Lying there, shirtless, I waited beneath the fluorescent lights, alone for a quarter hour, thinking how lonely a hospital room can be. And so it would have been, except I’m a veteran with this procedure.
In comes Surgeon, we greet, and I say, “Cut on me.” We locate the three lipomas that I want removed from my arms and chest, three being a standard insurable amount, and then he throws one more in for free—each now having its own X inked over it.
Already I’m happier.
By the time he is putting lidocaine in my right arm, his Physician’s Assistant is working on the left arm. Funny, I think, how I feel my right arm being poked, but not my left. He removes the little chunk of annoying—yet benign—fat from my right arm. She from my left. He is now on the chest. Soon he is pulling the suture thread through the cuts. She might be, too, but he is pulling the thread with gusto (he climbed Everest twice), more like a dental hygienist teaching me what it really means to floss, except this is my arm, my chest.
Now enters a nurse, Surgeon leaves, and the PA is on the last lipoma. I say, “Your touch is gentler.” She smiles. The nurse pulls the surgical tray to her side of the bed. “Thank you,” she says to the nurse, “we hadn’t planned it to happen that way.”
What way, I wonder? The good way? The tandem way? The raceway?
She is finishing up. So is the nurse. I’m looking less like a disinfectant spill and more manly, the man recovering from a few knife wounds.
All in all, it was the fastest, most pleasant ten minutes being cut upon. They say I can run, but might want to avoid contact sports. I’m good to go.