So Monday morning, the surgeon removed the parotid gland from back of my left cheek, which had developed a benign tumor.  The assumption was that it was the "superficial" lobe that sits atop the main facial nerve, but once inside he discovered that, on the contrary, the nerve sat atop it all.  He had to spread the nerve in order to fish out the gland, which made the whole process more difficult and a bit more damaging.  

After 3 hours in surgery I woke all tubed up and with a great bandage upon the side of my face.  They had placed a draining tube in the side of my head and hooked me into a pump.  It would be an afternoon and night of dozing, contemplation, and peeing into a bottle every two hours.  I had a button to release a flow of morphine into the IV, but I didn't use it much, since my face was pretty much numb.

I might have been nauseous if I'd tried to read or watch the television, but I was just content to be idle and to put up with the nurses' regular interruptions.  Maybe there was more morphine than I thought.