I woke to the sound of beeping and whirring machines. Faint pink light stole around the blinds spanning the huge window that looked out over a horseshoe-shaped courtyard, its terraced vegetation manicured to appear natural and wild. I felt the inflatable wraps on my legs fill with air and press my calves, as they had every few minutes during the night.
    I’d woken each time, a bit disoriented by the “good stuff” still feeding into my veins from the IV pole next to my bed, and looked around the room, as I was now, trying to get my bearings. The night nurse’s name on the whiteboard. The remote on the mattress next to my right hand. The bathroom door just far enough away to remind me of my post-op weakness.
    It felt like there was a weight on my chest. Inside it. Around it. The zip-up garment keeping everything—whatever was left—in place felt both stabilizing and stifling. I pulled the blanket back a little and looked down, taking in the two drains extending from each side of my ribcage and the unfamiliar flatness. Every glance since I’d woken from surgery had been preceded by fear and followed by a strange sense of relief and lostness. Relief that it was over. That my showertime grieving was done and the operation that would alter my life—in ways I still couldn’t fully understand—was no longer something lurking in the future.
    And lostness. The destabilizing sense that I’d been changed in subtle and overwhelming ways during those five hours in the operating room. There was a deep-rooted disquiet too—the kind that hums on the edge of consciousness, whispering “You’ll find out” in a tone that is both threat and promise.
    I pushed myself up farther against the inclined mattress, winced at the discomfort in my pectoral muscles, and opted for an ungraceful scoot instead. My legs and glutes still functioned well, but everything above my waist felt pummeled and encased.
    I sighed. Closed my eyes. Breathed as deeply as I could without pain.
    “Are you sleeping or picturing yourself in a bikini on a Hawaiian beach?”
    A head of teased-high, pink-tipped gray hair poked around my hospital room’s door.
    “If it’s the latter . . . honey, dream away. I’ll come back some other time.” Darlene’s stage whisper held a smile—the kind that borders on outright laughter. It wasn’t just a tone of voice for her. It was the way she lived her life.
    She made a production of quietly closing the door and tiptoed toward the bed. “Don’t tell the nurses I snuck in!”
    I glanced at the digital clock mounted on the wall next to the TV. “What are you doing out and about before seven a.m.?”
    “Got my Zumba in a bit, but wanted to see how you fared overnight first. Besides,” she added, waving away her rule breaking with a slim hand, “the nurses know me. They wouldn’t kick out the human equivalent of a therapy dog.”

Taken from Fragments of Light by Michéle Phoenix
Copyright © 2020 by Michéle Phoenix
Used by permission of http://www.thomasnelson.com/