My One-Year

Today is my one-year anniversary with Axel. 

For those of you who don't know Axel, he's the steel rod attached to eight inches of my spine. 
Before my surgery, I always thought I would feel differently with a rod in my spine. I don't. I sometimes feel less flexible but then again, I was never very flexible. 

Reflecting back on my surgery, I guess it wasn't all that bad. I don't remember a lot of intense pain but I do remember some. I suppose it helped that I had a morphine pump in my hand...

The worst memories I have about my surgery are the sneezes. Harmless sneezes,  right? 

Wrong. I remember being afraid that I was going to sneeze. 

Sternutaphobia-the fear of sneezing.

The second worst memory is about my third(?) night in the hospital. They had just taken me out of the ICU (ahhh, probably my best memory) and I was sharing a room with some other little girl. There was a partition in between us but we could still hear her talking and what-not. So this particular night, I couldn't get to sleep. It's hard to get comfortable when you're used to sleeping on your side but you're forced to sleep on your back. It's also difficult to get comfortable when a nurse has to come in every hour and put this foam wedge underneath your back and rotate you from side to back to side, etc. Basically, I had gotten no sleep at all. So it's early in the morning and my mother finds this t.v. channel that plays soothing instrumental music and shows panoramic views of lovely countrysides. Just as I'm drifting off to sleep, the girl on the other side decides to wake up and ask her dad to find some cartoons for her. He flips on the t.v. and instead of people talking or whatever, there is this loud static sound coming from the t.v. The dad fiddles around with it for a while and finally turns it off. The little girl whines and insists he put on some cartoons and so he turns the t.v. back on. Once again, static noise. By this time, I'm wide awake and starting to get a migraine. Forget falling to sleep, this little girl wants to watch cartoons. 

Vicodin is also another bad memory. 

So now I have a thirteen-inch scar on my back and I beep when I go through the metal detectors at the airport. 

So what should we do, Axel? Watch Double Indemnity with my new Netflix account that can play videos instantly on X-Box Live? Yes.