Invasive Procedure
"I had never come so close to dying before. I had never witnessed someone die before."
I could have been dust in an urn.
4:15 am, April 2017. The Daedalian interchange of the 10 and 110 in downtown Los Angeles was empty and dead quiet, devoid of the standard road-rage-infected yoga moms and aspiring actors that typically jammed LA’s freeways. Alison cruised along the barren six lanes as I slouched beside her in the passenger’s seat. Two 21-year-old college students facing the open early-morning road, clad in gray sweats and even grayer demeanors. I felt high and loopy from the lack of sleep and lack of food and water over the last twelve hours. I was ready for this to be over.
Alison was doing me a favor: In three hours, my insensate body would be hoisted onto a sterile table in an equally sterile room, where a roomful of medical students would watch as a white-gloved surgeon cranked open my anus and sliced a pre-cancerous wart off my rectal walls. All in the name of saving my life, or whatever. If all went according to plan, the procedure would take no longer than twenty minutes and I’d be discharged from the hospital and sent on my merry way. I couldn’t leave the hospital alone, so Alison agreed to drive me to and fro in exchange for a sushi dinner and a loving dose of schadenfreude. Isn’t that what friends are for?
“Can’t wait to tell my grandkids about this one,” I said.
“Yeah, I’m sure they’ll be stoked to hear all about it.”
I’d only been under the knife once before, three years earlier, to get my impacted wisdom teeth removed back home in Chicago. I’d possessed an intense phobia of anesthesia awareness, the experience of either waking up during surgery or undergoing a sort of sentient paralysis in which the patient physically feels the procedure but cannot move, ever since I’d seen the trailer for a terrible Hayden Christiansen movie about the phenomenon a decade prior. I expressed these fears to my doctor (“And the pain is so great it sends Hayden into a clairvoyant state where he realizes it’s all a ploy by his girlfriend to collect the insurance money!”) while a nurse inserted the IV. He looked at me puzzled. “I assure you that won’t happen,” he said. It didn’t. I left the clinic a few hours later with a newfound sense of trust in the medical community and four fewer bones in my skull.
Still, I was nervous about this morning’s procedure. I called my anal wart Napolean because he was small and mean and had a nasty habit of invading places he shouldn’t. My USC student health center doctor had caught Napolean early on after a routine visit, but after nearly six months of doing his darndest to nip it off my anal cavity with some sort of Batman-villain freeze-ray technology, he finally threw in the towel.
“You need surgery,” he said. “And a biopsy.”
“Will it be an invasive procedure?” I asked. At that moment, I was pantsless, full Winnie-the-Pooh style, crouched on my hands and knees on an exam table while he was dabbing an ointment that I could only compare to magma into my protracted asshole. He snapped off his gloves.
“What do you think?”
USC’s hospital booked me for an 8:00 am surgery, the first of the day. On the freeway, the sun was still hours away from poking its head over the horizon. We didn’t listen to music. It was just me, Alison, and Siri, and even she seemed exhausted relaying the directions.
As Alison changed lanes, I noticed a silver Porsche far in the sideview mirror careening down the freeway, one of only a handful of cars on the road. Its headlights were out, which was odd, and it was quickly getting larger and larger in the mirror. It swerved in between lanes. It must have been going 140 miles per hour. “Alison—” I squeaked out. She had already spotted him. Her eyes were glued to the rearview mirror, palms squeezed around the steering wheel. Before either of us could get another word out, the car shot past us, then hydroplaned across four lanes, missing us by inches as Alison hit the brakes and my world spun. My chest thrust into my seatbelt, my nostrils filled with scorched rubber. The Porsche flew into an exit lane, and then, without slowing down at all, plunged headfirst into the back of a semi-truck. I’d never seen something as large as a motor vehicle crumple like a paper ball in less than a second. Metal and glass burst across the concrete, as the nine-foot car was reduced to half its length—a carrot transformed into a stubby baby carrot. Alison regained control. I hyperventilated. “Shut up, shut up, shut up!” she yelled at me. Panic flooded every cell of my body. I had never come so close to dying before. I had never witnessed someone die before.
We continued down the 10. The wreck grew smaller in the mirror until it disappeared completely out of view. I managed to regain my composure gradually. I wondered if we should call the police, but figured someone else must have already been on the case. Perhaps someone not scheduled to check in for his surgery in fifteen minutes. Alison stared ahead. Finally, I broke the silence.
“Well, that was a good omen,” I said.
Alison cracked. She mentioned that at least now we could see Thestrals, the mythical beasts that only characters in the Harry Potter universe who’d witnessed someone die could behold. I laughed at that, though it tasted bitter. I tried not to picture the mangled corpse of the intoxicated Porsche driver, tried not to envision the crew that would be responsible for prying the door off the shriveled car and scraping the pulpy formerly human body off the twisted metal walls. I tried not to think about the family he must have left behind. I tried not to think about what it must feel like to, in an instant, lose the sensation of air on your skin, breath in your lungs, the gleaming colors and sounds of the world all around you as the blackness of death engulfs you, and then there is nothing.
When we pulled into the USC hospital lot, Alison and I sat still in the car for a moment.
“Thanks for driving,” I said.
“Had a blast.”
A few hours later, I sat upright in my gown and answered questions about my medical history. Alison stood by my side drinking coffee. One nurse inexplicably asked if she was my mother, to which she said, “Um, no.” (To be fair, many mothers of teenagers in Los Angeles pay a lot of money to look as old as their sons.) We were told it was time for her to leave, so she casually bid me adieu, and as she left the thought finally arrived in my mind that it wasn’t just me that had nearly died that morning. What if we’d left my apartment a second earlier, or she accelerated a touch faster? We would’ve been directly in that Porsche’s path. Napoleon and I were the only reason she was there in the first place. I wondered how I would’ve responded had I been driving. Not well, probably. I didn’t respond to things well.
My anesthesiologist asked if I was okay. My heart rate was spiking. “Just a smidge nervous,” I said. Super casual. I didn’t bring up what had happened earlier that morning. I didn’t bring up my paralyzing fear of learning that what I hoped was merely an innocuous wart/warmonger was in fact a cancer that would soon spread throughout my bloodstream. I didn’t bring up Hayden Christensen.
My anesthesiologist nodded and injected a clear liquid into my IV bag. “Something to take the edge off,” he said. He wasn’t wrong. I suddenly felt like I’d just had three tequila shots. I smiled dopily and thanked him as I was wheeled into the operating room. Two nurses helped me maneuver myself onto the operating table. I waved to the group of maybe a dozen medical students, who stood in a row ready to observe me get opened up like a Thanksgiving turkey. My surgeon entered the room and asked how I was doing. I gave him a thumbs up.
“You ready to go lights out?” he said.
The phrasing confused me, so I shook my head. It must have been funny because he and a few of the students laughed. I hadn’t meant to be funny. I wasn’t ready. But then again, none of us are.
“It’ll be over before you know it,” he said. He laid my head down and I was turned over onto my side. I let it happen. “Now, Michael, I’d like you to count down from one hundred.”
I started counting. 100, 99, 98…. I can’t remember where I stopped. The blackness simply took over.