Sometime in the morning, the surgical staff came in. One of them spoke pretty decent English, thankfully.

“Okay, we do bath?” she asked.

“Oh yeah, that would be great. I would love to have a bath.”

I was thinking about how this would be my very first sponge bath experience— should be interesting. She brought in a little round plastic bin filled with hot water, a small vial of soap, and these paper-rubber mitt glove things—little square rubber sleeves with textured paper on the other side. About four of those.

There were two of them—a male nurse and a female nurse. They just came in, grabbed my gown, unbuttoned everything, and there I was, laying naked on the table. I decided right there that I had to set my mindset: these people don’t care, so don’t have any self-conscious thoughts. They’re here to take care of you. Let them do what they need to do.

I knew I had to be okay with being naked in front of whoever I needed to be in order for everything to work as it should.

They washed me all over, turned me as much as they could, helped me sit up using the overhead bar so they could wash my back. It wasn’t terrible, and it felt nice to be cleaned up, especially after sitting there with cold sweats. I’m sure I was super stinky.

When we finished, one of them asked, “You have bath towel?”

It took me a while to understand what she was asking. “No, I don’t have a towel. Why would I have a towel? You just gave me a bath.”

“Oh, okay.” She went and got those little plastic-lined pads—they reminded me of pee pads, the ones they used under anything that might leak on the bed, or like for a dog when you’re potty training them. She came back: “Do you feel okay? Sure.” Just patting me dry like I was a wet chicken they were pulling moisture off of.

Okay, well, this is one way to dry off.

Then she asked, “You have toiletry?”

“Yeah, I should have some toiletries somewhere.” The cruise line had packed my bag and brought it in, but since someone else had packed it, I had zero clue where anything was.

“Which bag?”

“I have no idea.”

So I sat there watching as somebody went through all of my stuff—”This? This? This?”—until we finally found some toiletries. I used some deodorant—I use a little natural salt —and put on some face lotion and eye cream. I was actually feeling somewhat human again.

Then she asked, “You have shirt?”

Looking at my luggage, I had no idea where anything was or how clean it was, since I had dirty stuff mixed with clean stuff. I was shocked they wanted me to put on one of my shirts. Coming from the US, I expected everything to be as sterile as possible.

“No, can I just have another one of these?” I gestured to the hospital gown.

“Oh, you prefer this? No shirt? No shirt?”

“No, I don’t know where anything is.”

She rolled her eyes a little, went off, and came back with a paper gown. Perfect. That’s just fine.