Dreamscape Dreamtime: Knee Surgery

I should start this one out by saying I hate knee surgery. I see operative reports every now and then on laparoscopic knee surgery and every time it makes my stomach turn and I feel sick. It just makes me sick to think about things mucking with my kneecaps... My phobia of kneecaps started very young when I read The Oath of Gold at a young age and well... it has some torture in it that involves kneecaps. Blehuhuhrrrrch...

So last night my brain decided to play a prank on me. I had a dream about bone spurs on the kneecap. Ewwww!

So I was limping around in my dream, hardly able to get around. Somehow I knew I was in college and I had to get to classes. I had to get my knee fixed, I could see the bone spurs on the kneecap under my skin. Shudder.

I had the surgery. Thank goodness my brain skipped the surgery part. Or maybe I just blocked it out from my waking memory... Ok, well, I do remember parts of it. Giant daggers of bone sticking out of round kneecaps, surrounded by twitching red muscle and pale tendons. A telescoping camera stuck under a flap of skin. Gross!

The doctor told me that he’d taken out some pretty big bone spurs, so I’d have to take it easy for a week or two.

Now me, I’m stubborn, even in my dreams. I had to get to my college classes, which were being held downtown in this old main street where the buildings were tall, stacked next to each other, and built on narrow streets with few parking spots. It felt like London during the Industrial Revolution, or what I would expect that to look. Closely built brown brick buildings, lots of people rushing around.

I had to go, the surgery had put me back a few days of college and I just knew I couldn’t miss any more classes. So instead of staying home, I drove and got the closest parking spot to my classes as I could, then used my crutches to get to class. The pain was intense! I kept crying out in pain but no one would listen. Everyone on the street just walked past me as if I wasn’t even there.

My alarm must have gone off and mentally I got out of that pain filled part of my dream and I was in my classes. I had one class where the teacher was unsympathetic to my pain and demanded I get all my work done, no matter how much I hurt. I kept pointing at my knees, which did this creepy opening up to show the inside of my knee like a rose opening up, thing that really made me sick. Excuse me while I gag under my breath for a second...

The second teacher, though, he was an old gym teacher I had. He started yelling at me as if I was crazy for getting out of bed. I told him about the bone spurs and about the last teacher who’d had no sympathy, and he nearly blew a gasket he was so mad.

My dream shifted.

Suddenly I was the doctor, the surgeon that had scraped the bone spurs. I was walking down this old main street, avoiding panhandlers, when I saw my patient hobbling around so close after surgery and walked quickly to her. I asked her why she was even up and she told me she had to get to classes. I wanted to scream at her, but I saw the pain in her eyes, so I told her to get into my car and I would bring her home. She refused, saying she had her own car.

The gym teacher came out of one of the red stone buildings and between the two of us, we got the girl up on our shoulders and pretty much forced her to the car. I explained on the way that the bone spur removal was not a minor surgery. She wanted to be stubborn, but I didn’t let her.

I guess soon after that I woke up, mostly grossed out. It was so strange for me to dream about a procedure that is more like a nightmare to me. It made me a little queasy when I woke up. Blechy.