I remember nothing of surgery itself, but for weeks after that I was on Vicodin and half-crazy. I remember a dream that felt like I had spent a hundred years on a submarine, with almost no input but the ping of a radar. I remember being mostly unable to participate in a Skype conversation my visiting parents had had with some friends from fifteen years ago, putting my head down, and seeing that everyone was in fact a tiny ship on a great expanding sea, getting farther and farther from each other, ala the big bang. I remember identifying with a pinball in a two-dimensional pinballish world -- somehow my sense of self was inside that world but my perception of it was from outside in the z-direction looking at it -- and the certainty that that pinball had to eventually get flushed down a certain exit pipe, and yet it never seemed to. Everything felt pregnant with metaphor for everything else -- the bed was school, a book was traffic, speech was rain.

It all sounds trippy and enjoyable to me as I write it now, but really, it sucked.

This sounds very familiar to when I was a young man and I was given a lot of painkillers and had a very high fever due to an infection. I had a very intense waking dream where I felt like I was hurtling into an infinite void. I had a few flashbacks in the next week while totally sober. Overall it was an intensely unpleasant experience.

When I was about 11 I had a bad flu with fever for a number of days. I was eventually hospitalized for dehydration as I could not drink or eat without vomiting. I don't remember a lot of detail but there were several periods of vertigo and a blurring of dreaming and being awake.