To balance the five or so days of memory loss prior to operation, recuperation in the ICU provided me with countless adventures: imaginary and actual, existing outside of time with brilliant rapidity and painstaking languor in differing measures. I have organized such events into some form of comprehensible narrative, yet the actual occurrence of which remains questionable, for whilst I clearly remember being instructed by a cluster of doctors crowding my bed to respond to their voices, the reward of which being to have the mystery tube withdrawn from my oesophagus and replaced with an oxygen mask, I still managed to invent the scenario as being that if one slipped into unconsciousness, without the mask firmly in place, then you simply would not wake up. It was terrifying. In fact, a good fifty percentage of my pre-compos mentis dealings were mesmerizing in their abjectness, equilibrated only by other wondrous, imagined scenarios. Little time had elapsed, but the whole world had been presented to me; something raw had been unearthed in the interim between my sedation and continued consciousness.
