Throughout my life, I have had many memorable experiences but the one that reappears most vividly in my mind is as follows.
Last winter, I tore the cartilage in my knee cap and then tore my meniscus. After ignoring the pain and discomfort for months, I decided it was finally time to do something about it. So last September, I went in for knee surgery. This was a terrifying prospect for me as I am allergic to the anesthesia that they give you. After discussing this with the medical personnel, it was decided that I would be given a different kind that was likely to make me have a reaction...well that was a serious misjudgment on all of our parts. In the middle of surgery, I had a reaction, which brought me out of my sleep. I immediately started itching everywhere. In order to stop the itching on my feet, I started to move my legs.....while the surgeon was still operating. NOT GOOD! I also tried to rip out my oxygen tubes. Over my panic of where I was I could hear the surgeon yelling at the nurses to get me give me more anesthesia and allergy medicine. He was also ordering them to hold me down until everything kicked back into my system. Underneath his deeper tones, I could hear the decidedly more feminine voices of the nurses trying to calm me down. Within a few seconds everything goes hazy and the itching becomes a faint memory. The rest of the day passed in a drug induced blur.
The whole experience of waking up in the middle of a surgery probably lasted less than 30 seconds, MAX but like we have discussed in class, it is the context that is associated with the experience that creates the memory. This particular memory will make the prospect of all future surgeries an unpleasant one. It truly is about the associations in the mind that forms the memories that will last a life time.
On a similar note, I am not likely to ever forget Kubla Khan after Monday. As most of your who will read this will already know, I completely messed up reciting the poem in class. This failure was not due to a lack of knowledge but stage fright. I had practiced the poem multiple times and spent hours memorizing it. Even just one hour before class, I was able to do it perfectly but the closer I got to actually performing the less I seemed to remember. I couldn't see the page in my mind any longer. In fact, it felt like if any of you had asked me what my name was when I was at the front of the class, I most definitely would not have been able to tell you! My memory had failed me! I am even more likely to remember the after-effects of failing that badly in front of my peers. I won't go into details but I will tell you that I was sick for the remainder of the afternoon from nerves, adrenaline (not the good kind), and a whole host of other not fun emotions. Since Monday, I have been able to perfectly recite the poem so we will see how it goes this afternoon.
This experience further proves the point that the context of the memory and the situation that is being experienced while remembering greatly affect if a memory is coherent or not. When trying to remember Kubla Khan, it felt almost as if I was trying to imagine the words on the page that I had memorized from but the words had gone too blurry to read. Almost like things look when I forget my glasses or lose my contacts! It was the memory's context of surgery that will always hold that within my mind and it was the situational context that will make me remember my class recitation. So I hope that my memory would hold up stronger today and allow me to get this ordeal over with so I can stop obsessing over Kubla Khan. I know that not only will I appreciate this but all of my sisters will too! They are all sick of hearing this poem and some of them have parts of it memorized from hearing me this past week!
