A FRUITFUL DAY IN THE OPERATING ROOM

If life had gone according to plan, a scintillating piece of ponderous commentary would be appearing in this space. You’d be sipping a warm beverage while taking in my words of wisdom, nodding and smiling between paragraphs. Either that, or I would have hit a raw psychic nerve mid-sentence, sending you to You Tube’s cute kitten channel for immediate relief and redemption. Well, my friends, I am here to tell you that life does not always go according to plan. Just ask Jeb Bush, or if you want a second opinion, Rick Perry, the guy who got tossed from “Dancing With the Stars” faster than he did from his quest for the Republican presidential nomination. Oops.

My diversion was far less profound, but just as frustrating. I was scheduled for minor outpatient surgery at Washington Adventist Hospital yesterday, the second of two procedures in a month aimed at removing a benign mass from my back. A benign mass, I learned from Dr. Google, is a non-cancerous tumor, not a pre-Vatican II Catholic church service conducted by hippie folk singers. There are, I guess, some valid procedural reasons why an allegedly minor operation needed two surgical dates. But the explanation is so dry, and uninteresting that it should never be reported outside of a medical journal, and even then only if it is really hard up for copy.

Here’s the deal, along with a full waiver of my HIPAA rights. Initially the tumor was, in the highly technical jargon used by physicians with five years of graduate school and a two-year residency, the “size of an orange”. Then came the first surgery. When the bandages finally came off, my appendage had been reduced to, again in the medical vernacular, the “size of a key lime”. Yesterday’s surgical adventure was to have been a brief cut-and-stitch aimed at the final excision of the devolving fruit. Instead, it was a day-long adventure.

I arrived, as instructed, two hours ahead of my 9:30 a.m. operating table time. I was prepped and ready to get this done by 8 a.m. Because nobody in the nation’s capital has been able to come up with a way for people to move from one point to another in an expeditious and orderly fashion, my surgeon was held prisoner in I-270 traffic until 11 a.m. I gave thanks for needing only a simple key lime removal instead of a life-saving quadruple heart bypass.

“This won’t take long,” he said, as the anesthesiologist sedated me. I awoke hours later in the recovery room. The surgeon was standing by my bed, sputtering words you never want to hear in these circumstances, “You aren’t going to believe this,” he said. “It was the size of a grapefruit.” He positioned his hands, as if holding a county fair blue ribbon grapefruit, his face flashing the smile of a prideful fisherman boasting of a trophy catch. I told him I was glad he was having such a good day and then fell back to sleep.

All of this, dear readers, is my feeble way of explaining why you are not looking at an insightful commentary on a burning public policy issue. It takes a lot of slicing and dicing to extract a grapefruit. Given the state of our current world, pain is not a useful ointment for the dissection of complicated issues. Try to think fondly of me whenever you have your next fruit salad. I’ll be back soon.