Pre-Surgery Jitters

31st December, 2025

I woke up to an alarm clock that sounded like an ambulance siren.

Panicked, I checked the time, 6’o clock.

Just to be sure, I checked the hour hand and minute hand again as if I were sitting on an exam on reading clocks on my second grade. It’s human nature. Our minds always tend to obfuscate simple concepts into complex jumbles.

Like, which hand is longer? Is it the hour hand? Or is it the minute hand? What was the name of that teacher who taught us this in school?

Then again, I may have just been trying to find an excuse to use the word obfuscate and deliberately make the whole concept of time sound far more complex than it actually is, just to show off the newly attained weapon in my vocabulary’s arsenal.

The Doctor had said I needed to be ready by 7o clock for the surgery. That left me exactly one hour to wonder whether I was afraid of the surgery or simply afraid of being late for it.

I rushed to freshen up. My mind was combing through a tangle of emotions, the fear stood out immediately.

It kept throwing questions at me.

“Are things gonna get worse from here?”

“What if the whole jaw just falls down because the surgeon forgot to put the glue in?”

“Will I finally qualify for the normal human category on Instagram without using AI filters?”

“Did I even bring my credit card or am I going to have to exchange my kidney in return for this perfect jawline?”

I made sure that my teeth were spotless.

My worst fear wasn’t the surgery, but getting yelled at on the surgical table for my not so good brushing technique.

Imagine surviving all the anaesthesia only to be judged and hear

“You call this brushing?”

I didn’t want to pay that extra 400 rupees for teeth cleaning add on package that could have been prevented with two minutes and a tooth brush.

After getting freshened up, I wore the blue gown.

Though I wasn’t impressed with the choice of wardrobe, it definitely offered more air-flow. As they wheeled my stretcher to the pre-surgery ward, air wasn’t the only thing flowing freely. My intrusive thoughts came rushing back to me, some of them were fleeting and ridiculous. Like, what if the gown flew up?

Others chose to stay and break out whenever they pleased, as if my mind were a stage and my thoughts and questions were musical numbers waiting for their cue.

At some point, I realised even my thoughts were getting more dialogue than I was.

Every few paragraphs, another set of questions would burst into quotation marks and demand more attention.

“Are you sure this is a healthy way to process your emotions?”

See, there it is again. Perhaps, certainty has never stayed with me for very long. Questions always seemed more comfortable, because they always keep the door open and don’t force you to fit into a single answer.

One of those musings took me back to the first time I was told that I was a special child, apparently that was the explanation I was given for being bullied or not being included in groups.

I remember the separation I felt from normal kids. Though I could never tell whether I was born with it or was it just an abstract feeling I had invented for not being able to gel well with others.

Time and adulthood traded that idea of specialness for a sense of loneliness.

After these musings and musical numbers, I finally arrived the ward.

I was surrounded by others.

For the first time that morning, I felt like I belonged to a group, a group consisting of an old man, a teenage girl and a two grannies.

None of us had much in common.

Different ages.

Different lives.

Different stories.

Except for the fact that we were all waiting for someone to cut us open and hopefully put us back together again.

Couple of nurses approached me and asked me for my name to make sure it matched the file hanging beside my stretcher.

Really?

They’re about to cut me open and now they’re cross checking whether they’ve got the right person? I thought to myself.

I told my name anyway. It seemed like a bad time to think about the hospital’s commitment to accuracy.

20 minutes passed by while two more nurses and their supervisor continued to play the game of Name.

One by one, they wheeled the others away to their operating theatres.

I was patiently waiting for my turn.

Actually that’s a lie.

I was just one moment away from panicking the contents of my digestive system straight into that blue gown.

Suddenly, the generous air flow and minimalistic design of the gown started making sense.

My stomach started making noises,

growling and gurgling.

At first, I thought the sound was coming from the supervisor who was giggling with his colleagues nearby. But as time went by, I realised the disturbance was coming out of me.

