Drug-induced hallucination week! Day Three: Scantily Clad Celtic Men!

I'm baffled all these scantily clad men hallucinations. I mean, really. Good Mormon girls NEVER have those kinds of thoughts. And I am a good Mormon girl. I promise.

Anyway, EGG COLLECTION. It's a surgical procedure wherein they hoist you into very dignified leg straps and use special needles to pierce through your uterine wall into your ovaries and suck out some eggs.

(And I had a LOT of eggs.)(They said my ovaries were each the size of "footballs, love." Which means soccer balls, because this was in London, remember.)

But see, all the fertility stuff had made me gain a lot of weight and I was embarrassed. So when they asked me how much I weighed, I lied.

By about thirty pounds.

It wasn't until I was strapped (so dignified!) on that table and they were using that weight to calculate the anesthesia they were supposed to give me that I realized you should never lie about your weight to doctors who might have to give you anesthesia.

Just for future reference.

It was supposed to be like a "twilight" kind of anesthesia. Something where they said I'd be semi-conscious but I wouldn't remember anything. They'd give me pain medicine, they said. And it would be like taking a nap.

There was no damn nap.

(I know, I know. Good Mormon girls don't say "damn." So I obviously did not just say that.)

The pain three seconds into the procedure was so bad that they had to send in two extra nurses to hold me down to keep me from writhing. I had just enough anesthesia that I was all foggy and had no inhibitions. So I screamed a lot (and loud). Which was embarrassing even as it happened because I like to seem like I'm in control of my screaming, and I wasn't.

"Can't you give her any more pain medicine?" Asked Steve who was in charge of holding down one of my shoulders.

"No, we can't," they said in their London accents that had suddenly started to sound a lot less charming. "We're already at the maximum for her weight."

"But I LIED!" I was crying. "I LIED about my weight!"

Apparently it was clinic procedure to ignore whatever patients say while they are anesthetized. Because they don't know what they say half the time.

But, trust me, I knew.

The room was fuzzy and every time I screamed it got fuzzier. When I started openly just sobbing, I think Steve started to cry, too.

"I lied," I said again. "I was embarrassed!"

Steve says that I said this twelve or thirteen times.

The procedure lasted a little over an hour. And amazingly, the hallucinations didn't start until about 45 minutes in, though there were several times before that when I just blacked out for awhile.

It started when a scantily clad Celtic warrior with a blue face came and stood next to me.

And then another.

And another.

There were about twenty of them by the time they finished coming into the room.

I said to Steve, "There are Celtic warriors watching this, you know. They have blue faces." (and they weren't wearing many clothes.)

Steve said the doctor laughed. But he just stroked my hair. "Are they charging at you?" he asked.

"No," I said. "They're just watching."

"Then everything is fine. They're just here to protect you."

"Okay," I said. "But I lied about my weight."

Each time they got an egg, the doctor would call out, "I've got another one!" and an embryologist would run in and take it to the other room to be put in a petri dish with the sperm. They were all grinning because they weren't used to having patients as young as me and they weren't used to getting so many eggs.

If I had not been so busy screaming and crying and wondering why the heck all those blue men were in my room, I might have realized:

that was the hour that Sam was conceived.