Monday, February 12, 2007

My last two weeks (and a 110/120)

It's scary how easy is to summarize the last two weeks of my life in just two words: surgery and recovery. Indeed, that was almost all that took place in the week, with a couple of notable exceptions tho.

Monday I checked in at the clinic early, had the various analysis done and then waited and kept waiting for the surgeon to arrive. From late morning, when the surgery should had taken place, we moved to lunch time and then early afternoon and, considering I hadn't drunk or ate anything since midnight, it wasn't easy. Then the moment came and I found myself nervous, not so much for the pain to come, but the idea of being put asleep and being helpless, possibly never to wake up again always deeply troubled me. I did wake up, obviously, little more than one hour later, to find myself no so much in pain, but unable to speak due my nose being totally filled by tampons. The day went on well and without incidents, if we exclude my fainting to the ground in the evening (my fault, I had been warned it was too early to stand, luckily, despite my "I'm perfectly fine", I was wise enough to have my father close).

The problems started the day after, when I got back home and I had to start eating something, rather then being fed by flebos. Then I found out that swallowing, that at the beginning was a nuisance, as time progressed became painful and then a torture, just as much as the sore throat and bruised lips caused by days of continuous mouth breathing. Yet, the worse moment was undoubtedly friday, when the tampons had to be removed in what turned out to be the second most painful moment of my entire life and a really traumatic experience as three balls made of 1,5 meters of cloth each were removed from my nostrils. It took a good half a hour before I was able to stand properly again and another quarter of hour before I could walk to the car and make it back home.

The following days were easier, mostly spent in or over the bed reading (and in fact, after months, I finally managed to finish my book about the Russian Revolution), reading, watching tv and playing with computer games. Strangely, I found myself exhausted most of the time and sleeping during the day has not been an uncommon occurrence. I also managed to make a couple of attempts of drawing with my new graphic tablet, but the results were... well,worse than horrible. At least some good news came in the form of Susanne being accepted for an internship in Rome, which means she will be here for a whole month in March, and my TOEFL result, scored a pretty good 110/120 (30/30 reading, 29/30 writing, 29/30 comprehension, but a meagre 22/30 speaking).

Being discouraged to drive (apparently, nose surgeries can have some temporary effect on balance), there was not much I could do. Once I went walking around with my father, discovering things about the place I live I could had never guessed, while on thursday I visited Liesbeth at her working place (making a good 7 kms walk while at that) and had lunch together.

By friday, I had enough of staying home and decided to go to the VCN Happy Hour, unexpectedly receiving a kind of a award, but ending up stuck at the bar for hours waiting for the weather to improve enough to allow me to drive back home. Saturday I started preparing the room for Susanne's future visit, freeing up space for her in my wardrobe and going out to buys some staples and, finally, sunday my artistic side once again emerged while I prepared something to take to Germany next friday, which I cannot write about yet, should Susanne happen to come reading here, being it all a surprise.

And so two weeks passed.

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