Recovery

 June 19^th 2026

 

    When I woke up, groggy and disoriented, I found myself in the post surgery recovery area.  My neck was immobilized by a large brace, oxygen was flowing into my nose, blood was pooling in two dangling plastic drains, I had two IV lines and an intense bruise where an arterial line had been.  Despite all that, I was neither paralyzed or dead, the two main risks of the surgery.

    Time passed as I drifted in and out of a hazy, medicated sleep.  When I was awake, I sipped the juice I was given through a straw since the brace was preventing me from really opening my mouth.  Each time I opened my eyes, there were fewer and fewer patients in the other beds, and it finally dawned on me that quite a long time had passed.  “We’re waiting for a bed upstairs,” said the young nurse apologetically.  “They’re waiting for a nursing home to pick her up and it’s taking a while.”

    As the patients cleared out she had more time to talk to me.  My memory is foggy, but I know we talked about the political situation, the need for universal health care.  I told her about some of the actions we’d been doing, and she asked how she could find out about them.  “Follow Rise and Resist on Instagram,” I told her, recruiting even in my dilapidated state.

    It got to be 6:30pm, then closer to 7pm.  “I’m pretty sure it’s going to be after the shift change at 8pm,” she said, and the next time I woke up it was 8pm and they were preparing to move me.  “Tell me the name again,” she said as we approached the unit doors. “Rise and Resist,” I said and then fell asleep again.

    I woke up when we got to the Spine Center floor, where I have been before.  It was more crowded than a couple years ago, with two patients in beds in the hallway with partitions creating makeshift rooms.  A couple of nurses were bustling around me, checking on lines and getting various things set up.  But then they started pulling off the sheet and my hospital gown, insisting they had to check my entire skin.  I was groggy, but they seemed to be saying it was to prevent sepsis, which was confusing since this was my fourth surgery at this hospital and my sixth overall and I had never encountered anything like this. To make it worse, one of them had a camera to document…something.  I wanted to refuse, run, escape but drugged and encumbered by all these devices I was trapped.

    It could not have lasted more than a few minutes, but in my mind I was 15 and at Kings County Hospital, in a room with dingy blue walls.  It wasn’t nurses hovering over my naked body, camera in hand, but a doctor and a child welfare worker.  The doctor was struggling to use the polaroid and it seemed like years of being trapped under the fluorescent lights while they took picture after picture as children in pain cried all around us.

    When I landed back in the present, I realized I was crying silently, tears finding their way around the oxygen and the brace.  I had been installed in a small room by myself with all the tubes and equipment neatly arrayed around me, squeezy things inflating and deflating on my legs to prevent blood clots.  I could barely move, I couldn’t even take the pills the nurse brought me until she searched the unit for a bendy straw so I could drink the water she held.  I don’t know what they were, but they sent me crashing back into blackness.