Do I have my vision? Yes. I see the back of the bandages wrapped around my eyes.
Touch? The skin of my face tells me gauze bandages wrap the upper part of my head. I don’t hurt. The pain hasn’t started yet and probably won’t for a while. This isn’t my first surgery, not by any means. My chest rises and falls, so I have my breath, too. And my heart.
Close your eyes. Where are you? In your cheekbones? Your lips? Where’s that tiny, little driver of yourself? Maybe right there in your chin, down your neck and chest, that highway where the orgasm flows.
How about my toes and my fingers? Do they still work? My fingers search. I’m prone on an ordinary hospital bed, covered by a thin sheet. My toes are too far away. I’ll worry about them later.
All around me there’s moaning, crying. I can hear—hey, I can hear, too!
What the hell is this place? It’s like a triage tent or something, not an ICU. I’m angry with the hospital, feel cheated.
Oh, my lips. They’re like salted baked potato skins. I’ve definitely retained thirst. Thirst to rip my breath away, I need water like no misery I’ve ever known, like a dying house plant, like no metaphor can touch. That’s what the others are crying for: water. It’s blood, blood loss. Enough of my mind’s pulled through to reason that. If there’s hell, hell is thirst.
“Hey there.”
It’s my brother. At my shoulder. He can tell I’m awake from my fingers struggling or my gasping lips.
“Am I okay?”
Six years later, I’ll hate that I said that. As if he could know. Before the operation, the neurologists listed off what I could lose. Hearing was most likely. Perherphial vision up there, too. Other senses and motor functions I diagnosed with my imagination, though I held my wildly running fears within as they wheeled me to the operating room, then pressed the mask against my face and said count backward from ten.
Remove a walnut sized piece. Scoop the bad part out, the seizure “focus.” I always assumed they were minimizing, putting on a happy face. Later, X-rays would prove me right. It looks as if a third of my brain’s gone.
“Am I okay?”
My brother, my best friend, who must have been terrified for hours, now so hopeful, elated that I can speak, possibly astonished I survived the procedure, stands at my side, and I lay this on him, how frightened I was. I ask him to tell me which pieces pulled through.
What is he supposed to say?
Now, years later, I can stand for hours, walk. Run.
Before they inevitably came around to proposing that I undergo the knife (“high-powered suction,” technically), I regarded brain surgery patients with fear and disgust, imagined a peanut rattling in an overlarge shell, envisioned life wheelchair-bound and drooling, my family baby-talking, congratulating me for eating spoonfuls of mush, for defecating.
After I healed, I made the mistake of telling a stranger—on our first date!—about my operation, and I could see in her horrified eyes everything I’m describing now, her absolute repulsion.
Back then, released from the hospital, we’re all in the car on the ride home from the airport. We arrived at the top of my parents’ driveway—that’s when we learned the surgery didn’t work. I started seizing in the passenger seat. As I lost consciousness, I heard my brother, sounding so defeated, say, “Oh, shit.” It slipped out: exactly the wrong thing to say.
Travis Flatt (he/him) is an epileptic teacher living in Cookeville, Tennessee. His stories appear in Fractured, Variant Lit, Prime Number, Gone Lawn, Flash Frog, and other places. He enjoys theater, dogs, and theatrical dogs, often with his wife and son.
Twitter: @WriterLeeFlatt
Bluesky: @travisflatt.bsky.social