Every Time I Wake Up from Anesthesia I Want My Mom

Big thanks to S, K, R, S & J

Every time I wake up from anesthesia, I want my mom.

I wake up in a room full of people speaking languages I don’t know,

and I become a baby.

The wound reopens again.

I send embarrassing text messages to my family.

I desperately search for the care I didn’t get as a kid.

Usually, when I was in Berlin or in Barcelona, I had enough context for my health issues to make sure I didn’t have my phone in my hands for that moment.

It’s written in my medical notes now—

Patient requests: do not return the phone until she is lucid.

A small line, clinical but holy.

A line written for my protection.

For the two to three hours when I am incoherent and half-dreaming,

when pain medication softens the world into static,

when my mouth is moving but my mind is not yet home.

Even if I had to do the latest infusion, the spinal tap, the stent at the hospital alone,

I would still ask them—please—keep my phone away.

I wanted to be unreachable.

To protect myself from myself.

It’s happened twice while I’ve been in Europe that I’ve had my phone in my hands anyway—because of unexpected surgeries.

Two laparoscopies.

One to remove the majority of my reproductive organs.

Another to treat the endometriosis they found through an ultrasound before my latest infusion of Ocrevus.

The second time, I texted my friend Johnny. I told him that I had run to Instagram to tell a lie—that I was okay, that everything was okay.

I posted the story, then deleted it. I told him this in a state of incoherence.

I still can’t bear to listen to the audio messages I must’ve sent—coming down from anesthesia, pressing the button for my Dilaudid.

After that, I sent a series of embarrassing messages to my Auntie Shannon—a person I’ve been estranged from for years. It was humiliating. It was horrifying.

And still, after that, I called my cousin Sean—a person I haven’t spoken to in easily fifteen years. We talked for hours.

And I tell you the truth: I can’t remember a single word I said to him.

He was there for me, though. He stayed with me through those hours while I moved the IV pole, dragging it across the hospital floor so I could steal the vape from my friend’s bag—just to have nicotine in this Italian hospital where they’d just scraped new lesions of endometriosis off my stomach.

I don’t know how to talk about this without talking about the fact that I’m a fucked-up person.

That I’m not good.

Not bad either.

Just—complicated.

I don’t know how to talk about the fact that I will be falling out of pocket twice a year, at least. Maybe for the rest of my life.

I remember vague themes from this conversation—fear, trauma, confessions of my childhood sexual abuse—and I’m lying to you now as I write this, because I don’t really remember those moments.

It’s only because I recorded small parts of the conversation.

I’ve gotten good at that—recording myself when I’m intoxicated.

I don’t use drugs like I did in Berlin or Barcelona, when I was the Queen of the sauna—the only woman the gay sauna would allow to enter.

I don’t push to the point of numbness and mandatory sleep like I did when even the bartenders at Bein Schlawinchen would break their own rules to pay for a taxi home for me because of the strangeness of my presence there, the quality of my character.

When I wake up from anesthesia, I feel like my uncle Kevin.

I remember the smell of his body—sour-sweet.

I remember the night I stole from the liquor store—a bottle of Smirnoff Raspberry—for him when he was detoxing in the house.

I remember walking into the store and saying I was doing a project for the DARE program and wanted to know more about alcohol.

I slipped one into my bag. Not because he asked, but because I couldn’t bear to hear his body shaking the bed against the walls of the room across from me.

I don’t know what this narrative is.

I don’t know if I’m a good writer because I’m writing it about me now. There’s no poetry here.

All I know is that I am a deeply desperate, earnest, yearning person—

that I want to be seen.

That I want to put some skin in the game, however I can.

This is the beginning of me snitching on myself.

I pray to God it’s worth it.