Where is that memory?

Surgery requires vulnerability, trust, and creates an odd intimacy. There is a group of people who know me in ways no one else ever will. They saw me and my body at a most vulnerable place and time. They saw the inner workings - heart, lungs, muscle, bone. I went in to surgery knowing this and trying not to be embarrassed by what they would see - a middle aged, overweight woman. I do recall making some quip upon entering the operating room and seeing all the equipment. I said something along the lines of "All of this just for me. You shouldn't have." A couple of people introduced themselves. I remember being shifted onto the operating table, blinking a few times, then nothing. I had to go in trusting them - trusting in their skill, their compassion, their ability to see me as a person not just anatomy that needed to be fixed.  They monitored me - kept blood circulating, kept me breathing, repaired my aorta. They kept watch over me. They hold the memory of those hours.

I wonder how many surgeries they have done since mine. I'm sure for them all of the procedures blur together, that eventually the individuals fade. But I will always remember them in both abstract and intimate ways. They left evidence of their presence. I have a scar running down the midline of my chest. I have wire in my sternum and a piece of man-made material where my ascending aorta once was.

It is like being enchanted for a while. Whisked off to a place of forgetfulness. A slumber like no other. And when the enchantment ends, there is no memory, but time has passed and things aren't quite the way they were before.