The biggest takeaway from having surgery this time was, "You can lack anything but health, and you can lack nothing but money," as well as, "Authors are pathetic."
It sounds terribly negative, but that was precisely the most direct lesson I took from it.
A lot of people were concerned about why I needed surgery. It was just hemorrhoids. There was nothing embarrassing about saying so.
I could have chosen not to get surgery, but after asking some people and looking it up on Baidu, I saw that the procedure supposedly didn't hurt at all—"just like playing one hell of a game." On top of that, the doctor strongly recommended surgery, so I stupidly believed all that nonsense.
The anesthetic didn't take full effect during the procedure, so of course I was sweating buckets from the pain.
I thought everything would be fine once the surgery was over, but then the pain began without a break, and even the painkillers they prescribed didn't work.
I was in pain for an entire day and couldn't even sleep. They wrapped a drainage tube in gauze and stuffed it into my anus, which was full of incisions. The sensation was beyond description. Every time I closed my eyes, the pain woke me up again.
That night, it hurt so much that I broke into a sweat whether I was lying down, sitting, or standing. When Nurse made her rounds in the middle of the night and asked whether I had a fever, all I could say was, "It just fucking hurts too much."
I endured that pain for nearly thirty hours, and then they changed the dressing.
After that, the pain continued. It was slightly less intense than at first because I could use suppository painkillers. It felt a little better, but only