[Apologies for not writing sooner, folks. Been trying to get back to work, and trying to get back to work has taken a toll on me. I’m getting stronger, and getting stronger means that I’ll be writing regularly again soon. Thanks for your patience.]

I woke up in a room which, for some inexplicable reason, I thought was the garage of my surgeon’s private home. I don’t know exactly what sorts of drugs the doctors had given me. Whatever they were, they were obviously potent enough to convince me that I’d woken up in the garage of my surgeon’s private home.

A nurse who resembled an overweight Carrie Fisher walked into the garage holding a tiny pillow. She presented the pillow to me.

“Oh no, that pillow is too small for me,” I said, though no words came out of my mouth.

“Take this pillow and hold it against your chest when you have to cough or sneeze,” Carrie Fisher said. I took the pillow from her. I placed it against my chest then folded my arms around it. She seemed pleased. I thanked her but again, no words came out of my mouth.

I was in “Dr. Ye’s garage” for an indeterminate amount of time—maybe an hour, maybe a day. I was bored and lonely there. I kept hoping that someone I knew would visit me, though no one did. There wasn’t anything for me to do there except stare at the colorful monitor hanging on the wall across from the bed. I was so bored that I entertained myself by trying to decipher the symbols on the monitor. I stared at a “&” and a “#” for awhile, wondering if those symbols were actual letters that I could no longer comprehend. Attempting to decipher the symbols was tiring work. I eventually fell asleep.

Sometime later I woke up in a hipster/artisanal Emergency Room in Brooklyn, New York. Unlike Dr. Ye’s garage, I was not alone here. Directly across from me, seemingly far off in the distance, was a derelict Santa Claus. He was lying in bed, merrily eating food off a cafeteria tray. Some of the food was getting stuck in his ornate beard.  There was a second patient immediately to the right of my bed who I could not see because our beds were parallel and facing in the same direction. And there was a third patient, diagonally across from me on the derelict Santa’s side of the room. This patient was, from what I could see, in pretty bad shape. The man appeared to be suffering from a nervous disorder. He was very thin and shook uncontrollably in his bed. He looked like a bug that was trying, and failing, to act like a human. He wore aviator-style eyeglass frames. An older woman, who I assumed was the bug-man’s wife, was at his bedside. She hugged him dearly, holding him as if he was as light as a balloon and could fly out of the room and away from her at any second.

I didn’t know how I had gotten all the way back to New York City, which I still think of as my home. No matter. I was excited and relieved to be there. Being back in New York felt right to me. Rain fell against the small windows of the hospital room, and I remember thinking, That’s New York rain out there. I couldn’t wait to get out of bed and get outside the hospital, to feel the East Coast rain on my face.

A group of about 10 or so people walked into the Emergency Room. A tall, good-looking doctor in a white lab coat was leading the group. He gave what I thought was a pretty good speech to the group, the gist of which I instantly could not remember. I thought, To be a young speech-making doctor? At this hipster/artisanal Emergency Room in New York? Boy, think of all the leg he must get! I felt envious of him.

In the midst of the group was a face that looked strangely familiar to me. It took me a minute to realize that the face belonged to Carrie Fisher, the nurse who had brought me the tiny pillow back in Dr. Ye’s garage. I realized in this moment that I had unknowingly been holding the tiny pillow against my chest the entire time, exactly as she had instructed me to do. What is Nurse Carrie Fisher doing in Brooklyn? I wondered. And why am I still holding this little pillow against my chest? The questions were starting to pile up.

As the group began to exit the ER after the speech, I called out to Nurse Carrie Fisher. She ignored me and kept moving. My mouth, apparently, still wasn’t working. “What do you need?” asked a Hobbit-sized, very brown nurse. This Hobbit nurse’s outfit was odd: she had a light-blue bathrobe on backwards and protective goggles on her face that looked like a pair of sunglasses J. Lo might have worn in the late ’90’s.

“I want to ask the nurse who is leaving a question, the one who looks like Carrie Fisher,” I said. “It’s important.”

“I can’t understand what you’re saying,” the Hobbit nurse said impatiently. She shrugged her shoulders. Her eyes were a warm, dark brown yet somehow cold at the same time. I tried to tell her again, with more urgency this time. “Who is that nurse that looks like Carrie Fisher? Why am I holding this tiny pillow? And are we in Brooklyn or not? Can you please answer these questions?”

The Hobbit nurse looked at my chart. “It’s time to remove your catheter,” she said.

“Remove my catheter? No, I believe you must have mixed up my medical records with someone else’s because I think, if I had a catheter in, I’d know it,” I said.

I lifted my blanket and had a look for myself. To my complete surprise, there it was: my tiny dink, which looked pale and small and innocent like a baby in an alien movie, with a tube coming from the end of it. “How the fuck did I have a fucking catheter in and not fucking realize it?” I said, which, factoring in the pharmaceuticals still milling around in my body, probably sounded like, “Arrwww aaaaaaooho oooh aaaaa looow oooot?”

I could go on here but I won’t. Suffice to say that it was taken out quickly and I was, thankfully, still sedated enough to endure it. Let’s leave it at that.

The Hobbit nurse eventually brought me a meal, though I had no interest in eating. She told me that if I ate I would be granted permission to leave. The Hobbit nurse was big on these kinds of threats. I ate a few spoonfuls of the cafeteria gruel in front of me. I was bored here, too. Like Dr. Ye’s garage, I might have been there for an hour or a day—I don’t know. I fell asleep. When I woke up my mother and father were standing next to my bed. It was pretty miraculous to see them again; they were the first familiar faces I’d seen in I didn’t know how long. I felt like I hadn’t seen anyone in a hundred years. “Are we in Brooklyn?” I asked anxiously.

“We’re not in Brooklyn, silly,” my mother said. “We’re in the hospital, in Vancouver.” As she kissed me and told me how happy she was to see me again and how terrific I looked, Brooklyn faded like a mirage. I started to pine for it. Instead of everything looking hipster and artisanal and Brooklyn-y, the room suddenly looked shabby and dilapidated. “Nurse Carrie Fisher” didn’t look like Carrie Fisher at all; she looked like the lead in “Ugly Betty.” The Hobbit Nurse looked less like a hobbit and more like a diminutive Alfred Molina. Still, I was back in the world again. That was good, right? And I was back with my family again, which was also good. I had climbed into that goddamned flimsy upside-down inflatable raft in the operating room and had lived to tell about it.