Waking Up in Margaritaville

Friday, April 29, 2011

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

Waking Up in Margaritaville

By J’AMY PACHECO

I woke up the other day in a state of rather intense confusion.

In a dream I still vividly remember, I had been worrying about a house my husband and I bought. It was a small, one-level fixer-upper home painted bright yellow. In my dream, I didn’t know where the house was, but I knew it wasn’t in the city in which I currently reside.

While I slept, I worried not only that we hadn’t moved into the house yet, but that we’d bought in the wrong city, necessitating a change in high schools for our daughter. That was devastating enough, but I also feared we’d forgotten about the new house and wondered what had happened to it; if we’d “lost” it by delaying taking action.

When I woke up, I spent at least five minutes trying to figure out if I owned the walls at which I was staring. Realizing I did was more of a relief than you can possibly imagine.

That’s how my wake-up moments have been for about a week now, since I had my first experience with surgery, and my first hospital experience outside of childbirth. Something about that combination has lingered, long after the fast-working anesthesia (called “Margaritas,” the nurses told me) has presumably left my system.

I don’t often remember dreaming. On the rare occasion that I do, I usually forget about it in a few hours. But since the surgery, I’ve been dreaming the biggest, weirdest, most vivid, lingering scenarios ever.

After the house dream, for example, I had a dream that I was babysitting an infant belonging to a teacher I used to know. I started out taking it to a meeting at a school, where I was given entry by a parent I actually knew from school years ago.

But the meeting turned into some sort of gathering at my dad’s house. To make a long story short, the baby told me it hated me and ditched me. My daughter’s former elementary school principal raced off screaming after the baby, stopping it from going over the edge of a huge “cliff” leading to a really, really sunken living room with wallpaper made to look like a forest.

The entire house looked just like my dad’s house in real life, except for the sunken living room, and the contents of the fridge. When my dream-self went to the fridge for a Diet Coke, I found it stocked with Pepsi.

I can sort of make sense of some of this. While my dad’s fridge unfailingly contains Diet Coke in the “real world,” Pepsi was a treat we were sometimes offered when we visited him as children.

After my daughter left elementary school, we learned a teacher had been arrested for having an inappropriate relationship with a teenager he met there. In the light of day, I can actually see how all of the baby-teacher-principal-cliff elements fit together, which makes me feel like Dorothy getting back to Kansas and telling the farmhands, “you were there, and you…”

Now, I can see how I would have these types of dreams if I was still receiving Margaritas intravenously. But I never did take the super-de-dooper pain relievers they sent home with me, instead opting for prescription-strength ibuprofen. And I stopped that three days after the surgery.

Oddly enough, I didn’t have these types of dreams in the hospital. That might have been because I was afraid to sleep after a nighttime nurse silenced the alarm on my I.V. machine, pronounced it “not finished,” and left it to run dry. When the alarm went off the second time and the bag was replaced, I watched in disbelief as she used a syringe to suck out the air that was then in the system and shoot the liquid contents that came with it to a spot on the floor. No horror movie could have scared me more.

I would have convinced myself that it was a dream, if not for the nurse who came in later and cleaned up the mess after I pointed it out to keep her from slipping in it. She seemed to be as distressed as I was about the situation. Yikes.

Fortunately, those nighttime hospital memories haven’t intruded on my dreams at home. Also fortunately, my dreams, while somewhat stressful, haven’t been the evil-nurse-bad-guys-chasing kind that many women report after this kind of surgery.

One, I read, had a dream that she killed somebody using pancake mix and a wooden spoon. By comparison, my dreams seem almost normal.

Well, as normal as dreams can be in a run-down yellow house in Margaritaville…