Yay for drugs.

Drugs are good. The prescribed kind. I have too much of a guilty conscience to enjoy doing drugs that I wasn't told to do. I am in a fair amount of pain at the moment from my knee surgery, but...I don't care! I don't care to the point where I have no idea how I got through my last three years of college doped up on Oxycontin.

Drugs are my favorite part of surgery. There's really not much about surgery that would qualify as "favorite," so it's kind of like an 87 year old man winning his age group in a five-kilometer road race. (You should see how annoyed my Grandpa gets when he doesn't win his age group. "Shannon? What kind of a name is "Shannon"? Do you know any old people with that name? No. I bet the person said they were older than they really were just so they could win a medal.")

But Mom raised me to see the silver lining in everything, so stay with me here.

I love the 'going to sleep' part of surgery. It's wonderful - kind of like crawling into bed, knowing that no one will expect you to get out of bed and do something silly and wasteful of your time like putting on clothes other than pajamas, for like, WEEKS. It's great. And when you wake up, sometimes you're still a little groggy, like getting to relive a dream you had starring yourself and Matt Damon.

Granted, there are exceptions to that. After my knee replacement surgery, I cracked my eyes open, and before I could even have a conscious thought, I was bawling in agony. I have an incredibly high pain tolerance, so I have to wonder if my doctor bothered to put any pain meds in the IV drip while I was out or not. I was such a mess that even the post op nurse came to my hospital room a couple of days later to make sure I was okay!

But after this teeny tiny knee surgery I just had, I was in no pain for about 24 hours. I was chit chattering away with the post op nurse - "so, how long have you been working here? Do you enjoy it?" etc. And then, for the first time in my 25 or so times of going under anesthesia, I had a reaction to the drugs. I interrupted myself and said, "I'm getting really REALLY cold..." and I proceeded to shiver and convulse for about 3 hours. The nurse put warm blanket after warm blanket on top of me, and wrapped one around my head.

"This is GREAT!" I said to her. "Now I can go to Iran and not be arrested."

I harbor no illusions that this knee surgery "did the trick", as my doctor thinks it did. I'll give it a few months, but I'm turning into a bit of a pessimist where my body is concerned. I'll never be "done", or "fixed" to where I'm not in some kind of pain. But, as long as there's enough Oxycontin to go around, I have no idea what I'm complaining about.