-white-
-metal table; reflection, light fixtures on stands, metal poles; indistinct edges, corners, sides, table wheeled closer, touches bed, hugs blanket, leg tenses away-
-white towel tray; silver scalpel, clamps, saw, needles, gauze; new metal for glinting light-
-green sleeves dripping onto bed, brush arm; blue gloved hands check pulse, move tools, direct light to face; blinded by white-
Blink.
-white mask, white head, green chest:  white clothes hide face, hands, hair; eyes behind plastic shield reflect yellow in the light; deep breath-
-sterile-
-latex touching me; plastic electrode, finger monitor; shuffling feet bump bed, hand pat to leg: O.K.  All Hooked Up.-
Bleep.  Blink.  Bleep.
-white sheet scratches cheek; elbow, needle, pinch, pain, red, clear, plunger depresses clear liquid, IV attached; tubing to metal pole, light in my eyes; blue cuff on bicep squeezes, arm numb, arm relaxes; Blood Pressure’s 110/80; Good.-
Blink.  Bleep.  Blink.  Bleep.
-Pulse is 85.-
-fingers clench; black monitor with pulsing green line-bleep-numbers counting hearts; whistling air to tubes down nose, nose cold-
-clear bag leads to needle, liquid drops one, two three, drip, bubble, watch blue veins pale in pink flesh; cold room, cold blanket; legs cross, uncross; gray silhouette hovers over face, blocks light; blue hands pull blanket to chest, pat leg; All Set, Start the Anesthesia.-
Blink.
-Bleep.     Bleep.     Bleep.-
Blink.
-white face, plastic eyes, brown hair curl over forehead, white hairnet, white hair; white face, blue hands, glazed eyes-
-clear mask, soft bubble over mouth, nose; tube to tanks, tank valve opened, blue hand at monitor; Breathe Nice and Easy, Couple of Deep Ones.; plastic fogs with breath-Blink.
Bleep.
-Count Backwards From One Hundred-
Blink.  Bleep.
-Ninety-Nine-
Blink/Bleep.
-Ninety-Eight.-
Blink/bleep.
-blink/bleep.; Ninety-Seven; blink/bleep.-
Blink/bleep.
-Ninety-bleep.-B.P. Stable-blink/bleep-Six; bleep.; blink.-
bleep/blink.
-bleep.; nine-bleep.-gray-blink-ty-black-blin-six-dark-bleep-
bleep-
bleep-
bleep-
beep-
beep.-
Beep.-
Beep.
Beep.
“Can you please turn your alarm off?  It’s right next to you for god’s sake!  Jesus that’s annoying.”
The groggy voiced response from the opposite bunk was a grunt, the unintelligible intellect of a seven thirty alarm on a Saturday morning to get up and go to the dining hall to take care of camp kids.  One roommate up, one roommate asleep, me pretending deep breaths with closed eyes and cold nose, blanket fallen off to the side of the bed.
“That is the worst alarm I have ever heard,” she huffs.
I groan.  Laura smacks the alarm clock, a mumbled “happy now?” before she opens her eyes and we grimace.  I whisper that the alarm isn’t the most annoying thing in the room.  We laugh as she asks what I said and we ignore her.  She heads to breakfast as I stare at the inside of my eyelids, trying to remember my dreaming.
“I really hate this camp.”
“It’s only for the summer.”
The alarm beeps again…and again I groan, sitting up to stretch in bed, wincing at the pain in my stomach, before putting my feet on the ground, retying the strings on my hospital gown from when they came undone when I was asleep.  “Yeah.  Great.  Yippee.  I’m in the middle of nowhere, stuck in a log cabin pretending that I care about little seven year olds who want to go on a hike while scratching the damn bug bites I’ve got because it is the middle of nowhere and the only other inhabitants of this place are mosquitoes.”
“At least it’s not snowing.”
“That’s not even a perk when it’s 110 degrees outside.  Snow would be awesome right now.  It’s too hot to even wear a night gown.”  I pull the shade up from the window, look out on the porch where my towel has blown off the chair I put it on last night to dry and now lays in a heap on the concrete, an ant army scurrying around it to find food.  I groan.  “It doesn’t even look like there will be rain today; and I don’t even get to have a break because of that stupid meeting.”
