Waking up from anesthesia is not, apparently, the time to wax philosophical.
... or is it?
I should warn you that this post reveals at least one fact about me that (a) most people do not know, and (b) might alter some folks' opinions of me. If you know me and prefer to think of me exactly the way you know me at this very moment in time, please read no further.
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I had to have a tooth extracted on Monday. It had been a problem for far too long, was party to a lingering infection, and was even the subject of a root canal a year or so ago. We don't know why, but the infection never fully went away. A recent flare-up moved the recommended treatment options to the extraction column. oh yay.
That extraction was Monday and, as it was the first tooth I ever had to have pulled, to say I was nervous about it would be an understatement. The part of this story that prompted a post here, though, is my experience after it was all over, coming off the anesthesia.
Everything that happened between waking up in the chair and sitting down in the passenger seat of my wife's car is pretty much a blur to me. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, she had to wait outside in the car. The dental assistant (nurse? -- I'm assuming she assisted with oral surgery) was the only person I remember talking to me, helping me ease out of the chair, and walking me out of the office by holding my arm. The dentist and anesthesiologist had hightailed it outta there by that time. My mask had already magically reappeared on my face before any of that. I have only the vaguest of memories talking to the assistant on the way out but, like trying to remember the details of a dream the next morning, I had no recollection of what was discussed by the time my brain was fully functional.
Much later in the day, when I started to think about the 30 minute drive back home, I realized that I could only remember bits and pieces of it. I decided to ask my wife about some of the details of that drive and our conversation, and relaying the story had us both cracking up.
Apparently, one of the first things that I said to my dear wife when I got in the car was,
"I'm pretty sure I told that nurse that I used to do a lot of drugs, and that those drugs were more fun than this."
I am left to simply imagine how the nurse reacted to this revelation. Although, if she's been assisting in dental surgeries for a while now, I'm sure she's heard some pretty doozy shit from the mouths of people coming off anesthesia.
The drug talk didn't end there, though. I recall making all these observations (a word that will gain relevance in a moment) about traffic. There seemed to be twice as many cars, twice as many lanes, and twice as many traffic lights as there were on the way TO the appointment just couple hours before! I must have realized that I was essentially seeing double because I started describing all these phenomena to my poor wife in at least partially excited detail... Excited that I was seeing it but also somehow excited that I knew it wasn't real.
All this got me started talking more about the drugs of my youth. I said,
"Acid always made me feel like my observations and intellectual acuity were enhanced, but this drug makes me feel stupid. This is a stupid drug."
We both got a chuckle out of this for two reasons. (1) Here I am lamenting the lack of "observations" when it seemed ALL I WAS DOING was making observations the whole way home. (2) I called it a "stupid drug" but still somehow managed to put together a cogent and grammatically correct sentence using words like "intellectual acuity" while coming down from it.
This led to a discussion (albeit VERY one-sided) about why some people seemed to be prone to bad acid trips while others (like me) felt every trip was a wildly entertaining adventure. To quote my wife at the end of the stories she was regaling,
"There was a lot of talking."
I fully acknowledge that there are psychological and/or neurological reasons why someone might have a bad acid trip. Without knowing much of the science behind it, I suspect that people who are already anxious, stressed, or generally harboring dark thoughts tend to have bad acid trips. However, that bit I wrote above about being excited about my visions on the way home because I knew they weren't real sent me off on a diatribe about how this also related to acid trips. My feeling is that many people who had bad trips must have felt that what they were experiencing was real – and that has every potential to make it scary. I've always been thankful that, as psychedelic as things ever got for me, I always held on to at least some sense that what I was experiencing wasn’t real.
All this from anesthesia! To wax philosophical or not?
