“It’s showtime!” the doctor yelled to the nurses. He walked out of the fluorescently lit room dressed in his water colored scrubs. That’s the last thing I remember before getting knocked out and physically altered. Moments before being unconscious, I had been furiously sucking on some sublingual tranquilizer pill while pacing this room that seemed especially small with all the medical equipment in it. “Have a seat” a nurse told me and pointed to a chair. I sat. She turned to review some paperwork. I got up again. “You can have a seat” she told me again. But I couldn’t keep still. When would the tranquilizer kick in?
The nurse made some small talk with me. She asked me where I was from and what I did for a living. I told her I was a stripper. “It’s better than going to college, isn’t it?” she asked me in her Southern accent. She was wearing blue eyeshadow, and had a big cotton- candy mass of blond hair piled on her head. I told her I went to college but was now a stripper. “It’s better money, though, isn’t it?” I didn’t disagree. “And it’ll be more money with your new boobies!”
The tranquilizer was not working.
The doctor came in and at this point we were both wearing that blue shower cap-looking thing. “We’re going to give you some margaritas and you’ll be just fine,” he joked as he hooked me up to an IV and I went under before the tranquilizer ever set in.
In what seemed like the next moment, I woke up in a 21-year-old boy’s room full of high school sport trophies and prom pictures. He has two fantastically loving parents who let me stay in his room while he was on a road trip. I met these people hours before surgery because I was renting a room from them. It was a random, Craigslist find, and it worked out nicely. It was strange, I suppose, lying in that boy’s waterbed and looking around in my post-operative haze. He clearly had a better childhood than I did, I thought, as I felt the dull pain of my new wounds. His mother left his room just as it had been in high school, like a shrine to him. It was painted in his football team’s colors and cluttered with mementos of happy memories. Framed pictures of him overflowed into the hallway and hung next to several crucifixes. The family seemed particularly conservative, which concerned me a bit, considering the nature of the procedure I just underwent. They were nothing but exceptionally kind to me.
I’m back in Vegas now. I am swollen like a mutant-freak sex doll, but extremely pleased with the results. It is so strange to wake up with a different body and it is especially strange to suddenly be partially synthetic. You’re literally fake now.
The pain is quite intense, to say the least. The bottoms of my breasts are blossoming with purple and yellow bruises. I think tubes were forced down my throat while I was under, because I feel like I got kicked in the neck. I stopped taking the painkillers almost as soon as I got home. There is something about physical pain that is a thrill in itself. That is an entire other story, I suppose. Let’s say I really prefer pain over the opiate drugs. I don’t like the feeling of painkillers. I feel weird on them and I just want to feel “normal” again. Having waves of pain followed by an endorphin rush, like a runner’s high, isn’t exactly “normal” but I prefer it. Anyway, for the next few weeks, I’ll take a seat, like the nurse suggested, and let all my wounds heal.
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