Hospital
02 February 2026
02 February 2026
Home, last summer. If anyone had suggested I ‘think of a happy place’, this would be it. Olympus OM-1, Kodak Portra 400
I remember almost every detail from that day at the hospital, but what I find myself thinking about most often is the gap in between—the episode that I have no knowledge of. I remember being transferred to the OR, a room that looked like the command centre of a spaceship, or a data centre in the middle of moving house. Impressive, and slightly intimidating. I climbed onto the operating table, half naked, where they placed warm and cold patches on my body, a nose mask over my face for oxygen, and positioned me exactly right so that the vital inner parts of my body would be visible on a monitor at my feet. All very efficient and routine. One of the doctors made small talk with me. In hindsight, I would have preferred to properly take in everything that happened in that room, but at that very moment, I appreciated the distraction.
As soon as the anaesthetics kicked in I was gone, only to wake up a few hours later in the recovery room. What happened in between, I don’t know. It’s the silly details I wonder about, not so much the operation itself—a fairly abstract procedure. If I could have watched it, I would have been looking at a screen. I probably wouldn’t have been able to mentally connect the visuals with my own flesh and bones.
It feels much stranger imagining how they painted my lower body parts with a disinfecting liquid that left an aggressive pink on my skin, in a better-safe-than-sorry kind of way. How they put a knife in my groin and shoved a tube into my vein, a rather intimate act I would say. What would they have said to each other? What would my face have looked like? Like I was sleeping? Or dead? How many of them were needed to get me back into bed? Two? Four? Would my limbs at least have cooperated a little? Somehow, they managed to make me presentable again. Or human, perhaps. Released my hair from the silly cap, rearranged my hospital jacket, tucked me in. It still feels a little absurd to think about these things.
As soon as the anaesthetics kicked in I was gone, only to wake up a few hours later in the recovery room. What happened in between, I don’t know. It’s the silly details I wonder about, not so much the operation itself—a fairly abstract procedure. If I could have watched it, I would have been looking at a screen. I probably wouldn’t have been able to mentally connect the visuals with my own flesh and bones.
It feels much stranger imagining how they painted my lower body parts with a disinfecting liquid that left an aggressive pink on my skin, in a better-safe-than-sorry kind of way. How they put a knife in my groin and shoved a tube into my vein, a rather intimate act I would say. What would they have said to each other? What would my face have looked like? Like I was sleeping? Or dead? How many of them were needed to get me back into bed? Two? Four? Would my limbs at least have cooperated a little? Somehow, they managed to make me presentable again. Or human, perhaps. Released my hair from the silly cap, rearranged my hospital jacket, tucked me in. It still feels a little absurd to think about these things.