By the time the anaesthetic had begun to wear off, it became clear to me that despite having anticipated that I would sail through the aftermath of the procedure without any pain, I was going to be disappointed. The local discomfort soon edged into pain but that's hardly surprising. After all, what else can be expected when a surgeon takes a scalpel to scoop out skin and the flesh under it somewhere on your body?

That 'somewhere' for me was on my upper stomach wall. When I'd first become aware of the appearance of something peculiar there many years ago, I'd attributed it to a spider bite, occasioned while working in the garden. It was infected and required medical treatment. A doctor at a walk-in clinic drained it, bandaged it, gave me a prescription for anti-biotic and sent me on my way. It wasn't diagnosed as a cyst until it had, over the years, returned once, twice. Sometimes the recurring infections, years apart in occurrence were quite awful, and sometimes more tolerable, like the last time it happened.

When I decided it had occurred often enough. My general practitioner referred me to a general surgeon. It was she, many months later, who removed the cyst yesterday at the Montfort Hospital, the closest medical facility to where we live and just incidentally a hospital that once had a miserable reputation but which has re-invented itself over the past decade. Besides the surgeon, there was a nurse and another, younger nurse who took active part in the procedure, while the more mature one set up the instruments. The intern stitched me up after the surgeon had extracted the cyst.

The whole thing took well under an hour; my wait at the hospital was brief. Irving sat out in the parking lot in the truck with the puppies, waiting for me to return. I returned sans cyst with instructions to leave the top bandage, waterproof, in place until Sunday. Then to leave the remaining one to disintegrate on its own. The stitches, the surgeon said, would take quite long to disappear, up to six weeks.

That was a little surprising, the length of time before the stitches would be gone. On the other hand, the application of the anaesthetic resulted in almost immediate effect; quite amazing. Administered subcutaneously, the needle and its contents provided the pain quotient in the procedure, and it seemed to take forever before that part of the process was completed. But immediately afterward I was completely anaesthetized, allowing the surgeon to proceed. When the surgery was completed and the stitching was being done, unfortunately, before the last stitch went in, I could feel what was happening, necessitating another application of that miraculous anaesthetic.

Sleep eluded last night. I had no intention of taking any kind of painkiller. The site was painful, quite beyond uncomfortable. But I did manage to fall asleep, feeling pretty exhausted for some peculiar reason. And today the pain is absent, for which I'm grateful. There's just discomfort where the cyst had been if there's even modest pressure applied. Since our kitchen counter edge is right at that vulnerable level, if I forget and press myself against it, as for example while I was preparing pie dough and bread dough after breakfast, I'm swiftly reminded.