This is an absolutely true story. As such it doesn't have exaggerated sexual escapades but rather a description of a sensual experience received at the hands of a hospital nurse.
*
I woke up on my back looking up at a non-descript white acoustic tile ceiling. The tile surfaces were textured rather than punctured with pencil-sized holes. Too bad, I thought, the holey ones would have given me something to count while I lie here. The room was dimly lit by incandescent light, warmer in tone than institutional fluorescent. I noted those details in an attempt to remember where I was and why I was there. When I turned my head to my left to begin a survey of the room I noticed there was a tube inserted into my mouth.
I could hear a rhythmic wheezing past the end of my bed which corresponded to the pace of my breathing. All I could see to my left was a blank, off-white wall, four to six feet away. Then I remembered where I was and why. I had awakened from having open-heart bypass surgery. The last thing I remembered before my sleep was hearing my heart surgeon telling me at the cardiac cath lab that they would be bypassing somewhere between one and six clogged arteries supplying my heart muscle. "I'll let you know how many when you wake up." The wheezing was the respirator and the tube into my mouth was the respirator tube reaching into my trachea.
It must be night-time, I thought, since there wasn't any noise of nurses bustling around outside whatever space I was in or of other hospital personnel or family members talking. I turned my head slowly from left to the right and saw that the wall on the right was no further away than the four to six feet I had seen on the left. I was in some vestibule of a room, likely a recovery room from surgery.
I heard a soft voice back to my left. "Awake now I see. If you are wondering where you are, this is the cardiac intensive care unit. Don't try to talk, since the breathing tube through your trachea won't let you. Don't worry, we are going to take good care of you." She was very pretty, her fair and flawless skin face framed by very dark brown or black hair, I couldn't tell which in the dim light, which was either cut short or pinned up to the back of her head. I guessed her age at over 25 but less than 35. Even in the state I was in I tried to assess her body, one of those habits of mine and of most men I knew. Slim to athletic was all I could tell with the white jacket she wore over some equally shapeless top. Not big breasted but not a flat chest either, B or C cups I guessed.
"I'll be sitting at my desk at the foot of your bed for most of my shift tonight, but if you need something, just push this button," she said as she slipped a small metallic cylinder into my left hand. The cylinder had a wire out of one end and a button the size of a dime on the other end. "Your job now is to get more rest. Assuming all goes well, we'll take out your breathing tube tomorrow and transfer you to the stepped-down cardiac care unit." I nodded my head and tried to smile around the tube, acknowledging her information as I fell asleep again.
I woke again suddenly, realizing I was not breathing. Did the machine stop working, I wondered? It was probably just a few seconds, but without breath it seemed like 30 seconds, and then the respirator resumed its rhythmic wheezing. That was scary, I thought, realizing that was the first time in this whole experience of heart attack and surgery that I was actually scared. Being transported to the hospital, examined in the emergency room and then in the catheterization lab before learning from my cardiologist and then from the heart surgeon that emergency bypass surgery would follow had not scared me. I hadn't had severe chest pains and medical help had arrived quickly after my wife's 911 call, so even though I had some anxiety along the way, alleviated by i.v. valium in the cath lab, I never feared I would die.
