Lenora Hadn't been Conscious of Being...

Thousand+ Words a Day for Dec 8, 2025

Lenora cracked her dry eyes and tried to think clearly. She was awake—she’d been awake for some time, able to discern the sounds of the monitors over her head somewhere, able to understand the nurses when they came in and clunked around. There were a couple of them who had been in and out of the room during her slow climb out of the stupor of anesthesia. One, an older woman with a sharp, but somehow soothing voice, called her sweetie. “Sweetie, can you hear me?” she said on one of her visits to the room.

Yes, I can hear you, Lenora thought, but she could not respond.

On the next visit, the nurse said, “Sweetie, the operation is over and you’re in the recovery room, can you hear me?”

Over? But we just got started.

On another, she dug Lenora’s hand out from the edge of the blanket under which she was shivering and grasped it. “Sweetie, are you having pain? Squeeze my hand if you have pain.” At that point in the confusing recovery, Lenora had felt nothing, and her hand lay limply in the nurse’s strong one.

Then there was a different voice, much younger, and coming from some other place above her head. “She’s not even awake yet.”

The nurse released Lenora’s hand and deftly tucked it back under the covers. “Oh, yes, she can. She just won’t remember, that’s all.”

That seemed to be hours ago; now, as Lenora was regaining her sense of time and place, she was having pain, and it was getting worse by the moment. She snaked a dry tongue out of a dry mouth and tried to lick her dry lips, but that proved impossible, and so she gave up on that and continued to try to pry her eyelids apart. She was alone in the room now, and over the course of a few moments, she suddenly became aware, first, that she was thinking much more clearly, and second, that she had to urinate. Badly. Her eyelids came apart, the world swam into focus, and she turned her head to see the nurse, the one who had squeezed her hand, standing over her manipulating a monitor. She moaned, and the nurse looked down. “Well, look who’s awake,” she said to the other nurse. Then, to Lenora: “The surgery’s over, sweetie. Do you have pain?”

Lenora took a big breath and formed words as she exhaled. “I have to….” Then another breath. “…pee.”

“You’ve got a catheter in you,” the nurse said. “Go ahead and pee if you need to.”

In more normal circumstances, Lenora would refuse to urinate while lying in bed, no matter who said so. But the uniqueness of the circumstances she found herself in combined with the pressure in her bladder removed this inhibition, and in a moment, the nurse heard the characteristic noise—it really was a tinkle—of the fluid moving through the tube and collecting in the bladder bag that hung on a rack on the side of the bed. “Very good. Are you having any pain?”

Lenora took another breath. “Yes….”

The nurse fished around on the side of the bed for a little box on the end of a thick cable, and then she retrieved Lenora’s hand again from under the covers. She put the box in Lenora’s hand. “Here, hold this,” she said. She manipulated Lenora’s fingers on the box. “Feel that button? If you’ve got pain, you press that button. That will put some medicine in your IV. Can you press it?”

Lenora pressed the button.

“Very good,” the nurse said.

A few moments passed and the pain she felt in her abdomen did diminish somewhat, and as it did, that problem faded and a new problem took its place. She turned her head the other way and took another breath. “Water….”

The nurse on that side was young, blonde hair in a ponytail, and she had a white napkin in her hand. She plucked something out of the napkin and moved it to Lenora’s mouth, rubbing it over her lips first. Ice. As Lenora’s lips puckered to take it, the nurse released it, and it slid into her mouth. She heard the other nurse’s voice say “All right, I’m going to go see if the kidney is waking up yet,” and then the door to the room opened and closed.

The small piece of ice had vastly improved Lenora’s ability to speak. “The surgery’s over?” she asked.

“Yep,” the young nurse said. “You got through it just fine, your vitals are good. Can you drink some water?”

“Yes, please.”

The nurse turned around and then brought up a paper cup with a straw in it. As the other nurse had done, this one dug one of Lenora’s hands out of the covers and folded her fingers over the cup, then brought it up to Lenora’s chest, high enough so that the straw would reach her mouth. “Can you hold that okay?"

She could, but she didn’t answer. She was too busy trying to reach the straw with her mouth. Finally she did, and she sucked the cool water into her mouth and swallowed. “Ahh, that’s good,” she said, and then she emptied the cup.

“The doctor will be in to check on you in a while,” the nurse said. A clipboard had materialized in her hands—or maybe it had been there all the time—and she flipped some papers up and down.

“What time is it?” Lenora asked.

The nurse looked at her watch. “It’s ten twenty. Are you hungry?”

Lenora hadn’t been conscious of being hungry, but then she hadn’t been conscious of anything since about six o’clock that morning—and she hadn’t eaten since the previous midnight. “Yeah, I think so.”

“They’ll be up with a tray for you around 11, will that be okay?”

“Yeah.”

The nurse took the empty cup out of her hands. “You want a warm blanket?”

It was cold in the recovery room, and while she was under a sheet and some sort of thin, open-weave blanket, it wasn’t doing the job. “Yeah, that would be great.”

The nurse rose and opened the cabinet behind her. Inside was an insulated pouch with a heating element in it. She opened it and pulled out a folded blanket which had been simmering in the pouch at 122 degrees. She unfolded the blanket and draped it over Lenora, from neck to feet, and Lenora realized that the blanket the nurse had referred to was not just metaphorically warm, but was actually heated. The heat spread like liquid across, over, and into her cold flesh. “Ahh,” she said. “That’s wonderful.”

“Okay, I’m going to leave you now, but if you have pain, you just press that button. You’ve got the button?”

“Yes, I’ve got the button,” Lenora repeated.

“Okay.” The nurse walked around the bed and then Lenora heard the door open and close.