Last night I dreamt that I had been shot with a arrow. The arrow was embedded into my left hip bone. It was very painful, but I was able to move. With the help of friends I limped, and was carried, to a bed inside of a building. A woman appeared, whom I was told was a healer. She tested the arrow by pulling it gently. I groaned in pain. She then gave me a small bottle of clear liquid to drink and told me she would be back in about fifteen minutes. I drank the bottle, about eight ounces of fluid. It tasted like water with a slightly copper flavoring. My friends kept me company while I waited, making jokes about my having an arrow stuck in my hip. It spite of the pain they did make me laugh.
When the healer reappeared, she was wearing an apron and had an old fashioned doctors bag, which she sat down and laid out her surgical tools. She asked if I was ready to start. I told her I didn't think the medicine did anything because the wound still hurt like hell. She laughed (she had a very high spirited musical laugh) and told me that the medicine did not make the injury any less painful, but rather it made me not care about the pain. I was a skeptical, but she put a hand on my shoulder and asked me to trust her. Something in her demeanor led me to do exactly that.
She then proceeded to cut my hip open, find the arrow, used a pair of pliers to grasp it, wiggle it back and forth until it came loose, and pulled it out. As the arrowhead came out of my hip I could hear the cracking of bone and as she pulled it free I could see small flecks of bone stuck to the tip of the barbed arrow. She then proceeded to carefully separate the flecks of bone and set them aside. She then cleaned the wound, used a spreader to hold it open while she glued the pieces of bone back in place and then covered it with a putty like compound, before sewing the wound shut with swift and sure stitches.
She was right - it hurt like hell - the pain surged through me - but I didn't care. I experienced every instance and moment of pain as she worked on the wound, but they just didn't matter. She then told my friends to let me lay there for about thirty minutes and I would be good to go. In the dream I laid there napping, and it was that nap, the nap within the dream, that I woke up from when I woke up this morning.
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