Top 10 things to expect from your first major surgery

10. Your ward will smell vaguely of shit.

9. “Rate your pain from one to ten.”

When the nurse asks you this upon your arrival in the emergency ward, your response will be simple enough: “A million billion, you ignorant slut!” But in the following days your pain will pass through many subtle changes. During these days, a nurse will ask, “Rate your pain from one to ten,” maybe a hundred times.

To begin with, the question is bullshit because it is an abstract quantification of how you feel. How do I feel? Six? Four? Negative pi? I just don’t know. Ask the question a hundred times and its meaning becomes further obscured and intangible. The patient may as well be asked, “If your pain was a chicken, what part of that chicken would it be?” My pain is a bone. My pain is a nugget.

8. Morphine.
This is a drug that one receives by either inhalant or injection during a stay in hospital, the prospect of which some people think is “fun”. Let us please take a moment to consider this word, “fun”. For me, “fun” is finding money in an unexpected place. “Fun” is not extreme pain induced by an exploding organ. The morphine tranquilised me. The end.

7. Blood.
I had blood work four or five times a day. This, I expected. What I did not expect was waking up with a thick tube cut into my body funelling blood into a large plastic bag. My parents had, in fact, seen the bag in my bed and decided not to let me know it was there. “We didn’t want to alarm you,” they later informed me.
I thought it was interesting that my parents would prefer not to warn me, saving the moment for discovering my own body’s mutilation and blood for when I wake up alone.

6. Wards celebrate Christmas.
My particular ward decided to give Christmas a theme. The theme they decided on was “Under the Sea”. Clearly, it did not occur to them that Christmas has an existing theme of the birth of Jesus Christ. Otherwise, it did occur to them but they decided that the theme of Jesus Christ would be better received in an “Under the Sea” world. In either case, I decided to let it go.
In an interesting move, the staff opted against the more traditional decorations of tinsel, paintings and tree, preferring simply to write the words “Under the Sea” with a texta throughout the ward. The effect was, frankly, demented.

5. Scars from keyhole surgery are adorable; they look like a series of bullets.

4. Some nurses like you. Some nurses don’t. You get over it.

3. Your family will be as annoying in the ward as they are in the home.
My father arrived in my ward, took the clock off the wall and asked, “Does this belong to the hospital?” I asked him, “Why would I bring in large wall clock from home?” He considered this, examined the clock closer and finally replaced it. Then he farted, paused and said, “Well, there’s not much I can do for you here, Mia.” Then he farted again, paused and said, “Yes, there’s not much I can do for you here.” Then he left. My mother arrived later that night with the instructions: “Bring home the clock.”

2. You will receive small pieces of crap as gifts.
My brother gave me a “Get Well Soon” balloon. I said that it was tacky and could he please throw it away. He called me a bitch. Then he struck me in the face with the balloon. So tightly inflated was the balloon that the impact seriously hurt my eye. I later found out he had stolen it from an old man.

1. You may lose weight.
The benefits of this weight loss will be grossly counteracted by your hair, which cannot be blow-dried during this period, and your face, which will have certainly crusted. Also, you cannot wax or shave your legs. Others will find you repulsive.

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