Today I had surgery. It was unexpected but necessary. I’m assuming some of you have been there.<\/p>\n
When we finally got down to the procedure, it turned out that there were two interesting items of note: (1) They couldn’t really anesthetize me completely, so there was going to be pain, and (2) I needed to keep absolutely still for the entire procedure. No dramatic mouth breathing, nothing that could cause me to move unexpectedly.<\/p>\n
So for the entire duration of the surgery, I needed to remain totally immobile, regardless of whatever pain I was feeling. I did my best to comply, and somehow we muddled through.<\/p>\n
Afterward, the surgeon complemented me on my ability to remain calm in the face of such extreme discomfort. “With any luck,” he said, “this is the worst pain you will ever experience in your life.”<\/p>\n
At that point I felt it only fair to let him in on a little secret. “It wasn’t all that hard,” I told him. “I just reminded myself that everything is relative, and that there are worse forms of pain than this.”<\/p>\n
“The entire time,” I explained, “I remained focused on the memory of my very worst romantic breakup. Compared to that, this was a piece of cake.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today I had surgery. It was unexpected but necessary. I’m assuming some of you have been there. When we finally got down to the procedure, it turned out that there were two interesting items of note: (1) They couldn’t really anesthetize me completely, so there was going to be pain, and (2) I needed to … Continue reading “A piece of cake”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20703"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20703"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20703\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20704,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20703\/revisions\/20704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}