A report from the Intensive Scare Unit

First, she cuts off your left ear. But she does it insidiously. You still have your ear — you can see it in the mirror and touch it with a finger, but IT cannot feel YOU. The sensation — or lack of it — is like ordinary anesthesia, except this one has lasted six days and counting and shows no sign of abating. It is the precise opposite of the Phantom Limb Phenomenon. While I am asleep you could drill into my ear with a quarter-inch masonry bit, and I wouldn’t wake up. This surgery I had would be great for a person about to get one of those creepy huge “flesh-tunnel” earlobe piercings.

Alas, that is not why I had the surgery a week ago. I had it to finally remove a cyst on my neck under my ear, near the parotid gland, which contains a nerve that controls muscles in one’s face. The cyst had been growing for years and looked as handsome as a wet, naked lychee nut that’s been crossed with a giant mutant pulsing maggot. The thing was roughly the size of a mature bullfrog. Every few months I would go to my doctor, a highly skilled ENT, and she would drain the cyst: a procedure every bit as elegant and appetizing as when a veterinarian expresses a dog’s anal glands.

The problem is, the cyst kept refilling, usually within 24 hours. So I finally decided on having it surgically removed. The surgery happened a week ago tomorrow. Though it lasted three hours, it was supposed to be an outpatient event, but I just got home from the hospital yesterday, four days later. What went wrong? Nothing, in a sense: The operation is delicate — a key nerve must be worked around and can be aggravated during the process, etc. Some side effects are inevitable, and are almost inevitably temporary; in my case, however I seemed to get all of them plus a few more, all at maximum power and duration.

My left eyelid lost some strength and my left eye began watering aggressively; it hasn’t stopped yet. It is as though I am weeping for the tragic state of humankind, but only the left-brain side, concerned with things political, educational, societal, legal, governmental. My face seems perfectly satisfied with the right-brain matters of art and creativity. So there might be something to this.

My lips became a bit numb and my mouth became a bit lopsided, with a slight snotty curl at the corner. This is still not resolved. It is as though I am a Mafia don perpetually whispering orders to whack someone, out of the side of my mouf, to a gunsel named Joey the Crab. Also, my speech is slightly affected; some of the hospital’s nurfef couldn’t always underftand me, and I had to reftate things.

The two biggest problems were that for a day or two I was very unsteady on my feet, and the hospital had assigned me to a bed with kiddie rails and a motion detector, so if I stirred at all from a motionless supine position, such as to dangle my legs over the side of the bed to eat breakfast sitting up, the baby monitor would rat on me with a loud alarm, and nurses would rush into the room from different directions as though a Code Blue had been broadcast.

That previous side effect probably had nothing to do with the operation itself, but more to do with the relatively frail state of my health and my reprobate, dissolute lifetime lifestyle; this last point apparently was concerning enough that doctors ordered an ultrasound of my liver, just to be sure. This terrified me because I once wrote a fraudulent medical book and know just enough medicine to understand why liver ultrasounds are generally ordered — they involve a search for what the medical community euphemistically calls “masses” or “lesions,” or my favorite, based on how these lesions show up on radiology, “opacities.” But the liver test came back clean. So maybe I have been a clean liver all these years after all! (Haha, pun.)

But the biggest problem is that after the surgery my blood pressure began pogo-sticking up and down — sometimes resembling the numbers associated with a swimmer of the English Channel, and sometimes the numbers associated with a dying fat guy who had stroked out and. was at the bottom of a swimming pool. This issue is also still unresolved.

I am not a religious or spiritual person, but at times during this ordeal I sought some sort of inspiration, and as it happens, right across from my bed was a large crucifix! It did give me inspiration, but perhaps not in the way the hospital intended. Jesus resembled a composite plastic superhero — He-Man, mostly — with a cape and a breastplate, and he appeared to be flying, and it made me laugh. That was a play directly to my only deity, and it was comforting. Here he is.

In the end, the managing doctor of my ward told me what a pleasure it had been to care for me, but I think he was being overly diplomatic. I suspect I had not been the easiest patient, because, since I got home I have been plucking off my body those aluminum stick-on EKG tabs. It has been like scaling a fish. The hospital folks evidently forgot to remove them before they skedaddled me out the door as fast as they could.

Oh, one last thing. It will allow me to tell you one of my favorite jokes. A man has to send his father to a nursing home. He picks out a fancy one, and drops his dad off. On the first day, the old man is sitting on a couch watching TV and his body begins to list a little to the left. As soon as this occurs an orderly rushes over and sits him straight up again. Then the old man lists to the right. Same result. Same thing keeps happening. The next day, the son returns and asks his dad how things are going. “It’s a nice place, sonny,” the old man says. “But they don’t let you fart.”

Hospitals don’t let you poop. I dunno if it’s because of the food or the meds, or one’s psychology-physiology nexus — the “Almost Home” Phenomenon — but after four days, zilch. Within five minutes of getting home, yes.

Anyway, I am back home. Blood pressure still pogo-sticking.

I will see you all on Tuesday, I hope.

Meanwhile, keep sending in your personal amusing medical stories, which have been excellent. You can include them as comments, but I prefer that you send ’em here: