I find myself unable to sleep again, and thought I should continue on the crises entries so that I don't have any concerns weighing on me.
I had my first surgical operation when I was young. As I had a tongue-tie condition where my tongue cannot be raised high enough to pronounce certain words, I was to be sent to a hospital for operation.
Nowadays, tongue-tie operations require the patient to spend up to two days maximum in the hospital. However, back when I was a child, I had to spend five days in the hospital. The operation itself wasn’t really a trauma, though I had panicked shortly before I lost consciousness after being given a sedative. The trauma was being separated from my mother for five days.
How it happened was that I remembered being asked if I would like to be able to speak properly, and if I liked to do so, I needed to go to the hospital to get an operation done. I was excited at the thought of being able to speak properly, and so I agreed. I was also told that I wouldn’t be going to school for the period, and that I couldn’t see my friends. When I was sent to the hospital, I remembered feeling scared about the whole operation and yet, excited at the same time. I was reassured by my mother, and told to be brave, and not cry when I was left alone at the hospital. Shortly before the operation, a nurse came to give me a sedative through an injection, while another nurse talked to me to distract me from the pain of the needle. They reassured me and praised me for being a good boy. The praises made me felt happy and good. They then asked me to close my eyes and told me they would be moving me from my bed onto a wheel bed so that they could wheel me to the operating theatre. I felt my heart started to beat faster and I was getting anxious. While being wheeled into the operating room, I remembered hearing soothing voices reassuring me that everything will be all right and that I am a very brave boy. As I was about to lose consciousness, I panicked for a while, as I did not really know what the doctors would do to me. I was operated upon and stayed in the hospital for five days. When I woke up, the operation was over. I felt relieved and happy at the same time. I could feel that there was something different under my tongue. For the next few days, my relatives visited me, and I ran around in the hospital and watched television programs as well. While I was in the hospital, I missed my friends and classmates very badly. Each day, my relatives visited me to check how I was doing, and I looked forward to the visits. I was engaged and distracted by the nurses who gave me colouring books to do, and roam the hospital wards. I did not cry until the fifth day, when my mother visited, and I cried, relieved to see her, as I had been putting on a brave front for the entire duration and I missed her presence very much. I remembered a relative teasing me and praising me that I did not cry when my mother wasn’t around, and only cried when my mother showed up. It was the first time I was separated from my mother for so long.
As a child, I couldn’t speak certain words properly, and the operation cured me of that. However, I believed that the suppression of feelings while missing my mother led to my inability to express my own sad feelings towards many issues until today.