Facts and Priorities

With bit less than a month and a half to go, I still know very little about what to expect with my Taylor Spatial Frame other than what I was told by the surgeon initially (should probably do some research…). The thing will straighten my leg. At some point it will probably be infected. If (when?) it gets infected, I could need to be re-hospitalized. After the procedure to place the frame on December 26, I will be in the hospital for somewhere between two and five days for pain control. Getting pants on over the frame will become a very interesting game. I will be moving downstairs from my second-floor bedroom so I can move around easier with my wheelchair. My mother is clearing stuff out of my future living-spaces this weekend.

I do have a new piece of information to add to the puzzle. Apparently I will miss about a month of school. Granted, I will miss about a month of the second semester of my senior year with my college apps done, done and done, so the academic pressure will be off, but still. That's a lot of content. So…that'll be interesting.

Really, that's it for new frame-related information. That said, I do have plenty to write about tonight, things I should have written about earlier but didn't have the time to. Now, before starting this blog, I scanned through other blogs and decided I liked them better when the posts weren't super long. Some of the posts here are already pretty long and I don't want this post to become the next War and Peace (or something like Stephen King's The Stand, a book large enough that it was recommended to me for its sheer heft (not to mention the fact that it's legitimately quite a good read)). Which is why I think I'll split today's post into a few mini-posts, each covering a different facet of what I want to cover.

Which is to say, this is the grab-bag post. I'll miss a month of school. And I had an interesting conversation today that's related enough to the general theme of the blog to be worth mentioning.

During Comparative Religion today, I was sitting next to another student whose throat has been causing him trouble, to the point where he's missed multiple days of school and been to the emergency room. Today he's undergoing throat surgery. He was nervously sifting through whatever information he could find online—a YouTube video of transplant surgery (I tried my best not to watch), an article asking whether general anesthesia was safe. Finally, he asked me about what it's like, surgery, whether you feel anything or…

I assured him you don't feel anything, that you go to sleep and the next thing you know you wake up and it's over with.

He asked if you dream, if you have any sense of the passage of time.

I said no. Not in my experience. But I did note the aftertaste is really quite awful.

When I had surgery for the first time, way back in third grade, the anesthesiologist described the smell of anesthesia to me as airplane gasoline. Now imagine airplane gasoline as a taste. That's what sticks in your mouth for days afterward. It's odd…I'm not concerned about waking up during my surgery in December. I am concerned about tasting airplane gasoline for days.

Perhaps I need to reevaluate my priorities?