2002-11-01 - 12:38 p.m.

I remember waking up in the recovery room with an immediate sense of disappointment that the pre-med had worn off (I guess it HAD been two hours) and being barked at to �breath deeply�, which seemed like a lot of unnecessary effort, so I drifted back to sleep. Apparently I had a relatively animated discussion with the porter who wheeled me back to the ward, along the lines of me shouting out �How big is the scar?� and him being reticent to tell me and getting tired of my repeated pleading, though since it was swathed in about 40 square metres of gauze dressing, and he had no way of seeing it, you can understand his eventual testiness.

I spent the afternoon nonchalantly slipping in and out of consciousness, only being woken at one point by the jester surgeon asking me to blow him a kiss. I thought perhaps I was delirious, but it was his way of checking that I (by which I mean �he�) had avoided that whole lower facial paralysis scenario. Thankfully we�d swerved it, though I did have that post-dental lip thing where it feels like a small but unmanoeuvrable dinghy and made even drinking tea a comically dribbly exercise. Cursory damage assessment reveals a lower jaw that feels like it�s had a picture hook drilled into it and a tube coming out of my neck whose sole purpose is to slowly vacuum out any spare blood, and anything else that feels like being vacuumed out of my insides, into a jar, which I had to carry around with me for two days in a not very dignified manner.

The next two days are spent in stasis, my only distraction apart from the wonderful (the star-shaped pair of pixgrrl, who also kindly transcribed my last entry, and littlefunny) people who visited me, being the ongoing flatulence battle of my coffin-dodging co-patients, rampant throughout the day as they jousted to have the most disgusting medical procedures performed on them (�I�ll see your bedside bowel movement and raise you a catheter replacement!�). At night, the noises would be emitted over the ether like the last gassy emission of a slowly-petrifying mollusc welling up over several decades through a stinking prehistoric tar pit. The man next to me would swear himself to sleep.

Weirdly, all the doctors appeared to be blonde thirty year old females, and so morning rounds were like a medically-themed covershoot for FHM or something. I was never paid much attention � they either though I looked REALLY good for seventy years old, or seemed perfectly OK knocking back my decidedly substandard painkillers (once you�ve have morphine derivatives, can you ever truly go back?). The rest of my stay was, in any case, uneventful, apart from the extraction of my blood-letting fashion accessory (all the rage next season, I�ll wager), which felt like they were slowly unwinding the arteries around my throat (you have to be awake for it) and left a slightly larger than pinhole gap in my neck. Which was nice.

Now I�m home with unsightly stitches and nothing to do. I feel worn out considering I�ve just laid on my back for three days. I miss my gland. I keep having thoughts that maybe we should try again. I can change. We can both change. But maybe it�s just too late.