressed.” Angry One is a blur. She never stops moving. She is blunt force and sharp edges. 

I wonder what made her so angry. Something I said? I ask her, and she tells me I was crying about my daughter. So, I still don’t know what made her so angry.

“Was I screaming?”

“No, but you gasped.”

She rejected my apology, which wasn’t sincere anyway, but I need her to give me more Kleenex and maybe a sip of ginger ale.

I understand. There’s always another patient waiting. Always someone who needs something. In all my years as an RN, I seldom sat down to eat lunch. Still, I can’t help feeling robbed of an experience that belonged to me. With falls being one of the most common adverse events in hospitals, why not have a step-down recovery area where patients, under the watch of trained ancillary staff, could awaken more slowly? No slapping allowed, verbal or otherwise. 

Since I’ve been deemed ready to wobble on rubber legs to the bathroom and have come out still standing, I’m ushered into a waiting wheelchair and escorted to the parking lot, where my husband waits in the car to drive me home. The person pushing the chair and helping me into the car is the kind nurse from pre-op who was so attentive. I remember now. He is the one who gave me these warm red socks that may have kept me from slipping on the cold tile in the bathroom. I’m still crying, and he is so kind.

“That’s a mean one you’ve got there,” I tell him. I’m slurring my words a bit, but he understands.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” he says, and I feel validated. 

In the car, my husband asks if I’m okay. I wail something about Lydia, drool on my shirt, and fall asleep. 

The surgery center calls my husband’s cell when we’re almost home to tell him I’ve left without my shoes. No, I don’t want to turn around. I’ll get them another time. 

Now, I want only to go home. To get into bed and pull the covers over me. To try to get back to that threshold where my daughter is more than a memory. Where she is three years old, and I’ve woken her from a summer nap to show her a huge toad on the patio. In a photograph, she’s cradling that toad in both hands, and her smile is radiant. Where she is seven and loves ballet and softball and has a Brownie sash covered in badges. Where she is ten and has pet rabbits and wins a first-place trophy at the state fair for her Book of Hours. And yes, where she is twelve and thirteen and fourteen and so brilliant and sensitive, so troubled, so filled with rage and despair, yet sometimes so funny, her acerbic wit cutting to the bone but still with the power to make me laugh.

After Lydia died, I used to sleep with her baby blanket, a ragged piece of pink satin she’d once loved, hoping to dream of my daughter, hoping for a message. I once stuffed a piece of that blanket under my shirt and went to hear a well-known medium, shelling out money I could ill afford for airfare and hotel and the ticket for admission. The large conference room was packed with others hoping for connection. I’d hoped the blanket remnant would be a magnet, drawing my daughter to me. It didn’t work. I guess she didn’t need it anymore. Maybe she didn’t need me anymore. 

And though my daughter was never an adult in my physical world, here in this post-operative, mind-altered, in-between place, she is a woman. How I long to know her. To sit with her in the shadows between our worlds, just for a while. Oh God, how I long to know her.

I get home and crawl into bed still wearing the now-very-dirty nonslip socks. My rationale, if I had any interest in being rational, would be that, since I was wearing them when I last saw her, maybe the socks will help Lydia find her way to me. If only to say something outrageously funny about the damn socks. Something that will make me laugh until it hurts, so I’ll know the anesthesia has worn off and I am fully back in the world. Something so outrageous, I’ll know it could only have come from her.

In the months since my surgery, I’ve read a few academic papers on anesthesia. Mechanism of action. Emergence delirium. Alpha5GABAA receptors. I don’t understand the language or the Rorschach tests of the graphs and figures, the daisy-chains of chemical compounds. How surgeons can open us up, put their hands and instruments inside of us, stitch us back together all while we’ve left the room, safe from the memory of any sensation, will always be a mystery to me.

I ponder the magic of anesthesia, how it wasn’t that long ago surgical patients were tied down and given some whiskey, with only a stick to bite on. I don’t need to know how it works, but I want to know where we go when the drugs send us out of our bodies. When we take our leave so the surgeon can work their magic.

What a gift to find my daughter in that liminal space. I don’t care if it was a trick of the medication. I want to believe it was something more.

Adapted from Love in the Archives by Eileen Vorbach Collins. © 2023 by Eileen Vorbach Collins. Published by Apprentice House Press. All rights reserved.

Eileen Vorbach Collins writes true stories she wished were fiction and fairy tales she wishes were true. She is the author of the award-winning essay collection, Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss, Apprentice House Press, 2023.