“Think of it this way:  after you get checked for lice, take your clothes to the laundromat, and upload camp photos for the day, you can go sit out on the pier…blue sky, blue water, bright sun.  Soak up the rays and get a good tan.”
I think about the old wooden pier, the splinter that I got the last time I went to relax and ended up having to have the nurse play doctor with my hand.  Surgery was better than watching her dig around my palm with a blunt pair of tweezers trying to get the pieces of wood out of my flesh.  At least under Novocain you don’t feel anything.  I turn on the bed to look at her sitting on the top bunk, her brown hair barely visible beneath the green sheet.  I hold up my hand in testimony to my last pier excursion.  She laughs, I sigh and change the subject.  “I dreamed I had to have my appendix out last night.  There were these doctors and they kept patting my leg…like that would make everything better…not”
“Really?  I dreamed-”
Someone knocks at the door.
I yell to Laura that I’ll get it and walk down the stairs, wondering when I moved to the second floor of the building…how I had gotten back home, why Laura was at my house.  Dad is in the kitchen reading the newspaper.  “You couldn’t get the door?”
“It’s Sunday morning, Christy.  No one should be at the door on Sunday morning; they’re supposed to be at church.”
“We’re not at church.”
“Mass it at eleven.”
“It’s 10:45.”  He shrugs.  I put my hands on my hips, tap one foot.  “Are you gonna get the door?”
“You’re the kid, you get it.”
“Well what if it’s someone important and they wanted to give you a million dollars and instead of answering the door like a responsible grownup you sit at the kitchen table drinking your coffee, looking out the window, skimming the paper, wondering if you won the lottery never knowing that the answer is waiting out on the front step with a huge smile as you sit ignoring the pounding and the bills waiting to go to church to ask god for financial aid?!”
“You could always answer the door.”  He turns the page.
I sigh, resigned to the fact that he is not going to move and I’m the responsible one in the family.  “Fine, but if it’s money, I’m keeping it all.”
“Kay.  Can you get me a refill on my coffee too?  Add cream until it’s white, thanks.”  A page turns and I turn the doorknob.
The door opens and a white light is blaring into my eyes, the man’s silhouette reaches for me as I tense and the group surrounds me, yelling “Congratulations!  You’re this month’s winner of Publisher Clearing House’s $5000 a week for life grand prize.”
I watch myself step back from the door, my hand covers my mouth as I jump up and down and scream till mom is standing next to me and dad is hugging me.  The back of my head looks funny as I watch from the stairs myself take the check in front of me.  Out of body experience.  Maybe I’m dreaming.
The black silhouette pats my leg reaches to the man next to him for a scalpel…no, microphone.  He asks, “Now that you’ve won all this money, what are you going to do next?”
“I’m going to Disney World.”  The words slip from my mouth as I laugh and get off the plane, my nightgown replaced with a pair of white shorts and a blue top.  The plane attendant smiles and I wait for Laura at the baggage claim, her blue bag the last one on the conveyor belt.  I shrug as the flight attendant closes the hatch door and we get on the bus to the parks.  She is listening to an Indie song on her iPod, the sound loud enough for me to hear over the hum of the engines.  I pull out my book, One Night with the Sheik, and find my marked page, blushing as the little boy in the seat in front of me turns to look at me and stares at my open page.  I read the first line:  “He grabbed me from behind, the braided strength of his muscles pressing against my warm flesh.  “Come to bed with me,” his whispers, his lips a breath away from my ear, trailing wet kisses down my neck…”  The little boy makes a funny face to his mother sitting next to him, pointing at me over the red polyester seat.  I shove the book under my seat, face serene as the mother turns, frowns, and pulls her son into her lap.  I sit and look out the window.
We pull up to Cinderella’s castle, the silver stone and blue turrets and winking windows gleaming in the sunlight as we shade our eyes and look to the top of the building, the hustle and bustle of the massive throngs of people milling about around us settles down into the steady drum of my heartbeat.  The scalpel in my hand winks at me from the overhead light as I press the blade against the flesh of her abdomen, watch as a thin line of blood appears and the nurse opposite me dabs it away with a white cloth.
