I’ve had so many operations (or procedures) that as I explore them in this post that I bet I forget a few. I don’t know why I’ve been so susceptible. As a kid, I played every sport, but I was seldom injured. I’m not a big person, so maybe my frame was prone to wear-and-tear. It has been a long, unreal journey. Dentists and doctors can be very strange characters. I put it down to their inhumane training. Self-respecting law students would protest loudly.
1. Wisdom Teeth. I count this as a surgery unapologetically, if only because, before beginning, the dentist said, “I’m glad I didn’t look at the x-rays again this morning or I wouldn’t have had the courage to do this.” So noted.
Apparently my wisdom teeth, having more wisdom than I did, scanned the horizon of my life and refused to exit in the usual way: they came in sideways. The dentist had to chip them out in pieces.
I don’t recall much about it, especially afterwards, because he gave me a primitive opioid whose name I can’t recall but which made me exceedingly charming that evening. I can no longer picture that dentist, a really nice man, or remember his name. This would have been in about 1976.
2. Left Pinkie Finger. Anyone reading this blog knows that I played every sport imaginable when I was a kid, and all of them except tennis and golf managed to jam my left pinkie finger. I grew casually capable of popping it back out. Eventually, the jammed joint didn’t want to bend unless I poured hot water on it in the morning. Then, SNAP, it would bend.
So I went to a doc, and he decided that the best course of action, considering that I needed to continue typing, was to fuse the joint.
Before the operation, they scrubbed everything like it was God’s kitchen, and then they gave me a block somewhere farther up the arm and told me that in no event was I to lift my left arm. So of course I lifted it, couldn’t control it, and, whomp, it fell on my leg or bedding or something. Everything needed to be scrubbed down again with a lot of silent resentment directed my way.
To punish me, the surgeon said, as he was beginning, “Any resemblance between this and a normal finger is completely coincidental.”
Then when it was over, Mike Ralston, a teaching colleague, forgot to pick me up. I can’t remember how I got home. It took forever to heal, and, in the meantime, there was threatening talk about bone grafts.
3. Angioplasty and stent.
I have trouble believing that I didn’t have any surgery between that finger, in about 1981, and my first heart problem, in 1998. Since 1991, I had been at AIG, an instigator of heart trouble among the staff, and the anxiety and stress finally got me. In March, Nancy and I managed a trip to England, and I felt the chest pains up on a hill in Devon, where, if I’d had a heart attack, nice knowing you.
I got back to Wilmington, DE, and went to my GP and said, “I’m having chest pains.” As a man who prided himself on his unflappability, his widening eyes made me a little proud. It turned out that I had a 90% blockage of the left anterior descending artery: the widow’s block, yclept. (Update: on May 4, 2023, I had a video appointment with a UW surgeon about my back. When I told him about this problem, his eyes widened like my old GP. In truth, it makes me a little proud to alarm a surgeon.)
The surgeon in Delaware, perhaps the coldest man I’ve ever met until I had my knee replaced, invited me to watch on a TV above my bed the angioplasty and resulting implant of the stent. Fuck and no, I thought, and closed my eyes. It amazes me to this day to think that these procedures, with a tube snaking up from your thigh into your heart, are routine.
My office mates at AIG sweetly sent a bunch of flowers. As a member of a cash-strapped department, I wondered how the budget covered them. The doctor, whose name I can’t recall—Kevin Boyle?—said in a robotic voice, “These will look lovely in your home.” Still I appreciated the man’s skill. But I wish he hadn’t invited me to watch him brutalize my heart.
4. Hip replacement.
In 2001, my right hip became so painful to walk on that there was nothing for it but to do a total hip replacement. As my left hip was great, the doc asked if I had suffered any trauma to the right one. I couldn’t remember anything.
Later, two events came to mind: (1) one drunken night in Munich, my mates and I were demonstrating certain athletic triumphs, my feet hit some gravel, I flew up in the air, and landed, whump, THUMP, on my right hip; (2) while getting my master’s in Greensboro, I was playing one-on-one with a 6’7” fellow whom I’d met through a girl named Margrace; his name may have been Sylvester. I drove on the basket and planned to drive past the hoop and do a reverse lay-up, using the hoop to protect my shot. Without having to leave his feet, Sylvester put his hand on the ball. I pushed up, he pushed back, I pushed harder, but eventually I landed, whump, THUMP on the hardwood floor. Trauma, I guess.
I wasn’t quite out when they wheeled me into the operating room, and though it seems unlikely now, I swear that blood had spattered on the walls. The doctor’s name was Toomey, or, if you’re of a dark frame of mind, Tomb-me.
