15. The Best Christmas Present

Anaesthetics? Something to smile about.

As I said in Monday’s Blog, I thought the anaesthetic of the operation would be a big fear and the aesthetics something I could handle when in reality it wasn’t so straightforward.

The word ‘anaesthetic’ calls to mind a suffocating, evil-smelling mask being placed over my nose and mouth, having horrible dreams and waking up feeling ghastly. This was my experience of having teeth extracted as a child and it was so awful I have been fastidious in dental routines for me and the children, doing everything possible to prevent tooth decay and the need for any of us to go through that particular trauma.

Thankfully, I was reassured at the pre-operative assessment before the mastectomy, that anaesthetics these days are quite sophisticated and the unpleasantness I remember is gone. True to form, the day of the first operation I was taken into the annoyingly busy pre-theatre room where people seemed to be talking over my head:
“How many tropical fish do you have now?” one asked the other, as if I wasn’t there.
“Let me see: one, two, three...”
They’re just trying to trick me to fall asleep, I thought defiantly.
“Four, five, six, seven...”
I was right. They were tricking me and it worked. I remembered nothing else until I awoke in the Recovery Room. There were no unpleasant experiences at all. Just the same with the second. Out in no time, awake, and no unpleasant after-effects. Better still, I don’t know if they had given me morphine, but I came round and felt quite er, happy.

Around twenty-five years ago, my husband and I hit upon an idea which has meant every year we give each other the best, most liberating, most spirit-of-Christmas present ever. We decided that instead of buying each other a gift, we would make a donation to the charity of the others’ choice. It began by us knowing someone directly who was say, building a school in El Salvador or working with a leper colony in India and we could send the donation with them. It changed over time and became quite good fun too.
“What are you buying your husband this Christmas?”
“A pig.”
“What are you buying your wife this Christmas?”
“A cow.”

Over the years we have addressed the extremes of earth, wind and fire through relief for victims of earthquakes, hurricanes and droughts. We have bought metres of plastic to build waterproof shelters, vaccines to prevent outbreaks of cholera and lengths of pipe to build village water pumps, all without having to push through crowds to the sound loop of “Have yourself a merry little Christmas”. I’d strongly recommend it. Now we just shortcut to selecting our own charity and making a donation.

Sometime in November word gets out that I’m not just on the 'Sucker List' but on the 'Big Sucker List'. That is, I receive letters from a very large number of charities. This used to be quite handy when I was teaching, as their persuasive letters and materials made excellent teaching resources. This year, I sat with several letters in front of me, all of equal worth trying to decide which one to donate to. As it was two weeks before my second anaesthetic, the decision was easy.

This year it was The Smile Train's turn, a charity which provides a straightforward operation for children born with cleft palates and lips. In the UK babies born with this condition are operated on relatively early so the feeding, speaking and aesthetic difficulties are dealt with long before they grow up. Not so in some countries, where children with cleft lip and palate not only struggle with eating and speaking but are treated cruelly and ostracised from society for life. The letter told me £35 could buy an anaesthetic for a child so the surgical procedure would alter their face and their fate for the rest of their lives.

I looked at the pictures of the babies with their twisted upper lips, beautiful children, but would not be seen so where they were destined to grow up. I felt a little sorry that they would have the discomfort of the surgery, but then shrugged: “Sorry, little one. If they can do it to me, they can do it to you.” I wrote a cheque for the cost of the anaesthetic, popped it in the envelope and posted it.

Hopefully, right now, some little person somewhere in the world is just like me: has had that anaesthetic and surgery; is a little irritated by the scars as they heal, but that soon, all will be normal and the rest of their lives will open up to them enabling them to be happy and fulfilled as they so deserve.
This year, strange as it sounds, anaesthetic is the best Christmas present.

http://www.smiletrain.org.uk/real-heroes/