DIY History | Transcribe | Iowa Women’s Lives: Letters and Diaries | Eve Drewelowe's journals, volumes II-III, 1950s

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Eve Drewelowe's journals, volumes II-III, 1950s

Page 145

Not too soon the procedure was finished, and I was transferred to room seven for the general and what was to follow. My arms were strapped down, but meanwhile before the cone was slipped over my face, there were a few fleeting moments for joking. There was ample time too to note my surroundings and to make subconsciously mental images of the features of the masked white-clad nurses and doctors around me. It was this momentarily survey which enabled me afterwards to identify the room by describing those in charge of me. With these last minute impressions of the world about me I was engulfed in a whirlpool that went around and around, down and down in spiral effect. So helplessly, so deeply was I drawn into a black pit in the nowhere, from where it might so easily seem there could be no return. For a blessed while - of course - I knew nothing more. 
It was - I suppose - room after eight, because the doctors had just come onto the floor, when I went up to surgery. It was about eleven-thirty, so I was told when I had been brought down. About two-thirty in the afternoon I began to come out from under the anesthetic. As the nurses sat with me - this other patient - one of the first things I was conscious of was the conversation. "They say she had a regular hair-ball in her stomach. She pulled out her hair and ate it." one nurse said to the other. 
"I don't see how a person who does that can be in her right mind" came the answer.
"I did not eat my hair!" I denied vehemently, for in my lifting stupor I gathered they were speaking of me. After that [illegible] I subsided again into my semi-conscious state or less. Sometime later still drifting, I was [prating?] of having missed the Metropolitan Open broad cast that afternoon. It seemed out of all proportion important that I should have heard and enjoyed that day. The

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Not too soon the procedure was finished, and I was transferred to room seven for the general and what was to follow. My arms were strapped down, but meanwhile before the cone was slipped over my face, there were a few fleeting moments for joking. There was ample time too to note my surroundings and to make subconsciously mental images of the features of the masked white-clad nurses and doctors around me. It was this momentarily survey which enabled me afterwards to identify the room by describing those in charge of me. With these last minute impressions of the world about me I was engulfed in a whirlpool that went around and around, down and down in spiral effect. So helplessly, so deeply was I drawn into a black pit in the nowhere, from where it might so easily seem there could be no return. For a blessed while - of course - I knew nothing more. It was - I suppose - room after eight, because the doctors had just come onto the floor, when I went up to surgery. It was about eleven-thirty, so I was told when I had been brought down. About two-thirty in the afternoon I began to come out from under the anesthetic. As the nurses sat with me - this other patient - one of the first things I was conscious of was the conversation. "They say she had a regular hair-ball in her stomach. She pulled out her hair and ate it." one nurse said to the other. "I don't see how a person who does that can be in her right mind" came the answer. "I did not eat my hair!" I denied vehemently, for in my lifting stupor I gathered they were speaking of me. After that [illegible] I subsided again into my semi-conscious state or less. Sometime later still drifting, I was [prating?] of having missed the Metropolitan Open broad cast that afternoon. It seemed out of all proportion important that I should have heard and enjoyed that day. The