The recovery wasn’t terrible, except that a few months later, in physical therapy, the nice woman gasped at how my right calf had swollen and demanded that I go straight to the emergency room; she suspected deep vein thrombosis. “But I’ve been walking on this for ten days!” I protested. She would not relent.
After a stop at a doc’s, I took myself to the emergency room in Seattle and was duly admitted and shot full of blood thinners. A day or two later, I went home, and spent the next six months injecting coumadin into my thigh.
Eventually, I went back for a follow-up with Toomey. It had been six months, and during that time my hair hadn’t grown at all. I mentioned that to him and wondered why that might be. He shrugged and changed the subject.
I said, “Come on, you’re not interested in this? You could win a Nobel Prize if you figure it out!”
My seemingly unflappable GP in Delaware once sneered, “Surgeons don’t know anything about medicine. They’re just carpenters.”
5. Pinkie finger redux.
As I was trying to repair a kitchen cabinet hinge, the cabinet door dropped on my beleaguered left pinkie. It hurt like a sumbitch, but I tried to live with it. It never got better, so I saw a surgeon in Seattle. He said, “It’s broken, and you waited too long for a simple remedy. If we don’t operate on it, eventually we may need to amputate.”
That would really put a damper on my typing, so I acceded. (Some doc later told me that amputation would have been unlikely. Fucking docs.) On the way back on the ferry after the operation, my finger hurt so horribly that I called the doc. “The Vicodin just isn’t working,” I told him. He averred, “Hmmm. Maybe something went wrong. Maybe you’d better come back.”
Have you had an operation lately? Know how long the process takes? “Please, I said, let’s just try a stronger pain killer.” So he prescribed some Perkies, and all was well. At least I learned to type with four fingers on my left hand. Sometimes out of habit I still use my ring finger to type exclamation marks!!!!!!!
6. Right knee.
Kate was always what you’d call a first pitch fastball pull hitter. She got her mom’s quick hands. Thus when I was pitching whiffle balls to her she caught me off guard when she whipped a line drive past my left ear. I twisted to avoid it and tore the meniscus in my right knee.
The surgeon made a show of getting in and out of my knee in 11 minutes. I wanted to ask him if he were sure that this was a competition.
There was the requisite physical therapy, which didn’t help much. The surgeon said, “Don’t worry, it won’t always feel like this.”
7. Right knee replacement.
He was right! My right knee crumbled altogether, and I had to use a crutch for a while. Later my orthopedic doctor, a kindly, brilliant, and sweet guy named Dr. Helming, said, “I think you’ve gotten as much out of that knee as you’re going to.”
So I had to have it replaced. I wasn’t completely out during surgery, but out enough that I couldn’t protest that I could hear the surgeon hammering away on my knee.
Afterward, he told my wife that my former knee was “disgusting.” Well, at least there was proof that I hadn’t been malingering. When I went back to this guy, whose name I do recall because it was very similar to the Pittsburgh Pirates’ centerfielder in 1960, he looked at the x-ray and said, “I’d show that to anyone.” I wanted to but didn’t say, I’m so happy for you! At least I didn’t develop deep vein thrombosis.
8. Inguinal hernia.
The less said about this, the better. I did get some good opioids out of it. I heart me some Perkies.
9. My back.
I’m thinking of the Keystone Cops running around and tripping over themselves in an operating room. I have severe stenosis, epidural lipomatosis, and severe scoliosis. It’s been two years and no relief, despite having a spinal stimulator implanted in my back. It’s gotten worse. I can’t walk more than two minutes, wash the dishes, take the recycling out, anything, without excruciating pain.
In the next ten days, I’ll get another MRI and have appointments with a surgeon at UW and one at Virginia Mason, though that guy already has said that the operation would take two days because of all of the interlocking damage.
Through this nightmare, the nicest person has been a radiology tech. A while back, as I was leaving her room, she said, “I feel bad for you.” Then I had to have another x-ray, and I reminded her of her kind words, and how the docs made me feel like they're blaming the victim. “They’ll do that,” she said. And later, as I was leaving, “Don’t let them get you down. Take care of yourself.” I was in tears getting dressed.
In my last telehealth conversation with the person who inserted my spinal stimulator, she suggested, “Well, hang in there.” You fucking hang in there, I wanted to tell her. I sincerely wish all of my docs could spend just one hour in the pain that I feel every minute of every day. Maybe they wouldn’t say such stupid things.
It’s such a cliché, an old man whining about his health. I’m just hoping someday my fantasy will be fulfilled: I’ll be lying on the table, not quite out, and I’ll hear, “We’re losing him, dammit!” Now that’s the ultimate operation and a fitting end to a sliced-up life.
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