There was a moment where everything around me faded into an incandescent blur. However, in that moment, all of my senses were peaked. Doctors call it “fight or flight”. All I knew is that everything was enhanced. The sight of the monochromatic white walls of the recovery room, the smell that can only be found in hospitals, the taste of the soporific nitrous oxide, the sound of someone nearby screaming their lungs out, and the pain that’s as powerful as a category five hurricane. To try to forget the pain I was in, I tried to figure out who was screaming. Where’s the basis of the screaming and why is it that the more I try to figure out who it was, the more pain increased and the screaming got louder? I figured out who it was. It was me.

I was getting an outpatient procedure done called a uretoroscopy to blast kidney stones. The procedure itself went perfectly well bar any complications; however, it was during the recovery that all went horrific.

As I woke up, my world started shaking and the recovery wing became a frenzy of chaos. I thought I was experiencing an earthquake but I was wrong. I had gone into a seizure. There was yelling but this time it wasn’t just me. It was the doctors surrounding me as they tried to get both my flailing and my erratic heartbeat under control. It was complete and utter chaos, and it only became worse when the tsunami of pain made its lurking presence known. The screaming became louder, the doctors’ faces became fiercer as they worked and right when I thought there would be the climax of the heart monitor flat lining like there usually is in the show “House”, there was silence. Everything became hazy as I slipped into drug induced bliss. The pain was gone, the screaming stopped, and my world turned black.

The next time I woke up, the world came tumbling back and with it came the pain-- and my dinner from the night before. I slipped in and out of consciousness twelve times within five hours. My mother and father were there with me and, while I never told them and plan never to, I heard their conversation that occurred after what I think was the eighth time I came to. They were saying they felt so helpless because of what I was going through. That is when I woke up again and the process continued. I don’t even know if that conversation really happened or if it was a hallucination.

What was supposed to be an outpatient procedure, turned into a nightmare of staying overnight in the hospital. It turns out that I was having an adverse reaction to the nitrous oxide which was used to put me to sleep for the procedure. I did get a post-op infection that left me septic but that was quickly mended by being put into a clean room and having IV fluids put into me; anyone who wanted to be near me had to be “scrubbed in”. I was finally able to leave and when I did, I left with a new perspective on life. Through my experience, I realized how good I really have it. There are people who fight for their lives daily and some fail while others just become worse. I now have a new respect for the word pain and for the life I have. Now, I live life to its fullest and do things I wouldn’t have before. I don’t know when it will be my time to go but when I do, I want to leave with no regrets.