Recovery
On Monday I went through a medical screening test that requires what they call “mild sedation.” The prep the day before was bad enough. I’d prefer not to go into great detail except to say that doctors have an annoying habit of treating the logical and obvious as though they’d never heard of such a thing. When I asked mine about the prep – “what if I vomit?” he looked politely puzzled and asked me to repeat the question. Then he thought for a moment, his brow furrowed at what was plainly a baffling question and told me. “Well, just pace yourself if you have to.” Which, I learned on Sunday night, didn’t do much good. To quote Mark Twain, “I thought I had thrown up my very soul.”

Of course, the following day, when I mentioned it at the hospital to the nurse who was inserting the IV, she just nodded and said, “Oh yeah. That happens,” as though she’d heard it a thousand times before.

In fact, it was not the prep that was the worst part, but recovery. The procedure itself was nothing. My main memory is of being very pleasantly stoned. After I woke up, they drove me home in a van and I ate some soup M had bought just before passing out on the couch. It was when I woke up there a couple hours later that I remembered why I don’t drink.

I felt like a roach that had been doused in Raid. The last time I’d been so miserable had been in my twenties, after a Harvey’s Bristol Cream binge. I crept about the house, a trembley nauseated and paranoid wreck, and by nightfall had such a pounding headache that I slept, or tried to sleep, with an ice-pack balanced on my forehead. The night was spent occasionally waking up to adjust the pack and then dropping off back to sleep to continue a long, bizarre dream about adopting a green kitten. Not until yesterday afternoon did I begin to feel normal, and I’m still a little shaky this morning.

Gumbo today.