I went under the knife again the other morning.  Or maybe it was a scissors this time.  I’m not sure.

But I am sure of several things.

It hurt.

It caused me stress.

I won’t do it again.

Or if I have to do it again, I’ll ask them to kindly knock me out, in whichever way seems best to them.

I didn’t think it was going to be that big of a deal, really.  I hadn’t worried about it much, if any at all.

I have had several surgeries.  I had a surgery to my stomach.   The shot straight into my gut after the surgery and the threatening stare by the male chauvinist nurse had me helpless and I knew it.  Funny thing though.  As she was charting said shot, I complimented her on her extreme typing speed.  She melted down almost immediately and ventured that she wrote as a hobby.  I told her I wrote a bit myself and we talked over the nuances of the trade.  After that, she was back in the room every few minutes, just hanging around, chatting about life, her family, and asking if I needed anything.  When I was discharged, she walked with us as far as she could go.  I know they train the folks who work in hospitals nowadays how to care professionally, so that even if they aren’t caring one bit on the inside, they have you thinking you are their one and only concern for the day.  But I suspicion her care was a tad more personal than that.

Not long after that one, I had two surgeries to my right knee, (the anesthesia buzz afterwards wasn’t half bad) and one surgery to my collar bone.  Oh yeah, I had that Lasik surgery done on my eyes years ago; that one was actually rather enjoyable.

I know you didn’t ask for a spill on my health; I felt compelled to tell you, nonetheless.

I really expected to be in a hospital long before the first time with my stomach, at age 40.  Afterall, those around me say I’m accident prone.

But since that first surgery, I’ve been doing my time in those sterile halls.  It doesn’t take anything to call up the memory smell of hospital food by now.  Still, with all the practice I’ve had, I can’t seem to make the gowns work.  The front of them does okay, it’s my backside that gets so cold for some reason.  I once took the liberty to tie another one of those gowns on to the back of my front gown; that worked fairly well until the nurse saw it. I got cold back there again after her remodel job.  I have a sneaking suspicion those female nurses spend a fair bit of time conniving together when they know they have an ultra-sensitive, positively bashful, forty something male like me coming in for a surgery.  And I’m sure their suppressed titters turn into gales of laughter once I’m out cold as they poke and prod my excesses, watching the ripple effect shimmy along their shiny table.

A guy loses all sense of manliness and ego in those situations.

And then the wife and family tell all sorts of preposterous stories when it comes to the recovery room.  (Bless their heart)

But this last one was different.

And I don’t want to do it again. 

Ever.

Several weeks ago, Austin called me up and asked if I could help him get a bearing race off one of the axle shafts to our trencher.  I said, sure, I’d be right over. 

I told him there were two ways to get it off.  Try punching it off with hammer and punch first and if that didn’t work, we’d torch it off. 

I was just starting to show him how to punch it off, and I was getting ready to tell him that really, we needed to wear eye protection as bearing races are made of extremely hard material and tended to splinter off at very high rates of speed. 

And twang.  I felt it drive deep into my left eye.

I went out to the pickup mirror and looked but didn’t see anything serious.  We ended up torching it off and I was back at our house when I had another look since my eye was feeling rather irritated. 

I saw a nice little blood pocket, under what appeared to be the outer layer of the white of my eye. 

The eye doctor said come in right away, even though it was after closing time.

He looked it over.  He thought whatever had hit hadn’t entered the eye.  He gave me some antiseptic ointment that closely resembled Vaseline.  The only way I could get that into my eye was to pull the bottom lid out and lay a ridge of it in there.  Even then it wanted to slide right out, and it hurt like sin.   The Doc told me I must use it, because if my eye got infected it could transmit straight to my brain and I’d have brain infection. 

I told my good wife I thought I had had brain infection for years already.  I think she wanted to agree with me.  It would explain so many things about everything.

*****

A few weeks passed on and all seemed to be doing better.  My eye was still quite red, but there are other things about me not quite up to par, so it rounded out the general picture.

I was combing my hair one morning, looking in the handheld mirror, working on the cowlick that I’ve worked on for forty some years, when I saw it.

Right where I had felt that pain when I got hit, was a rather ugly looking blister, grayish colored, that my bottom eyelid had to climb up and over when I blinked.

I got me back to the Eye Doctor.

He said, “Whatever hit you is still in there and needs to come out.”

He made me an appointment for the next morning with an eye surgeon, saying, “We don’t have the proper equipment here if it’s going to need stitches, or goes to bleeding really bad.”

The stitches thing kind of registered, but not really. 

The lady eye surgeon took a deep look into my eye and said that it was either a blood clot or the piece was still in there and we would definitely need to go in and see what was up. 

“So, if you are ready, we’ll go over to minor surgery and dig it out.”

“Sure,” I said, “Let’s get it done.”

Except the chair she had me sit down in in minor surgery was a dentist chair.

And she was talking about giving me a shot right in my eye to deaden it.

And she had me flat on my back, almost at negative g’s.

And she put this thing, called an expander, under my eyelids to hold them open so I couldn’t blink.

With a blinding bright light inches away, and now that I couldn’t close my eye at all, we were all set. 

She dropped some pain deadening eyedrops in and asked if I was ready. 

She told me I needed to hold still.

“MMMHHHMMM” I thought.  “Hold still or lose my eyesight.”

“We’ll go in here between these two blood vessels.  You still doing okay?”

“I’m going to slit the outer layer of your eyeball and get under it with a Q Tip.  I’ll see if I can work out whatever is in there with that.”

And it starts hurting really bad and I can’t move. 

She didn’t know it, but her left hand held her instruments, and they kept gouging into my forehead. 

“Okay, I’ve cleaned out the layer underneath the outer layer,” (after what seemed like 30 minutes of alternately clasping and unclasping my hands, crossing and uncrossing my legs, and hyperswallowing) “Now I’m going to go down one more layer deeper and swab around in there.  I’ll just make another slit here.” 

I saw that knife (or scissors) coming down again and got ready to depart.  No matter that I was going to spend the rest of my life with that expander propped in my eye like an old-style monocle exposing a full circumference, blood red eye.  It would make a good gag for the upcoming Halloween, I figured.

I gingerly talked myself down from the state of levitation I seemed to be in, and, as effort to calm myself and get my mind on something else, said, “You sure have steady hands.”

“Yeah, you have to in this line of work,” she said.

By now I was watching her take the suture needle and suture, bring it right down close, and saw the graceful movement of her hands as she worked it through the layers.  Until the needle got stuck and she asked her assistant for a forceps to pull it out. 

Her assistant wasn’t very sure what a forceps was, unfortunately, and the needle staid stuck long enough that by the time she pulled it on through, the numbing drops had to be applied once more. 

She finished up and I asked her if I could see that suture needle and thread for interest’s sake. 

“Sure.  We’ll get an envelope, and you can take it home with you.”

I have it with me today, and if I can get a decent picture of it, I’ll attach it later.  It’s smaller than an eyelash and the suture, she told me, smaller than a human hair.

“You did so well,” she said, “You were so calm, (chuckling) you even told me I had steady hands!  Most people aren’t that collected in here.”

Lady, if you only knew.