The steady bleep of the pulse ox tracks the oxygen levels in her blood as I widen the incision, as I look up and blink at the hand hovering over my stomach.  A thicker line of blood begins to swell as the doctor inserts a tube into the incision.  I feel my breath hitch, panicking as the surgeon-
-She’s waking up.-
-Let’s up the anesthetic.-
-Everything’s going fine, Christy, just relax.; he pats my leg-
I blink my eyes and stare down at the book in my lap, one hand curled around the beer bottle in my hand, Corona, slice of lime wedged into the top.  “Read the next line.”  I want to, really I do.  I say that, but my words come out slurred.  We all laugh.
He grabs the book from my hand, eyes moving back and forth over the page.  “The prince fell to his knees begging Cinderella to be his bride as she cried and said I do and they all lived happily ever after.”  He held up the book in triumph, the last line read.
“We totally made it through it.  It was awesome,” she said.
“Who would have thought that it would be so entertaining to read drunk…” he burped.
“It wasn’t entertaining…our additions to it were entertaining.  Who came up with taking a shot every time Cinderella’s name was mentioned again?  Because I am totally trashed now,” I hiccup and spill my beer across his lap when I start laughing again.
“AH!  Party Foul!  Ah!”
We all laugh.  I blink, focusing on the table in front of me, the metal tweezers that are held in his hand as he looks at the impression of the patient on the Operation game.  “I’m going for the ‘Butterflies in Stomach.’”  He says as he snaps the tweezers in front of my face and I grin.  He inserts the metal into the carved out hole in the game board representing the stomach.  The little butterfly figurine struggles futilely against his hold as he pulls the piece from the compartment, hitting the side at the last moment and the piercing BUUUUUUUUUZZZZZZZZZZ sounds  and he hits the table in defeat.
We all chant:  “Take a shot!  Take a shot!”
He holds up the glass, nods his head to the table then gulps down the whiskey.  We cheer his fortitude as he lifts the glass over his head and turns it upside down and hits it on the table, the shot glass in line with the five other ones he’s already drank.  He wobbles back on his chair, fists pumping in the air with triumph as he topples backwards and groans, laughs, and passes out, a light snore echoing from the darkness at our feet.  We laugh.
“My turn, my turn!”  I pick the tweezers up from the table where he set them in a spill of amber liquid.  I sway slightly as I focus on the board, my fingers squeezing the little metal instrument as the light swings back and forth above me, the shadows of my friends’ heads spilling over me and the game.  “I’m going for ‘the bread basket.’”
The room is silent as I take a breath, blink, and insert the tweezers into the basket shaped space on the patient’s gut, grabbing the piece of bread and withdrawing my hand.  “Steady, steady…nice and slow now…”  My hand shakes and my eyes bulge as I slip and hit the side of the space, a groan as I close my eyes and hang my head in defeat, listening to the sound-
Buuuuzzzzzzzleep.
bleep-
bleep.-
bleep.
Bleep.     Bleep.     Bleep.
Blink.
-white light blinding in eyes; shadows move around me; white coats shrug over shoulders, hide the green scrubs-
-white face, white hair, yellow plastic eyes lean over me; block light; name badge flashes briefly over my face-
Blink.
-blue gloved hands pull back eyelid; flashlight blinds one eye, then other; hand pats my forehead; Welcome back, Christy.-
Blink.
-metal wheels squeal on floor, metal table moves into the dark, out of view; bright light dims, is pushed aside; everything is yellow, yellow walls, yellow floor, yellow ceiling-
Blink.
-he pulls the blanket over my legs, over my chest; The surgery went very well.-
Blink.
-We’re moving you to recovery, you’ll be able to go home in a few days.-
“But I was playing Operation…”
-That’s right, you had an operation.  We removed your appendix, you’re going to feel fine now.  Just get some rest.-
Blink.  “Okay.”
-eyes close; black-