This week I have mostly been wearing T-shirts made of stretchy material, wide-necked jumpers and zip-up tops.
Because last week I was mostly in hospital, having blood tests, on a drip and having my ear cut open and fiddled with while I was still conscious.
Having an operation on your eardrum while you're awake is no relaxing experience. Obviously, with the anaesthetic it didn't hurt, but you can still feel all sorts of pushing and shoving and worse still
hear everything. I can only describe it as being like the various types of noise you get when you're tuning a radio between stations, played directly into the middle of your head.
Then there were some other joyful surprises. I think probably to cauterise blood vessels as they cut the ear round the back and prise it open to make more room in the ear canal, they don't use a plain old scalpel but some kind of heat implement. In short, I was treated to the light smell of my own flesh being burnt.
The next surprise came when the doctor said "I'm now going to use a hammer and chisel to chip off some parts of the bone" - and I was subjected to repeated pounding of the skull. Again, there was no pain, just the surreal thought that someone was "sculpting" my skull while I was awake.
With my face hidden away under a little tent of blue gauze, one of the ways I tried to distract myself was to disassociate myself from the reality of what was happening. Rather than let myself imagine the bloody scene that was being played out only a few centimetres away from my eyes and brain, I tried to pretend something else was happening. The effect the anaesthetic had was to make the whole side of my head feel like a slab of stone had been laid on top of it, so I jut imagined the doctor carving out a relief into that piece of stone rather than my head.
All sorts of characters appeared on the pillow to my right (the way I was facing) acting out slapstick routines - Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, Donald Duck, Mickey and Minnie Mouse (having a punch up), Elmer Fudd and Buggs Bunny, whole troops of elephants, giraffes and zebras rushing across African plains, marching bands, and even Kylie Minogue as the fairy she played in Moulin Rouge.
But in reality, they couldn't totally distract me from the absolute racket going on inside my head at times. At one point I thought I felt pain, but when I asked the doctor it turned out he was just firing an electric pulse into my head and it was making a muscle twitch. After that I just gave up on trying to imagine anything or distinguish between the different sensations, and at some point when they started to fiddle with the deepest part of the ear, it made me so disoriented and dizzy that I was grateful for losing my bearings.
A week later, I still have the packing in my ear, which makes me pretty deaf. That either comes out on Friday (together with the stitches) or in a couple of weeks, I'm not sure. Hearing takes a month or two to get back to normal. I have to have a CAT scan in a few months to check that there have been no complications. It will take six to twelve months for the nerves in my upper ear and around to regrow and for sensation to come back (at the moment it feels like senseless rubber). As the swelling inside the ear gradually goes down, by contrast it hurts more - the packing sponge inside expands and sends sharp shooting pains into my ear and neck once in a while. My ear is still ringing too, and I hope that stops soon.
I'm not making out that I've had heart surgery or a brain operation or anything truly debilitating - in fact I'm truly amazed that something that invasive can be done to my body and yet I can return to an almost entirely normal life again from the following day. My respect for doctors and nurses, who are so easy to take for granted, could not be higher. On the one hand this has been much less of an ordeal than I expected and asides from writing this post, I don't dwell on what it was like on the operating table. But on the other hand it has been a bit of an ordeal: it's the old case of not appreciating what you have until you lose it. With all these bandages wrapped around my head and ears after the operation, I wasn't even able to wear my glasses, reminding me of how blind I am as well - losing the better part of two senses in one go was a bit of a wake up call.
I don't mean that in a self-absorbed way. It struck me really hard afterwards that I had just received some of the best medical care this world has to offer, and yet 98-99% of everybody else on the planet doesn't have access to that. Maybe it's a mild form of survivor's guilt.
So, take care of yourselves.
