In the grip of morphia

I wouldn't recommend hip replacement surgery as a rule, unless you are 65 and walking around with a barbecue fork for a hip bone. I had the left hip done in January, 2006, and I felt 30 years younger. Now I am five weeks into recovery after having the right one done, and Karen says to me, "You look so much younger." If I felt 30 years younger after the left one, and I feel 30 years younger after the right one, then it will mean essentially that Karen is married to a five-year-old guy. Wait til I reach puberty . . . .

Recuperation is lengthy and not what you would call fun, but when you have watched two weeks' worth of "Ice Road Trucker" episodes in the middle of the night, time loses its meaning. Right now, I can't believe almost six weeks have passed. From both surgeries, I have only one bad recollection, and I only pass it on so maybe you can avoid it, if it should become your turn.

My problem was drugs. Hip replacement surgery involves the kinds of tools and techniques you would normally associate with house framing. After it is over and you are back in your room, I can honestly say you are going to feel a little bit sawed, reamed and hammered. You are going to want something to take the edge off this feeling. Since they wouldn't give me martinis, I had to settle for morphine and some other double-barreled narcotic-gauge drugs. The first time, in 2006, as a hip surgery rookie, I was not too discerning about drugs. There was such a thing as "morphine on demand." To get a dose of morphine at any time, like during the middle of the night, I only had to press a button plugged into tubing circuits that connected me to hanging bags of liquids via a needle in my forearm.

I willingly partook of this fix until sometime during the second night of my three-night hospital stay I was visited by a monster. He arrived in my sleep, and startled me awake, and commenced to terrify me. He was the impression of a face in a mass of writhing veins and cords and bundled sheaths of color, all reds, oranges and yellows, oozing and aflame, and bulges in the mass where his cheeks and chin were, and black holes for the eyes and mouth, hate gushing from the eyes and evil from the mouth. I could not get him to go away. Being awake didn't matter. He wasn't going away; in my consciousness, I had to shut him out – or shut him in – and finally I did.

I found out they call it a "morphine dream." But it was no dream. I had the very bad feeling that he was something primeval inside of me, and the morphine let him out. I had one more night to stay in the hospital, but I did not want to sleep in that bed again. I did, but that was it for me and morphine. I stayed away from it, and he stayed away from me.

With the right hip, I had only one request: no morphine. They marked me down as allergic to morphine. After surgery, they fed me other narcotics, and I had another experience that was a dream but not a dream, about a party at my house, vivid with color and brilliance, and the space expanding as the party grew, from 10 people to 2,000. No monsters, but there was something horrifying about the vision. A dream is like a story, but this vision was static. If was as if my life experience was stripped away from my senses – sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste – so I could look at them in their original state, without any learning or information in the way. The people were in their original state, too, untouched by experience. They all agreed about everything. When I woke up, I told the first nurse I saw that I didn't want any more narcotics.

I thought I was pretty cool, having the insight to realize it wasn't a dream, but a vision, through which I could see what the world looked like through original, untainted, senses. I was bragging to my daughter, Jessie, about this depth of mine when she exposed me. As I was talking, she started giggling, then laughing. "Dad," she said, "why do you think people like drugs so much?"

Like I say, people on narcotics see strange stuff. I only bring it up to let you know. Given the choice, I am sure that I would rather feel like a house being framed. I promise you, that is a feeling that will go away.