Out like a light

I had a little “procedure” done yesterday that required me being put to sleep, which everyone assured me was no big deal, which was easy to say since they weren’t the ones being put to sleep.

I really don’t even like the term “put to sleep,” cause it reminds me of a couple of dogs I’ve had in my day who have had that done. Most recently it was a Chow named B.J. who had been hit by a car. When it happens to dogs, they generally don’t wake back up.

This is the third time I’ve been put to sleep. The first time was when I was 12 and they were checking me for a kidney problem, and I woke up with a tube inserted in the last place a man would EVER want anything inserted.

The second time was when I had my wisdom teeth taken out when I was around 20 or 21. I woke up in the recovery room and asked the nurse to marry me. She declined.

This time, they had to run some sort of contraption down my throat and into my stomach, so I was more than happy to sleep through that. Before knocking me out, they rolled me into a freezing cold room, hooked me up to a few tubes, and left me there for about half-an-hour.

This was a bad thing, because that gave me time to think. I’ve heard of instances where all sorts of things go wrong when people are undergoing medical procedures.

For one thing, there was a movie a while back about people who undergo anesthesia, only it doesn’t have the desired effect, it just paralyzes them. So they can see and feel everything that is going on during the operation. I wasn’t having open-heart surgery, but still, the thought of seeing and feeling this long tube go down my throat filled me with a little panic.

Then I got to thinking, what if something goes wrong and I end up in a coma? I watch House, this can happen. Maybe I won’t wake up until the year 2018, I thought, and I’ll find out that some crazy things have taken place – like the country has been taken over by robots, or the Falcons won the Super Bowl, or my daughter has married a guy named Slash with tattoos from his ankles to his ears. I was about five seconds away from ripping out all those tubes and wires and running down the hall like a crazy man with my hospital gown flapping open.

Then the nurse and doctor came in, put some big contraption in my mouth and told me not to talk. I started to ask them to promise I wouldn’t end up in a coma, but they must have zapped me with the anesthesia, because the next thing I remember is waking up in the recovery room. It was not 2018, it was only 20 minutes after they put me under. So either everything went well, or that was the world’s shortest coma.

The doctor came in, spent an informative 15 seconds or so with me, handed me some nice color photographs of my innards, and walked out. This guy had the bedside manner of Gen. Patton. I changed out of my hospital gown, and stumbled down the hall like Amy Winehouse, not really knowing any more than I did before I went in.

I hope it’s a long time before I get put to sleep again. I don’t want to end up like B.J.