Post-op
I think it was about my sophomore year of high school: my mom had recently given up on forcing me out of bed in the morning, and I had grudgingly trained myself to actually wake up to the blare of my cheap Radio Shack alarm clock. I’d placed it across the room, forcing myself to physically get out of bed to shut it off and drag myself to the shower. Up to the point of actually standing on running water, my mind would be engaged in no other conscious task other than coming up with some semi-valid reason why I could get back into bed. Well, one Friday night I failed to turn the alarm off, and the next morning was just about to turn the shower on at 6:30 am, thinking to myself “dear God, what day is it and, since I’m mentally incapable of doing math right now, how many days until I can sleep in?” When it hit me: it’s Saturday.
The feeling of that moment, when one realizes he can, without consequence, get back into a warm bed and go back to sleep, ranks in my top five feelings ever. In the years since, I’ve been known to deliberately set my alarm on the weekend, just to get that feeling of being able to go back to sleep.
Having shoulder surgery did not feel quite that good. But at least it went okay.
Surgery 
feels like this: annoyance that the anesthesiologist, who only is interested in when you stop talking, can’t come up with a better topic of conversation than the stupid thing you did to injure yourself, a poke in the arm, and a spinny feeling. Then it’s over, and you wonder why the nice lady is staring at you. It turns out that it’s her job to stare at you, so that someone will notice if you die. They sit you up, and you freak out because you can’t move your arm anymore. Then you remember the anesthesiologist told you he was going to to stick a needle in your neck for that very reason, and you remember thinking that didn’t sound very pleasant, and now you’re a little pissed that he told you at all, since he knew you weren’t going to be awake for that part anyway. But now they’re handing you various bottles of pills which counteract the effects of the surgery, or counteract the effects of the pills which counteract the effects of the surgery, and you get dressed, at which point you realize just how much it’s going to suck that you didn’t have the goddamned foresight to injure your non-dominant shoulder. You call mom to tell her you’re alive, they wheel you out to your car, and your cousin drives you home.
You’re actually feeling pretty good, considering. You feel good enough to walk up to the video store and rent some movies, and you take them home and fire one up. By the end of the first movie, you’re getting pretty tired of not being able to move your arm — it’s really a frustrating feeling to have those motor cortex signals so rudely ignored — but around the end of your second movie, you start to get some sensation and you can twitch those major muscles. By then end of the third movie, you’re cursing the pharmacist who gave you sugar pills instead of painkillers, and you’re highly interested in knowing the LD50 of oxycodone.
But after a night of poor sleep, you’re finally able to get a nice painkiller groove going, and the next day isn’t so bad. Mom comes up and takes you to Target and buys you a broom for your new apartment. You sleep better that night. Next day, you even go into work for a couple of hours. You drop the narcotics for Ibuprofen, and a few days later, you’re fully up and about, only you can’t move your elbow away from your side.
The worst part of this is that the weather is incredibly beautiful in Seattle right now, and I can’t even ride a bike. But, surgery went okay.