Twilight Zone in the Operating Room
Was my body tingling with anticipation for improved eyesight? Or was I just high?
In the operating room, twilight is an anesthetic state induced by a mild dose of drugs to block pain and reduce anxiety during surgery. The patient is sedated and sleepy but still conscious and able to follow instructions. Awake, somewhere in between here and there, in the twilight zone.
I was calm before they injected me with their drugs.
At 7:30am on the dot a man named Carlos pulled the curtains back and grabbed the side of my gurney to take me to the operating room. A quick left and a sharp right as the panels of fluorescent lights above whizzed by. I’d been awake for a couple hours so I was already drifting in and out of slumber. I tried to keep my eyes open as white lights burned in and out down the corridor– I wanted to remember every single detail. My heart was racing with anticipation, a familiar feeling.
The gurney came to a halt and we were in the operating room.
Is this adrenaline?
“The doctor is a gentleman, right?” I heard.
I looked around to find my doctor. A flock of nondescript scrubs were fluttering around the room pulling at tubes, filling up syringes, plugging in cables. My arms were tied down to the gurney, my left eye covered with a patch and an array of cocktails was injected into my IV to sedate me into twilight.
I let my eyes close and the drugs take over me. I was calmer than I’d been in months.
Months of malaise, weeks of worrying. On the phone with my health insurance every day, making sure the people on the other end were working on my case.
Trying to confirm the surgery, trying to sort out my life.
Trying to figure out how to scale a new business, how to pay my bills without my family’s help. Trying to figure out how to keep living in this city without a car. Trying to find a good reason to leave if I couldn’t…
Trying, trying, trying.
Of course I burnt out. It was a cocktail of existential angst.
So I let go and let the anaesthesia kick in.
I could hear my surgeon’s mild French accent from the other side of my sedation explaining his every move to his fellows. I strained my ear to see if I could hear what was going on, and when the hell were they going to cut open eye, but I kept getting pulled back down into my universe.
I felt good. And excited? Why was I excited?
I’ve never done this before, this surgery. I’d been wanting it for years. Was that it? The thrill of doing something new?
My body was tingling and I wasn’t scared. I trusted the moment. Whatever happens, happens.
Even if my eyesight doesn’t improve, at leastI it won’t get worse.
I felt so good and so calm and so excited to finally feel so good and so calm.
Is this Nirvana?
Am I high?
Should I do drugs more?
On the other side of twilight there was an abrupt change of pace. Footsteps pacing, voices bouncing against the far corners of the room.
A pat on my arm and “Alright you’re done. You did great.”
Back through the corridor, through the fluorescent tunnel, and into my post-op cubicle.
It was 8:30am on the dot and my Vitrectomy operation was an apparent success.
Whatever cocktail of drugs they’d given me was still swimming in my veins, because my heart started to sink, leaving me with inexplicable melancholy. I miss that feeling.
Not the drugs, but the feeling I’d felt an hour before, sitting on the gurney, heading into the unknown, feeling butterflies for whatever was to come.
That was it. It was that feeling of being pushed into the realm of endless possibilities that I had been missing. Months of malaise, paralyzed by fear, sitting in the backseat of my life until Carlos had come to take me into the OR.
What a trip.
As I waited for my mom to pick me up — is that the title of my memoir? — the drugs began wearing off, but I stayed calm. Grounded, centered, confident, certain. The realm of endless possibilities, that’s where I needed to go; that’s what would pull me out of my malaise.
