by Michael Harrison

Created on: December 02, 2009

Surgery is something that you hope you never have to go through. If you happen to be unfortunate enough to have to have surgery, let me relate my own experience, it may help lighten your perspective. I've had four surgeries up to now, two were elective and two were not. Of the first two, one was oral surgery and the other was to have a severely ingrown toenail removed. The last two were related to the same injury, I had an accident at work and ended up losing about one half inch of my left index finger. The incident itself was pretty ugly but when it happens to someone with a warped sense of humor it can make things interesting at the emergency room. When I did get to the E.R. I was clutching a wad of bloody paper towels in one hand and a Ziploc freezer bag full of ice with the remainder of my finger in the other. It was New Year's weekend 2006 and the emergency room was packed. I walk in, there was a candy striper nurse sitting at the check in table processing people through to the next whatever. God bless her, she was the first to have to deal with me. She looked to be close to 70 years old, someones grandmother, and here I come. She looked up at me and asked, "Is there something I can help you with?" A normal person would have responded in kind, me....I looked right back at her, held up the wad of towels and my severed finger and asked, "Yeah, you got someone back there who can put this s-t back together for me?" To me, times of trauma are no time for silly questions. You work in an emergency room, I'm not there because I just happen to need something from the hospital. The short of it, the finger was too mangled to do anything with, I was losing the end of it. The only good thing that came out of that evening was the morphine.

The follow up to repair my damaged digit was interesting as well. Not wanting it to heal in a deformed manner the doctor I was seeing suggested a procedure to make it look somewhat normal and be functional, to a point. To this day I still have sensitivity at the tip of that finger and believe me it lets you know when it's cold out. Anyway, we schedule the surgery. I show up and we start doing the paper work and what not. This is annoying at best. Due to liability concerns you end up signing about three thousand pages of documentation beforehand. The most interesting being the living will. This is the one where you tell them whether or not to pull the plug in the event something goes wrong and you become a vegetable. At the bottom

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