Thoughts on torture

Bruising on my left arm from struggling against restraints during anesthesia.

At about 8 a.m. on Jan. 13, 2012, I went under general anesthesia so surgeons could cut a 12-inch incision along my scalp from near my old widow's peak, along the crown to above my ear, than down and swooping forward, then dropping close along the front of my ear, like a backward question mark or a hand-held sickle. Then they peeled me like an orange to expose my skull and used a rotary drill to bore out two large circles of bone, one about 2.5 inches wide starting at my right temple, the other overlapping it halfway, just above the ear.

I'd been clear under twice before. Once in 1993 when several attempts at an epidural failed because they kept jamming it into my spine at exactly the place where the cord was pinched nearly to nothing by a lumbar stenosis I suffered from later. The second time was Jan. 11, 2012, two days before the brain operation, while a wire was threaded up my arteries (starting at my groin) and into my head and two or three veins were glued shut to starve the tumor growing on the right side of the stem. Oh, and to stuff my fat ass into an MRI for the pre-op scan.

In 1993 I went under peacefully, no worries. In 2012 as I lay under the mask and breathed the scentless knockout gas, I became afraid. I grappled the fear, wrestled it down, kept breathing and knew nothing until I started to revive.

What I didn't know was that, both times at the Veterans hospital in San Francisco last month, as soon as I went under I started to struggle. Coming into the anesthesia room for the second time, the anesthesiologist laughed and said his back had just about recovered from holding me down. For the operation they tied me down.

About three days after the operation when the doc removed the tape covering my incision

On that Friday, Jan. 13, the doctors opened me up around 8 a.m. and stapled my head shut about midnight. Then for ten hours I lay mostly unconscious while they kept me in Intensive Care, sedated and intubated, so that I wouldn't hurt myself during the most vulnerable hours after surgery.

I was sedated for 26 hours. That's pretty dangerous, as I understand it, so there must have been good reasons for keeping me as helpless as possible. And I'm sure they were right, because as soon as consciousness started leaking back in, I found myself in a panic.

I couldn't talk. I couldn't control my breathing. My body was in agony, mostly my left hip, and I needed to shit. Oh, I needed to shit, and I couldn't tell anyone. There were straps around my wrists, but I couldn't keep hold of that knowledge for more than a few seconds, and I kept falling back into a fog, reawakening and rediscovering that I had a tube down my throat, and when I reached for my face to tear it out my arm moved a few inches then stopped with a yank. So I would pull and yank and lurch, and out of a blind fog a voice would come saying, "We'll get that tube out soon, Mr. McConkie."

I remember the first thought that formed itself in words. The first memory of anything before the awful present. It was about what it would be like to have a towel thrown over your face, then have water poured on it so you couldn't breath and were certain you were drowning -- and whether that was OK to do to someone, because they had knowledge you needed.

Just weeks before, I'd finally decided, no. It's not right. No matter what's at stake.

One a bed in the ICU I was strapped for ten hours and I don't know how many of them were punctuated by me coming awake and thrashing in panic because I felt like I was drowning. That was probably when I was trying to breathe and the machine wasn't set to blow air down my throat. My heart would race and my blood oxygen level would plummet but the breather wasn't keeping pace and I was physically helpless; I couldn't freaking breathe! I couldn't scream. I couldn't protest. And my arms couldn't move to tear that awful thing out of me so I could suck in air and gasp bellow my existence.

A worded thought finally fell together in my mind:

"I wouldn't do this to my enemy."

No, not if he was a murderer and held the secret to save a city from annihilation. Because at some point we have to stop and not become what we fight.

I'd believed that for a long time, and nothing cemented it more firmly than my eight days in Iraq in February and March, 1991, when I never had to raise my personal weapon, not because no Iraqi soldier ever got the drop on me, but because Iraqis believed we were better than Iranians. Believed if they surrendered, we'd treat them humanely.

Would they do that now? No, probably not, because America has changed and it's known we're not above either torturing people ourselves, or turning them over to people who will.

It's a terrible line we crossed, and I personally will not go there, nor will I give my assent or turn a blind eye. In my heart I know there are things so wrong that we can't do them to our enemies. No, not even such a physically harmless torture as waterboarding.



I don't know how long it was between my first addled whiff of consciousness, and when they pulled cut off the anesthesia, pulled out the tube and slapped a full-face bipap mask on me. When I came awake that time someone said, "We got the tube out, Mr. McConkie."

I replied, and my voice croaked from my throat being raw -- literally, bleedingly raw. My first statement was a phrase I've never said except to quote someone else, because it's always seemed a bit brazen. But it was heartfelt:

"Thank God."