Going Under the Knife (Again)

Newsletter 2023-03-24

I’m never looking in a mirror again.

As I got out of the shower, I was greeted by an unwelcome sight. Well, more unwelcome than usual. In the reflection, there was something new that definitely wasn’t supposed to be there.

"Can you come look at this?" I called out to my patient and ever loving wife. That is a sentence you never, ever want to hear from the bathroom. When Lola promised to stick with me "in sickness and in health," she didn’t realize just how loaded that phrase would end up being.

In her defense, I lulled her into a false sense of security by being extremely healthy for the first thirty-seven years of my life. Then, last summer, my wrist started hurting. While I was looking into that, my appendix exploded and I nearly died. As I recovered from that surgery (plus the one I underwent to remove a wrist bone a month later), I came down with a serious, recurrent infection known as c. diff that decimated my quality of life for months on end. My bathroom and I became constant companions until I was saved by a transplant of fecal bacteria from a kind, anonymous donor in Minneapolis. Minnesota nice is a real thing, even if it doesn’t always smell that great.

If this were the 1800s, I would have been dead many times over from any one of those incidents. Thankfully, this was the modern era, and my life was finally back on track. As of last week, I had managed to stay out of the hospital for six consecutive months, which was a personal best for me lately. I was off all medications, and I hadn’t missed a day in the gym since last November. I was arguably the healthiest I’ve ever been.

Then I looked in the mirror Sunday. I was in an exam room with a surgeon by Wednesday morning. I’ll go under the knife again in April. My initial self-diagnosis was correct in the worst possible way, except for one small detail. I thought the problem was in one spot. It wasn’t. It was in three.