SURGERY STORYTIME ✍️

[ranierean]

I spent most of my 2026 just… booking …or trying to book I should say, it's all incredibly draining. It doesn’t stop on the table, of course, and I didn't even have the stamina for basic blood tests. Mine were junk 3 consecutive times but I came up with something plausible on the spot about self-medication messing it all up and retook them until they weren't “concerning.” It did scare me at first but it's not like I know what to do? They're just fake numbers on a fake sheet and that's it. Quick fucking trivia question, what do you think "NRBC %" is and what’s it even for in plain terms? …something I have to and can reroll. Might as well be arbitrary.

...the desk girl was super friendly on the phone, funnily enough, I'd even say "playful." Face to face on the day of surgery? Nothing of sort, it was a different person. Maybe it actually was? I don't know, my voice is ridiculous, Muppet x Sesame Street crossover, but my visage has a compounding effect I figure. I skim through the consent forms that took aaaaages for her to print out, just to busy myself and to look somewhat serious. They're not in English but I can parse it just enough to say that that's not how you conjugate verbs? There were spaces before stops on almost every page (not French) and here I am thinking, aren't we all supposed to have impeccable grammar in the age of LLMs? That or indians have infinite-monkey'd their way to negative-positive parallelisms completely on their own. Ha. Ha.

I'm not dropping "$12 to 16k" but maybe I should've. I look like garbage, btw, not even accounting for the swelling, which of course does nothing to my boneless face. There's nothing to insert, nothing to lob off. The bruises drown in the sickly tones of my face. It's one big blob. I don't have a habit of taking pictures of myself, much less of actually keeping them, so I have 0 ways of doing any real comparisons. I could ask the people that I knew if I'm in some group shots maybe? Pull pics from university systems? My dentist? Orthodontist? When you're ugly as me any step is a sidegrade. There's no way for a face like mine to "come together." Most surgeons so far have told me straight up that nothing about me is actually workable. If a medical professional says, "welp, there's more to life," then where are you supposed to go exactly? I get used to the face in the mirror being revolting in one manner and get shocked when that hideousness seeps... someplace else. I'm retraumatized by being retraumatized.

They usher me to pre-op and give me this weird gown that's more like a rag. Well, it's a bit mean, but it's also just what it was. The room had surprisingly high ceilings, but I could only describe it as "the second cheapest Airbnb in town." I expected something sterile and maybe it was so, but it just didn't feel that way. A tiny old TV with a glossy black frame mounted over a slim desk that's more like a console, grey everything ...and a wall mirror that's too thin to be a wall mirror. A rare opportunity to see myself complete. I have no idea what my posture is like most of the time. My legs, torso, hands, head all swivel independently. It all looks like a rig from a video game that does first-person and third-person POVs simultaneously... and poorly.

In that moment it hit me: I'm going straight to hell. Not in the usual weepy key where you ask yourself if you're a "good person" or not and imagine a balanced ledger of your deeds, no, it's more like a technicality. A cold hard bureaucratic "No" that you would have to appeal through the same body that told you "No." It’s “fair” in the cosmic sense but “unfair” when it's laid down in the tongue of your personal grievances.
My life is terrible, I guess, completely unenviable. I can't one up anybody. No tranq zombie is going to look at me as something more than a walking wallet, provided they even "see" me. I don't track these horrible rooms anymore. They're just there to help me pick up these trains of thought. There's no one to blame. I'm not going to be like those middle-aged people with this rapid onset jolt in them to "contribute," "be deep," "seek fulfillment." It just... wouldn't be me.
There's a bit in Corinthians about self-mutilation that makes boring sense in the context of the pagan beliefs at that time, yes, but today's ills are more like... everyone acting like 12stepchemopatientrapesurvivors. The dumbest guy you know, I'll bet everything, if you press him hard enough, he'll be emotionally incontinent like the rest of them. The language of "trauma" is wholly redundant because even if you don't "overthink it," you still end up with something soyed like, "gotta eat clean" and "get enough sleep," "it is what it is." The long sighs and pregnant pauses. America of Thomas Crookses and Tyler Robbinsons.

When I was done, I didn't have it in me to get a cab. Why would you enter some random african man’s Toyota Camry anyway? Voluntarily? AND PAY FOR IT? The accumulated pain made it feel easier to just stumble into a bus, by muscle memory perhaps. If you can’t do urban navigation automated when high then you’re ngmi ...of course, this fucker gets stuck in traffic and crawls to standstill in a way that beams the setting sun through windows directly at me. There's no AC. To my left, an elderly woman swipes through the dialer on her Android phone by moving all of her hand from elbow up just to fail to get any swipe or touch registered OVER AND OVER AGAIN right up until somebody on the other end calls her back first. To my right, a girl, 13 yoa max, is glued to TikTok and is gulping down a candy bar with what feels like everything her mouth can muster. She's more interested in hogging up the wrapper itself as opposed to the actual thing. Before me, a little girl, I'd say 7, dances erratically with her arms up to the complete indifference of her mother. No one looks my way as I feel the stitches contracting. My face bleeds. Red tears. The sun is paradoxically only getting hotter.