Chris Jepson: Do-it-yourself neurological surgery

“I want you to consider voting for Bernie Sanders,” I suggested to Evelyn (name changed), my pre-op intake nurse at Florida Hospital. Evelyn is 60 years old, a black woman with a devil-may-care nonchalance, a quality that always resonates with me. Just minutes earlier we had a moment as she recounted the sorrow of unexpectedly losing her 35-year-old son to a heart aneurysm.

“I was planning his birthday party in two days and ended-up planning his funeral instead,” she said. That’ll tear-up even the most hardened among us, myself included. Evelyn had one child who lived with her and she called him “Baby” and he called her “Baby” too. “We were each other’s Baby,” Evelyn said, “I cry every day.” I told her sorrow is such a part of life and she nodded in agreement without looking up from the intake form.

For five or six years I experienced a dull ache in my left shoulder that I attributed to swimming in competition for 12 years, the relentless repetition of a specific stroke. I resigned myself to a remaining life of intermittent low-grade pain. A year or so ago it got so I couldn’t sleep on my left side and I propped-up my left arm with pillows so as to mitigate the pain. Eventually, I started having pain radiate down my left arm as well as in the center-left part of my back.

I eventually had an MRI and it was determined that I require a posterior cervical foraminotomy, which I am having this week. If you have to have your spinal column opened-up, well, this is about the best possible procedure to have. Hells-bells, I was thinking of ordering the Time-Life Illustrated Series on Do-It-Yourself Neurological Surgery and doing it myself it’s such a cake-walk of an operation. It’s an outpatient procedure for goodness sake, in by 7 a.m., out by noon.

Seriously, I consider myself lucky in this regard. I had cancer in 2011 and was fortunate to “experience” the absolute best cancer to get (if that be your “fate”), thyroid cancer (a high percentage of complete recovery). I had other issues as well, a humongous thyroglossal duct cyst but it all turned out just ducky. Thank you, good doctors.

So the Gods smile upon Christopher Robin with a mere posterior cervical foraminotomy and I will hopefully experience—again—a complete recovery. But I had to spend over three hours last week at the hospital going through pre-op intake. I saw five distinct individuals who poked, prodded and X-rayed not only me, but my insurance. I have such good supplemental insurance that days earlier when leaving my surgeon’s office, they not only opened the door for me as I left but I halfway expected a kiss on the cheek.

I can’t say that pre-op waiting rooms are the happiest of places. Avoid them if you can. But Evelyn is my type of human being. I chatted her up as she went about her business. I asked how long she’d worked at the hospital. Nearly 40 years in various capacities. I asked her age, when she planned on retiring. We talked of children, of life and of sorrow.

As I leave I reach out and touch her forearm and say, “Consider voting for Bernie Sanders. He’s for sure a white boy but he’s been in the corner of equality and justice since the ’60s.” She says she will.

We hug. She smiles at me. Life goes on.