Howie woke up. He knew that he was awake, but he couldn’t open his eyelids. Even worse, he couldn’t move at all. Not a finger, not a toe, he was frozen solid.
‘Maybe I woke up before the anesthetic wore off,’ he told himself, ‘but how can that be?’
He felt something soft dab at his side and whenever it did, it sent jolts of pain throughout his entire body. Silently, he willed it to stop. As soon as he had willed it, the pain disappeared along with the dabbing. He tried to sigh in relief, but his lips were sealed shut. The only thing he could do was breathe in deeply from his nostrils.
Then “it” came. Howie always described this part as “it” and the guys knew what he was talking about. It’s so difficult sometimes to talk about an experience that fought against good will. Maybe substituting the real word for a pronoun made the experience easier to endure when he relived it, even so he knew exactly what “it” was.
“It” dove into his side with malice aforethought, first he felt the cold, then he felt the pain. Oh, did he ever fell the pain. “It’s like feeling a dozen knives dive into you at once, slowly, and they dig themselves deeper and deeper into your flesh,” he sometimes tells the guys when they ask. He then tenderly rubs the area of the attack. Each time he has a different way to describe it, but every time the guys get the picture. This was beyond pain. The pain was so bad that it was actually used as a comparison by the guys before, to describe much lesser pain. This pain was the pain of being operated on while you’re awake.
Howie starts to realize what’s going on, but there’s still nothing he can do. He can feel blood oozing down his skin while the doctor digs, yanks, and pulls at the appendix inside. For the first time in his life, Howie actually wants to cry. But he can’t because of the anesthetic. It has frozen his entire body except for parts in his mind. And he feels indescribable pain.
He can feel his appendix starting to give way, maybe this is over…maybe…No. The doctor pulls the tool out for a moment and picks another tool off of Howie’s chest. Howie feels sick, but he can’t puke. He feels the cool air rush into his body and hears the doctor say something, but he doesn’t know what.
Howie wasn’t exaggerating about the knives. The doctor had at least two in at once. They notice that Howie’s heartbeat is racing, but somehow they don’t care, because they think it’s normal. If Howie could have slowed his racing heart, maybe they would have noticed. But he couldn’t, because he was breathing short and fast, taking in the entire toll of what his body was feeling. He wants his life to end on this table, to stop the pain, but he can’t move to help himself.
The doctor is cutting again. Howie breaks out into a cold sweat as his breathing increases. The pain is doing this to him. He’s nearly going crazy. The nurses noticing that he’s sweating, but they see his peaceful expression and decide not to say anything. ‘The room is pretty hot,’ they think.
Howie feels the doctor cut a chunk of muscle as thick as a finger. He compares this feeling to his fingers being chopped off one by one. So this is how the body feels during surgery. But with the anesthetics, it’s not supposed to feel at all.
Howie’s heart pumps rapidly, even faster than before. His body is telling the doctor to hurry and it stops squirting blood in his direction. Howie is loosing it. He can feel everything, he can hear his heartbeat, stronger now, in his ears and the blood trying to circulate through all of his nerve confusion. Despite the ever-growing pain, he tries to take his mind off of things. But the surgery is more painful than the appendicitis itself and he wishes whole-heartedly that it would knock him unconscious. Forever against Howie’s will, it refuses to do so. There was nothing else to feel in that room but pain. Nothing else to think about but pain.
One minute is like one hour and seconds are minutes in this warped zone of suffering that Howie is in. Howie feels his eyes jerk in his sockets, not in a sign of control, but in a sign of life. He feels more air on the open wound and then a ripping noise, like when your teeth are removed. But he actually feels the ripping movement and realizes why the dentists so carefully ask if you can feel anything.
The doctor says something again and Howie feels something being lifted out of his body. Is it over? He asks himself. No, not quite yet. He feels his body shiver at the touch of air on his exposed lower half. The doctor still has to cover up the hole.
Howie sings in his mind, trying to occupy it. But again, that doesn’t work. Still Howie keeps doing it. His entire body starts to twitch, but he his doctor takes no notice of it. Please help me, please help me, Howie prays to some unseen character. Please…please…
He feels the doctor’s hands outside of the hole and keeps on praying and singing in his head. The praying helps until he feels the sharp needle perforate his skin. He tries to scream, but something is still blocking his powerful vocal chords. His body panics for him, screaming out in its own way by lurching forward and shaking violently. This is when the doctors notice something is wrong.
The doctor when is putting in the stitches stops for a moment and tells the nurses to carry on. “It’s almost done,” he tells them, “just a few more stitches.”
“But what if his body goes into shock?”
“Is it possible that the anesthetic wore off? Should we give him more?”
‘Yes!’ Howie screamed inwardly.
“No, that can’t be it. Besides, if we give him more anesthetics, we could O.D. it and he may die. That will not happen in this hospital. I’m afraid we can’t take the chance.” He began to hurry and with every puncture of that needle, Howie became numb. This sick feeling continued until his body told him that he was allowed to open his mouth. Still nothing came out. His stomach, it seemed, had been effected by the anesthetics.
Howie’s body jerked a bit with every stroke. Still, the doctor thought that he had made the right choice. His heart rate was above normal, but it wasn’t beating fast enough to cause alarm. Maybe the anesthetics hadn’t completely numbed all of Howie’s nerves. Little did he know…
“Four more stitches and this guy is home free!” The doctor exclaimed. But Howie was in too much pain to celebrate. He promised himself that the first thing he would do when the anesthetic wore off was scream.
When the doctor finished, he caused Howie one last bit of grief by pressing on the wound. Then he felt himself being wheeled away. His sensation of pain was enhanced and whenever someone touched him he felt like screaming.
A while later they returned him to his hospital bed. He could hear Brian and Nick talking but he didn’t care. He was too upset with everything to care. The overwhelming feelings that were coursing through his body contributed to his sense of fear. What was he going to do? What was he going to do to overcome this and avenge for his pain? He tried to comfort himself with the worst possible things, but he knew that he would never go through with them.
All he could do for the next hour was think and flinch whenever either Brian or Nick touched him. He thought about the irony of his situation. If the anesthetics would’ve worn off entirely, he would have been out of those open doors. But since only a part of Howie was awake – the thinking part – he wasn’t able to. And that made him a prisoner of open doors.
Howie felt his body come to life before him. He opened his mouth, waited for his vocal chords to unfreeze, and screamed a blood-curdling scream.
End