I’ve been thinking a lot over the last little bit… As children, I thought it would be the most amazing thing to have surgery. Wouldn’t it be cool?  Medicine fascinated me. We spent hours pretending we were operating on each other. We were very professional. Sterile was of utmost importance and a definite requirement- plastic bags went over our feet- we wore masks. Water dripped from the IV pole and ran down the string into the toothpick needle.  And although I would have never admitted it- every time I had a pain in my side, I thought “maybe this is an appendicitis…”

But those days are over for me. I have established that I do not have a future in medicine. Needles make me faint. And there is nothing NOTHING about surgery that is fun. Emily has helped remind me of that. I am thankful for the gift of healing. We are indeed wonderfully made. And so I rejoice that even though there is pain for a season- God is working a strong work in Em’s life and giving her grace for the day… Praise Him… We’ll be kayaking with that shoulder soon enough 😉 And now- for Em’s dramatic stories…

Paradisemtnmusings presents:

ADVENTURES OF EMILY ON NARCODICS guest writer- Emily Horst

 As you well know, I’m on some pretty heavy narcotics these days, and sleeping all night long is just a faint memory…usually I catnap for an hour or so until it is time to wake up and take some more pills of some type. At some point in the middle of my night last night, I awoke with a start. All of a sudden, I felt a chill shoot through my whole body. Out of the darkness loomed the figure of a huge snake on my ceiling. Now, under normal circumstances, I am not afraid of snakes… I don’t profess to like them much, but we have this deal where if I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me. Up until this point, neither one of us have ever broken the treaty. But this thing was like an anaconda or something. So I lie there not daring to move an inch for fear that i will call attention to myself, while the snake is just chilling overtop my bed…looking at me with its beady little eyes and forked tongue. I’m scared to even breathe. So there I am… not breathing, not moving…the only sound is of my heart pounding in my chest and a dog barking off in the distance.

Suddenly it hit me. Duh! There is no way there is an actual snake above your bed… you are seeing that because you are on drugs. Whew! That was a relief! But! Wait! Roxycodone is not a hallucinogen. So then I flipped out cause I was worried sick that I was on bath salts and was gonna end up like one of the patients i had transported (drugs eventually caused her demise). All these thoughts are running through what is left of my methhead brain… “how did i get bath salts”  “what if mother finds out”  “i need to go to the hospital” “what if i am a druggy now” “i need to sneak away before my parents wake up”  Then I figured it out. Someone switched my pain meds for bath salts. Now all I had left to do was convince mother that was the problem and I was home free. (until the coming down off the high… I hear that is miserable)

So at least it was rationalized in my head now as to why I was seeing this snake. Fortunately, it was just snakes I was seeing versus thinking my room was on fire and I was burning up and all that stuff… but I was still fairly distraught that I was on hard drugs like that. (keep in mind that I don’t even drink or smoke, much less do any form of drugs that aren’t prescribed to me)

At this point I was wide awake and becoming more alert to my surroundings. As I looked at the snake, I thought, “Maybe there is some good reason that I am seeing a snake”.  I looked across the room and it dawned on me. I have an electric blanket on my bed… the cord for this blanket passes over top a little light in my room. This huge dangerous “snake” that I had stressed over for the past thirty minutes was merely a shadow of an electric cord.

I breathed a sigh of relief that I was not being killed by a snake, and I was not on bath salts that I needed to hide from my mom. Time to take a few more pills and attempt to go back to sleep.

THE END.

p.s. this story is 100% true. don’t judge me.

Editor’s note: We look forward to the time when Em is once again perky and able to be on the alert side of the operating process..