He had reading glasses pushed up on his head and a pen in the breast pocket of his scrubs and the particular greyness of a man eleven hours into a shift, and he sat down on the edge of the bed, which nobody else had done all morning.

My insides dropped straight through the mattress.

“So I’m going to be unconscious?”

“You are.

But you’ll be safe, and they’ll be safe, and that is the entire reason we’re doing it this way.”

And then he explained it, properly, for four or five minutes, and I am going to put down what he actually said rather than my panic, because he was good and because people reading this may one day be in that bed.

He said that they had intended to do it with a spinal block, which is the standard and which lets you be awake and have them put straight onto your chest.