The Hospital in Hudson, New York
Halfway through my senior year of college, just at the end of 2006, I had to have knee surgery. I felt something crack inside my knee one day as I was getting out of my friend’s car. It took three days before I could walk somewhat normally. The doctor told me a piece of bone had chipped off the inside of my knee, and that it was a chronic injury most likely exacerbated by sports. My surgery was scheduled for six thirty in the morning a few days after Christmas.
“No big deal,” the doctor said, “you’ll be walking a few days after.” So I stayed out the night before drinking with my friends.
The morning of the surgery I woke up in the darkness and drove to the hospital with my mother. We checked in and were shown to a room. I was given a gown to put on. When I was done my mother took a seat by the window and the nurse came in to ask whether I had made it into the gown okay. I nodded. She looked down and saw I was still wearing my socks.
“You have to take those off,” she said. “Is there anything else you’re still wearing?”
“I still have my boxers on.”
“You have to take those off too.”
I slid them quickly to the ground and put them in my closet while the nurse turned to my mother and said, “People always develop hearing problems when I say ‘everything off.’”
We waited again. I lay on my thin bed and looked out the window. The sky was starting to turn pink with the sunrise and Hudson was still misted over and vague, its many blemishes hidden, a thin church steeple rising above the other houses. I began to wish that I hadn’t had as much to drink the night before. I thought I should probably be more awake for the surgery. After all, it was the first time I had ever really been under the knife, except for some stitches under my chin when I was a child. The nurse came back and said it was time. She pushed my bed like a ship through the fluorescent hallways, my mother walking by my side.
As I rolled into the waiting area my mother squeezed my hand goodbye. There was a glass room to my right and I watched nurses inside setting things up quietly until the surgeons came in, separated by white coats. They were drinking coffee and making jokes, carried themselves with an ease the nurses didn’t have, as if something about coming into the operating room to find everything set up, something about all the years of school they had put in, the lives held in their hands, set them above and apart from the nurses around them.
An anesthesiologist came to my side. He began asking me questions. I told him I was studying English in college. “Come to China,” he said, “they need people like you to teach English.” From then on, whenever I saw him, he kept reminding me to go to China.
After a while he said he would give me something to take the edge off. He put a needle into my IV and a minute or two later it hit my blood and the wall in front of me suddenly began swimming behind the molding, behind the stationary electrical outlet.
In the operating room I sat under a big light. The anesthesiologist put a needle into my spine and a nurse soaped my leg. It didn’t matter somehow, that the gown had slipped up past my legs, that all of these people were strangers. It felt nice, her hands moving over my leg, the drugs tingling in my muscles. I surrendered to her hands as if I were a baby again, letting my mother rub my body with oil. This feeling of surrender lasted for the rest of the surgery and I gave myself up to the many hands of the nurses and the expertise of my surgeon.
“If you want to watch the surgery, you can just look up at this monitor, we’ll have a camera right inside your knee,” the surgeon said.
I did want to watch. I saw the camera move through what looked like a series of white tunnels that were flooded with water, the water surging and rushing by the camera.
“See it there, that’s it, that’s the chip.” I couldn’t see it. I only saw columns and walls, leaves of white algae moved aside by his tiny drill, cutting away. The inside of my knee was amazingly clean and smooth, a warm architecture completely alive.
“Got it!” the surgeon shouted, as if the chip were a fish. He held it up to me, and whistled, “size of a fingernail.”
I lay in a big waiting room and looked up at the ceiling. I was still swimming in the drugs and I felt the day growing warmer through the shatterproof glass behind me, heard cars passing by more frequently. The anesthesiologist asked how I was doing and I smiled and tried to nod. I still couldn’t really talk, just communicate with gestures. There were three nurses that moved through the beds. I recognized the one that had given me my gown. She came and asked how I was doing, and I just smiled. I was their easiest patient they all said, as they swung through to take my pulse, check on my IV. This was before the drugs began to wear off and I spent the rest of the day puking, first in my hospital room and then in my parent’s bed, made up specially for me.
The nurses knew I was still floating in the drugs, knew I couldn’t really talk. So they did all the talking for me. They told me about the expected snowstorm, their car problems, sports. One of them said I looked a little bit like her son who was fighting in Iraq.
“Second tour,” she said. “We’re expecting him back in a few months.”
I still couldn’t talk so I made a noise closest to “Oh.” The only word my mouth could make. Soon I found out all of the nurses had sons in the war, either in Iraq or Afghanistan. I tried to show them I was listening, stared up at them standing at my bedside, said, “oh,” and tried to smile. They seemed to like taking care of me, their own sons thousands of miles away, out of the reach of their mothering hands, while my mother was just through two big grey swinging doors, waiting for the nurses to wheel me back through.
Matthew Zanoni Müller was born in Bochum, Germany and grew up in Eugene, Oregon and Upstate New York. He received his BA in Creative Writing and Literature at Emerson College and has just completed his MFA, which he received from Warren Wilson College.
