I woke up the next morning to something different, cold baby wipes all over my body. The nurses were doing their best to “bathe” me before surgery. In America, this probably would’ve gone a lot differently, but I was in Macedonia after all. They didn’t poke and pry at me this morning--they knew I was about to have my back cracked open and part of my spine ripped out. I was anxious, but at the same time, I was so ready to get this over with.

 

My mom acted unsurprisingly very nervous, she was trying to keep it together for me, but she was right to be scared. She held my hand as the doctor came in and she questioned whether he had gotten enough sleep the night before. He assured us that he did and again that “Nikol will be perfect.” Perfect. The next nurses that came in were from the surgical floor, so I had never seen them before. They seemed to be just as cold as the nurses on my floor (aside from Darko), as they said nothing, rolling me out of the room on my bed. My parents were allowed to take me to elevator, but after that, they had to kiss me goodbye as I was pulled away into the abyss. Okay, that might be dramatic, but it did really feel like I was being swirled around in some dark dream. We stopped on the surgical floor, and they quickly rolled me out. Everything was cold, that’s the only thing I can remember feeling. It was a stark contrast to what I would’ve been feeling if I were outside, it was supposed to be around 100 degrees again that day.

 

They pushed me into my operation room, and that’s when my stomach first dropped. As I looked around, surrounded by a bubble of metal, I was freaked out by all the unfamiliar yet seemingly important tools. The anesthesiologist must’ve caught onto my panic, because she grabbed my hand quietly and just nodded her head, as if she was trying to tell me I was going to be fine. She asked me some questions, I don’t remember them now, but her English wasn’t great either so it was hard to want to answer her.

 

Just like the rest of them, she didn’t tell me what she was doing as she was doing it, so she slid a mask over my face, hand still on top of mine, and said “Ok, have nice dream Nikol.”

 

*****

 

I blinked my eyes open suddenly, but this time, instead of the clouds being above me, they were surrounding me and I was mesmerized before the shocking pain overcame my body. I was no longer laying flat, and I was also wondering why. I was tilted up on the bed now, tubes circling my arms, IVs in both hands.

 

Instead of being choked by my own carbon dioxide, I was being choked by the breathing tube they had shoved down my throat, an overwhelming amount of oxygen being pumped inside me. It took me a second to realize that it was actually making it harder for me to breathe, and I started gagging and coughing for what felt as long as the past 2 days before the ICU nurses even noticed me. I wondered how long I had been knocked out, I had absolutely zero sense of the time or even where I was. They ripped the tube out of my mouth as I gagged intensely, in full anticipation of letting the nothingness inside my stomach come out. Predictably, nothing came out, but I heaved and heaved until they had to hold my shoulders down because I was moving too much. They brought me a bowl just in case, but told me over and over “nothing to happen Nikol!”

 

I must’ve fell asleep again soon after because I woke up to an unfamiliar face stroking my cheek to wake me up. I surely didn’t hide the surprise on my face at this woman as she touched me gently, like a family member would. I sort of recognized her dark hair and her smile from somewhere---and then I realized she was my step-grandma’s cousin. I understood that she had been a huge proponent of getting the doctor (I later found out the reason I had the best spinal surgeon in the Balkan region was because she brought him a bottle of whiskey to his summer home essentially as a bribe to get him to drive three hours to help me). Yes, that is as weird as it sounds but if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that nothing happening in Macedonia shocks me anymore.

 

I vaguely remember her putting a cell phone to my ear, not saying anything, just holding it to my ear. I heard my Dedo’s (grandpa’s) voice on the other end. That was probably the first time I had heard a sense of urgency, a sense of panic in his voice. “Angel, angel, are you okay, how do you feel?” I told him that I felt fine, I was fine. I really pulled that out of my butt though, I didn’t even know how surgery went. I just knew I wanted to go back to sleep, I could barely keep my eyelids open.

 

In between drips of morphine, I drifted into some weird sleep. I don’t remember the them now, but that was the start of some really bizarre and dark dreams brought to you by hard drugs in a foreign country.

 

The next thing I remember is opening my eyes to confusingly looking at my dad. He was smiling, so really what more could I ask for. I knew I wasn’t dead at least, and had already given myself a mobility test by wiggling my feet and toes. I remember asking him if I was okay and if everything went well, and what the hell time was it because it felt like I aged 40 years in that ugly room between bouts of sleep. He told me the surgeon said everything went very smoothly, and the actual surgery had only taken about two hours but I had been in the ICU for almost six.

 

I guess in that same period of time, my mom came, but I was completely knocked out so she didn’t want to try to wake me. I must’ve looked as dead as the old person who was my ICU roommate, because she was really happy when I was finally brought back to my room. I’m not sure I looked much better than I had in the ICU, but I couldn’t figure out how to uncross my eyeballs. I didn’t even know they were crossed until my mom mentioned something; those must’ve been some crazy drugs I was on.

 

I continued to refuse to eat because of how upset my stomach was, in fear that real food might turn the dry heaving into something much worse. Every time I even thought of food I would gag, and my body would rip forward, making me feel like I was being torn out of my own body.

 

I closed my eyes, thinking I was about to get some great sleep (ha), finally back in the comfort and privacy of my own room. My mom went back to try to get some sleep at my Teta's apartment, so it was my dad's turn to stay with me that night. My poor father. I woke up, or rather never really fell asleep, every fifteen minutes to a half hour that night. I was finally allowed to sleep in a position other than on my back, so he helped me pull myself to both sides, but the pain so was excruciating that I couldn’t help but shriek. I hadn’t done a lot of crying up until this point, but by the time the morning surfaced, I had cried so much that tears could no longer come out of my eyes. We asked the nurses all night to hike up my medicine, but of course, they didn’t tell us what they were doing to me, until the doctor came to check on me. They told him they had made the GREAT decision to ween me off of my meds less than 12 hours post-surgery, so instead of receiving the appropriate amount of pain medicine, I was receiving much less.

 

“Nikol, why you cry? Why you have pain?” Dr. Savevski said as he stared at my shaking body, obviously in my own personal hell. Man, this one had a way with words.

 

I’m sure it was a mixture of protective father and insane lack of sleep from hearing me scream and cry all night, but my dad exploded.

 

“You’re FUCKING kidding me right? You just put metal rods on her SPINE and they won’t do anything about it. In America, we have something called patient care!!!!!”

 

I lowered the level of my screaming at that point, hoping that that would do the trick.

 

Dr. Savevski readmitted me to the ICU almost immediately. I think my dad scared him a little, but seriously, weening me off of medicine on day one? If I had to go any longer, I would’ve had an exorcism right there in my bed.