8) Post Operative Recovery

    It’s a different awakening. Not like the gentle rise from slumber after a night of restful sleep, this is a disjointed mixture of consciousness and unconscious. Blurred fragments of reality confused with dreamscape which now as I try to remember, I realise I can’t tell apart. I did put my hand to my side to feel if I had a stoma, and I distinctly recall the sense of relief that I was unable to feel one. Or was that later when I was awake, I actually can’t say for sure. Time is meaningless, well at least for me. For Sharon who is waiting for news, it passes by in a different reality to mine. She was there in the recovery room, that bit must have been a dream as civilians aren’t allowed past the doors to the theatre suite, although it turns out she was there for a while as the surgeon let her in to see me. 
  At some stage I am wheeled back on my bed to the ward, but it is journey like most of that first night that I have lost to anaesthesia. I was told later I was in the recovery room for a long time as they tried to stabilise my pain, but that memory is fortunately also lost and now I have no pain, I don’t feel sick, I just need to return to sleep and I do.