You may recall that in May of 2012 I had surgery to remove half of my thyroid and half of my parathyroid. While they were in there they found a very very small "microscopic papillary cancer" (.3 centimeters) and another benign "unspecified mass" It was all mostly routine and I'm fine now but the surgeon ran into a problem and had to keep sending blood sample to the lab and then WAIT FOR RESULTS. Consequently I was under heavy general anesthesia for 8 1/2 hours.
I don't know if any of you have had a similar experience with general anesthesia or not but since my experience I've talked with others that have similar stories and some of them worse than mine. I was left with what I call profound differences in my mind. My perceptions were all different. All my body functions felt different. Food tasted different.
Two of my most dramatic and significant changes were that I lost my taste for sweets. Another and perhaps the biggest change was that I lost all interest in reading for pleasure. I call that a big change because for over 50 years I have read from one to 5 books a week, every week with very few exceptions. I couldn't get enough. Now all of a sudden I have absolutely NO interest in any reading material what so ever.
Scary!
It affected my vision or I should say my visual perception if you can make that distinction, and my ability to react normally to the extent that I didn't operate a motor vehicle for 2 months. I could not tolerate sunglasses for 4 months.
Slowly, very slowly after about 8 months a few things began to return to normal. It took about a year for my perception of how food tasted to come back around. But I still had no interest in reading.
I had a conversation with the lady that cleans my teeth. She said that her dad had cancer surgery and it took him 3 to 4 months to recover from the anesthesia that time. A year and a half later he had another cancer surgery and that time he didn't recover from it at all. The changes it caused in him were permanent.
Scary!!
So after a year and nine months I figure I'm back about as much as I'm going to come back. But then I won the karma for the Massad Ayoob book here on this forum and even though I had to kick myself to get it started I wanted to read this book so I force myself to start it.
It didn't take long for me to get into it and after I finished it last night I thought that I might be ready to start reading again like I used to.
I spent some time today looking through my extensive collection of books and picked out two that I'm going to try to read. One is a Jack Reacher book that was written when Child was still putting a lot of good action in his stories, Gone Tomorrow. The other is book by the late Robert B. Parker, Rough Weather. Parker has long been one of my favorite writers. He is the author of all the Spenser books. They even had a tv series staring Robert Eurich as Spenser. It didn't fly because some of the patterns of speech and violence employed by Mr. Spenser in the book didn't translate to tv very well.
It may not sound like a big deal but to me it is very important for a couple of reasons and it will mean a lot to me if I can re capture this element of myself. I'm askin' y'all to keep your fingers crossed for me. I should know after my attempt to get into it tonight if I'm ready for my big come back.
I'm a little nervous about it but even if I don't have any luck tonight I now feel like that I will eventually be able to. Thanks for any and all good thoughts you can send my way.
I don't know if any of you have had a similar experience with general anesthesia or not but since my experience I've talked with others that have similar stories and some of them worse than mine. I was left with what I call profound differences in my mind. My perceptions were all different. All my body functions felt different. Food tasted different.
Two of my most dramatic and significant changes were that I lost my taste for sweets. Another and perhaps the biggest change was that I lost all interest in reading for pleasure. I call that a big change because for over 50 years I have read from one to 5 books a week, every week with very few exceptions. I couldn't get enough. Now all of a sudden I have absolutely NO interest in any reading material what so ever.
Scary!
It affected my vision or I should say my visual perception if you can make that distinction, and my ability to react normally to the extent that I didn't operate a motor vehicle for 2 months. I could not tolerate sunglasses for 4 months.
Slowly, very slowly after about 8 months a few things began to return to normal. It took about a year for my perception of how food tasted to come back around. But I still had no interest in reading.
I had a conversation with the lady that cleans my teeth. She said that her dad had cancer surgery and it took him 3 to 4 months to recover from the anesthesia that time. A year and a half later he had another cancer surgery and that time he didn't recover from it at all. The changes it caused in him were permanent.
Scary!!
So after a year and nine months I figure I'm back about as much as I'm going to come back. But then I won the karma for the Massad Ayoob book here on this forum and even though I had to kick myself to get it started I wanted to read this book so I force myself to start it.
It didn't take long for me to get into it and after I finished it last night I thought that I might be ready to start reading again like I used to.
I spent some time today looking through my extensive collection of books and picked out two that I'm going to try to read. One is a Jack Reacher book that was written when Child was still putting a lot of good action in his stories, Gone Tomorrow. The other is book by the late Robert B. Parker, Rough Weather. Parker has long been one of my favorite writers. He is the author of all the Spenser books. They even had a tv series staring Robert Eurich as Spenser. It didn't fly because some of the patterns of speech and violence employed by Mr. Spenser in the book didn't translate to tv very well.
It may not sound like a big deal but to me it is very important for a couple of reasons and it will mean a lot to me if I can re capture this element of myself. I'm askin' y'all to keep your fingers crossed for me. I should know after my attempt to get into it tonight if I'm ready for my big come back.
I'm a little nervous about it but even if I don't have any luck tonight I now feel like that I will eventually be able to. Thanks for any and all good thoughts you can send my way.
)
