UNDER THE KNIFE FOR ROUND 2

The first time my son went in for surgery, I was a nervous wreck. I paced the floor and repeatedly annoyed the nurse (“No, Mr. Gibbons, nothing new to report, mainly because you’re still holding him.”)

This time, I went for a sausage biscuit.

My son, Parker, was going in for a second hernia surgery. Since he came through the first surgery with relative ease, I was confident that he would do just as well this time. Add to that the fact that I skipped breakfast, and a sausage biscuit just seemed like the right thing to do.

Don’t get me wrong. There is still gobs of fretting and worrying. After all, this is The Dude, and he’s going in for surgery. I think anyone who’s little one has had surgery can attest that the single worst part of the whole day is the time when the nurse comes in and takes your child, and he gives you a look that says, “Hey! What did I do?”

I was really hoping that we would not have to have a second surgery. Before the first one, the doctor said that he could fix both hernias at the same time, but that there was a chance that the right side would heal up on its own. We rolled the dice in the hopes that he would have some miraculous healing happen. Apparently, miraculous healings do not apply to hernias.

The surgery itself takes about an hour. Eating a sausage biscuit takes about 15 minutes, if you stretch it out. So my wife and I had about 45 minutes of just hanging out and waiting. We decided to spend the time constructively.

First, we held a meaningful discussion about televisions. My wife said that a huge bank of multiple televisions would be really cool, because you could put on video of fish swimming, just as the hospital had done. I told her that this was silly, because you could, instead, have each television showing a different sporting event. This conversation ate up about 30 seconds.

Next, we moved on to people-watching. Or, as was the case, people listening, since the family sitting near us was loud enough that you may very well have heard them.

They first starting talking when a doctor came out and said their child was fine and was resting comfortably. He then handed the mother a plastic bag labeled with big, scary biohazard warnings on it. The mother smiled a surprised smile, as if the doctor had handed her a long-lost family heirloom, rather than something that had been extracted from a human body. “He said he wanted to keep it!” she said, checking out the contents of the bag from all angles.

She then passed the bag around to each family member, each of whom offered insightful commentary, such as “It’s bent” and “Only two incisions!” and “Interesting color.” My wife and I did our best to see what was in the bag, because let’s face it, an interestingly colored bent object that requires two incisions to remove is not something you get to see every day. After the family got a good look at the item,

Mom dutifully stuffed it in her purse, so we never did find out what it was. My wife thinks that it was some sort of a brace or support that had been inserted and had since served its purpose. I think he was a sword swallower who slipped during a performance. (My wife is far more practical than I.)

The family then moved on to trivia time. Little did we know that we would be part of the game, but when one of the members of the family began reading trivia from a magazine, I could not resist.

Every question he would read, I would lean over to my wife and give the answer. She asked me if I would like to go sit with them. I got the hint and kept my answers to myself.

The upside of the other family’s discussions is that it helped time move at a good clip. Before we knew it, the nurse came out and told us that he was out of surgery. I was expecting a fairly unhappy dude when we came into the recovery room, but instead was greeted with a baby sleeping soundly. (Yes, the anesthesia had worn off. This was an actual nap.) He slept for the better part of the day and managed to sleep for a good chunk of the night, too.

He seems to be doing fine now, and will probably never even know he had the surgeries. I am thankful that everything turned out so well. Looking back, I can only see one downside to the whole thing: I still have no idea what they pulled out of that one patient.