They're gonna cut me.

I was out on my sailboat one day and I put my foot down on a surface that I thought was going to be horizontal but in fact was tilted more towards vertical at the time. Now I gotta get knee surgury. Big suck.

But it could be worse. This could be the year 1721 in which case I'd be resigned to limping for the rest of my life. Or maybe I'd be having some crackpot with a jar full of leeches and a dull knife cut me open with five guys holding me down while I bite down on a bullet and guzzle corn whiskey. And THEN I'd limp for the rest of my life.

Or I could be having my 7th brain operation in 12 months like my cousin Mike. (Subject of a whole 'nuther blog.) So in the appropriate perspective, modern orthoscopic knee surgery is kind of a lame thing to be wepnering about.

But I'm not a man of faith and I can't help thinking about how much blind faith and trust we put into doctors. This little dweeby guy in a white coat looks at an MRI picture and says OK, we're gonna open up your knee and cut a piece of this and drill a piece of that and then you're gonna go home and do rehab after a while your knee will no longer feel like it's being stabbed with a steak knife. What the fuck, over? I mean, take the white coat off and this is just another slob glomming shrimp at the Christmas party. Now he and his posse are gonna be injecting me with anesthesia, knocking me out cold, then slicing into my skin and applying laser beams to my MENISCUS. I don't know what the fuck my MENISCUS is or what it does but I'm pretty sure I like having it and I fully plan on keeping it.

And who is this guy really? I don't know him from Adam. I don't know if he belongs to NAMBLA or if he tears the wings off of flies in his bedroom at night or if he's a Moonie or what. I mean I just don't know shit about this guy except that he has an office with magazines in the waiting room and knee posters in the examination rooms and some secretaries with computers and a diploma on the wall. I sure hope it's a REAL diploma and not one of those Sears diplomas. Could be one of those Sun Myung Moon diplomas for all I know.

So armed with this puny amount of background information on my boy I should be perfectly ok with letting him cut me open and fuck with my innards, right? What would you do? Google the guy? Follow him at night?

And then there's the whole dexterity thing.

I like to build stuff. Nothing intricate - I build furniture and do construction projects and landscaping and stuff. And nine times out of ten while I'm working on a project, I'll drive a nail right through the thing I'm supposed to be joining or make a cut the wrong way and tear up the piece of wood and have to either get a new piece of wood or glue the splinters and shards back into place or whatever. No big deal man, it's a two by four. But these guys do construction on humans. And it's microscopic. There can be no cutting the wrong way and tearing up shit. There can be no reading the fucking blueprint backwards or saying damn, I used the wrong size drill bit. There is no UNDO key in surgery and no EASY button either. Elmer's glue will not hold my shit together if this guy's balls suddenly itch he and shreds my MENISCUS into a pile of pulled pork. And I can't go to Home Depot and get a new MENISCUS and start over.

So it's like this - in a couple of weeks I'm gonna show up at the hospital and get some chemicals injected into me and I'm gonna go to sleep and I'm gonna hope I wake up. And if I wake up, the first thing I'm gonna do is check and see if I still have a right leg, 'cause I've seen too many Twilight Zone episodes where the patient wakes up with both his legs amputated and the doctor standing over him with a bloody meat cleaver going "BWAHAHAHAHAHA!" Then I'm gonna find out if I still have a MENISCUS. Then when the drugs wear off I'm gonna learn how painful it is to have someone poke around my MENISCUS with a goddam laser beam. Then I'm gonna go into REHAB and find out how painful it is to do knee exercises after this for-all-I-know sadist pervert Moonie has poked around my MENISCUS with a laser beam.

Then, hopefully, I'm gonna walk normally again.