The giggling and the noises from my stomach blended together in my ears like a strangely, cleverly mixed piece of music.

Which reminded me of another unfortunate encounter with music.

Back in college, during a soft skill training session, I was asked to sing a song as part of an ice breaking session.

For reasons that are still unknown to me, I was so confident.

I picked my favourite song, I grabbed the mic, and started singing.

The moment my voice came back through the speaker, I heard it clearly. That was the first time I heard my voice through an external system.

It was remarkably synonymous to sound my stomach was making now. The rumbling, laughter and the lyrics being butchered in the name of music.

Suddenly, the chattering and puzzled looks from my peers, while I was singing my heart out, in hindsight it may have sounded like my stomach on a bad audition session, made all sense.

The singing exercise was supposed to break the ice, but what it actually broke was my spirit, possibly some of my peers ear drums too.

Suddenly, another voice overlapped and pierced through the symphony of growling and giggling.

It said.

“The Doctor may be late, his wife is having some stomach issues and it is kind of an emergency.”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure whose stomach we were talking about anymore. I thought mine was making enough noises for it to qualify as the emergency.

So let me get this straight.

The surgeon who was supposed to be meeting me in the butcher shop in this case known as the operation theatre, is having a family emergency and was possibly distressed?

Dagnabbit!

The person who was about to hold a knife over my face, was devastated about his wife being admitted to the same hospital?

Not exactly the emotional state I had hoped for in a man who was entrusted with rearranging my face.

The Butcher was butchered,

Now who’s gonna cut up the chicken?

And if he ends up coming back, what if he gets so distracted and cuts up the head instead of the legs?

Does chicken head taste good?

That’s not important. The important question is, was he going to chicken out of this situation?

The last time I did that, it involved a blind meet-up with a group of strangers at a cafe located away in some forgotten corner of the city.

A man whose voice was already his worst enemy in communication, had somehow managed to sign up for an event where the only thing mattered was conversation.

It was like bringing a fork to a fencing match.

Needless to say, I backed out. Not because I was afraid of strangers, but because they might end up hearing me? Hmm.

It was always that one question.

Will I belong?

Will I be accepted as a normal human being?

Is it inherently built into us humans to belong to something or someone or some place,

May be even a group of chicken heads?

All detours whether forward or backward are ultimately leading to the same destination.

Invitation to picnic organised by that book club,

The bowling game with your colleagues,

The drinking party your crush happened to be going,

To be part of the organism, not apart from it.

Then a husky voice cut through asking for my name.

“You gotta be kidding me, will you please let me finish my inner monologue here, for god’s sakes?”

I thought to myself.

I nodded and answered again.

The nurse with the husky voice looked at me and said.

“It’s time!”

Time.

She said, time.

Is it time?

Is it really time?

I wondered.

I stumbled over the question anyway.

“For real?”.

She nodded yes.

Then the soundtrack returned.

This time it came with the sound of wheel of the stretcher.

The ceiling lights marched past me one after another, as they wheeled me down the hallways.

My eyes hurt.

I asked myself.

Why didn’t they keep it dim?

I reached the butcher shop finally.

They made me spread my wings.

Sorry, Arms.

I was struggling with a lot of feelings.

Mind had begun revisiting its darkest corners.

Breaking itself into questions,

While the soundtrack of gurgling continued to play in the background like a low budget horror film.

“Was this really what I wanted?”

“Would I finally be able to stop using AI filters to look normal?”

“Could this somehow possibly make my singing voice less like growling machine and more like, well, the song itself?”

“Should I to ask the doctor whether he was okay and could still reliably differentiate my head from the legs before starting to cut me open?”

It seemed like reasonable concern at the moment.

But beneath all the jokes, the panic, and the endless stream of questions, there was a more quieter thought, a simpler hope. May be when I woke up, I would feel a little less different.

Just normal enough to stop thinking about it.

And then suddenly, white, watermelon sized, bespectacled heads willed itself into existence from the ceiling.

It stared down at me,

Asking me.

‘What was your name again?”