April 7, 2009

Sleepless in scarsville

5 am: I’ll take an ineffectual codeine-laced suppository and try to go back to sleep.

It’s not pain in the sense of sharp jabs or undulating waves. It’s being the Wife of Frankenstein whose face has been stitched onto her skull one stitch at a time. It pulls. All the nurses warned me that it would pull and were they ever right.

There is numbness around my mouth. Yesterday Nando said, "Don’t try to talk to me. All you can do is mumble and I don’t understand you."

Under my neck it pulls. Around my jowls (which are supposed to disappear anyway but who knows, as the bottom of my face is covered from cheek to neck) it pulls some more. Around my ears it pulls and also aches, as if the ears had been punched. My lower eyelids feel sore, but not much. My upper eyelids don’t feel as if they have been touched. But Dr. Delos had talked about doing a lot of cutting on them, so why don’t they hurt? And where are the scars for that?