When you go unconscious of pain and concern but try to leave the table as soon as someone lets up on the juice, you’re defined as “consciously sedated.” It’s enough to get you past things medically called “very uncomfortable,” such as nine on a pain scale that goes to ten. First there is conversational chatter, people asking you about your life. Next you awaken in an unfamiliar bed with unusually crisp sheets. Someone has switched your experience button back to RECORD. What is between stays on a non-rewritable disk somewhere which no one can play. It’s cool in here, and bright, like in a supermarket near the frozen foods section. Someone spreads a warmed white cotton blanket over me.

In Ars Medica: A Journal of Medicine, the Arts and Humanities 5, 1, 2008.