Just Like a Fish

Once, when I was a child, I had to go in to have my teeth extracted.  I am not sure how they do it now, but back then they gave you a shot and then put a mask over you with that special blend of gasses that puts you into a fog and then to sleep.  At the time I fancied myself a bit of a writer (imagine that).  I can still remember with total clarity listening to the nurse and the surgeon as they talked above me in the surgery.  I swear that the doctor said, "Like a fish, just like a fish."  And then I was out.

Later I woke up with my mouth full of bloodied cotton and my head feeling like gauze.  I lost something like 8 teeth that day (all in the front of my mouth) and spent the summer sucking the corn off the cob.  What?  It still tasted good even if it took longer to enjoy.  I also wrote a fairly twisted story about a young girl who believes that the surgery that is proposed to remove a rotted tooth is really designed to implant a device into her mind.  A device that will give the doctors control over her thoughts, and perhaps worse yet, the ability to see her thoughts.  In the end she is unable to resist the surgery and the last words that she knows she hears, that she can call her own are, "Like a fish, just like a fish."

Most recently I had the great misadventure of spending 5 days in hospital.  This I can truly say was not lovely.  I can also with no hesitation note that there were absolutely no fish involved.  I did, however, experience a mind-numbing listlessness that can only be ascribed to the combination of medication and circumstance.  This state of mind brought me back to that dental surgery chair, back to the initial vision I had as a young writer of the crazed young girl, trapped in the sanitarium with no anchor and no hope.  The girl whose mind would never be her own. 

This may sound a bit crazed, and I am willing to admit it in all likelihood is, but that character from my youth drove me to defer the pain medications and to request a much less strong one to take its place.  I needed my mind back.  The mind-numbing was actually more painful than the pain - odd but true.

I guess I do not understand how people get addicted to those pain medications.  They are an abdication of the soul.  To relieve the pain in its entirety you have to be willing to relieve yourself of who you are.  I just could not take it.

I have always thought fish were such lovely creatures and admired the beauty in which they live in the wild.  But, given the metaphor I am working with, I am pretty sure that I would never choose to be just like a fish.

An otter perhaps?