The Kianna Times

Snipping of my Story

My feet slide across the ground in my flimsy slippers.  Cold runs from the freezing hospital floor up my spine, making me shake like a leaf.  It it from the ice cold or the constant fear?

Clutching my stuffed bunny in my little fist, I rub my thumb over it’s well loved fur.  It calms me slightly, but the sharp edge of terror is still there, breathing down my neck.

Doctors come to get me, and I slowly hop onto a stretcher.  They wheel me away from my parents, and towards the unpredictable future, in the shape of an operating room.  They lift me from the stretcher onto the wintery table, that bites at my back through the slit in my gown.  

A clear plastic mask slides over my mouth and nose, and I breathe in the anesthesia.  I know they’ve walked me through the surgery repeatedly, but with my mind clouded by the medicine, I don’t even know my own name.

Some lady prepped for the operation asks me things without verbal prose, even though I can’t talk through the mask.  I remember thinking how silly it was to ask questions to someone who couldn’t reply.  Here we go, no metaphoric citadel to hide in anymore.  Before I knew it I was fading away into oblivion.  No veto vote to hold it at bay any longer.

The universe fades in and out, as the world fades into focus.  Doctors in white coats murmur around me, chatting idley among themselves.  Groggily I ask, “What happened?  Where am I?”  The effects of the anesthesia wearing off have left my mind slow moving and foggy.  They tell me it went well, and that my surgery went well, and that they got my kidney out, and some other long forgotten medical terms.

My parents come, and my mom stays by my side.  Coloring pages covered in blank leprechauns, and four leaf clovers sprawled across the window into my hospital room.  A needle prick in my veins, holding back the pain.  A large bandage on my left flank.

A tube in my back pumps all the nutrients I need into my body, but they still offer me food.  I shake my little head no.  Looking down at my hands strapped on padding, and the needles poking into my wrists, I refused to eat until I could feed myself.  I swear I was the most stubborn nine year old ever.

 Thinking about that all theses years later makes me smile slightly.

It felt like starting over again, a rebirth of sorts.  Poetic yet painful.  I almost feel like writing about how tiring the recovery was, is harder than writing about before.  But I felt like I had to do this for myself sooner or later, so why not here?  On this page, so others can read it, and I can memorize it.  Realize that this is a part of me, and not all of me, a fact that I’ve always had a hard time remembering.  But I’ve always felt that putting words on paper turned it into reality, for someone, somewhere.