by Samantha Paige Rosen

Marcel Scholte, Operating room, digital photograph, 2025. Courtesy of Unsplash.

Deep Sedation

Samantha Paige Rosen | Jan 2025 | Issue 411

Three times I ask to be given mild sedation for the arthrocentesis, a procedure to flush out debris inflaming my jaw: fluid, scar tissue, tendons swelling and suffocating my joints. Mild sedation is twilight; I don’t want general anesthesia. Being put to sleep is loss of control. The moment your body becomes a body. The doctor assures me I will not want to be awake. He will stretch my jaw, which can barely fit a spoon, past its maximum opening capacity before threading a tiny tube, an arthroscope, through my joints. The discomfort will be too much, he says. But I’ve lived with pain for 11 years and since I can’t control this about my body, I seize it everywhere else.

He’s insistent, so this time I let go. They hook me up to an IV and I enjoy the ego boost of having a giant, ready vein. The anesthesiologist leaves me alone under fluorescent lights, needle sticking out of my arm, to search for the gas that will take my consciousness. She returns, presses a tube to my nose, tapes cords to my cheeks, clips a cold clamp to my finger to monitor my heart rate, another to my ankle. I crack jokes and tell her not to let me die. I wait for my eyes to flutter. Instead, immediate blackness.

I wake up sitting erect, maybe on a bench, maybe in a hallway. High on Propofol, I tell the doctor, “You’re a pretty cool guy, man! And I don’t say that often.” Panic. Did I just come out to my oral surgeon? Michael Jackson died from an overdose of Propofol, but I survived this. As for the pain? I wait for its inevitable return.

Samantha Paige Rosen writes about chronic illness, mental health, queerness, arts and culture, and social justice for publications including Slate, Washington Post, Them, BOMB, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She is the editor of A Home for Tomorrow—an anthology about building community through shared space and shared values—forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2026. In addition to creative and content writing, Sam tutors and coaches writing outside of Philadelphia alongside her three cats. She earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and is a proud Smith College graduate.