Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia. Part Five

Roommate was already asleep as I walked into the double occupancy room that we shared. I was exceptionally lucid and calm, the latter not being a character trait that I am associated with. I undressed, turned out the light and began to think of how relaxed I was about surgery. “Piece of Cake” I murmured to myself as I heard the roommate’s phone vibrate and whirr, probably a late good luck message from his girlfriend. I turned my thoughts to what the Polish MMA chap said at dinner and was again confident about tomorrow’s event. “What would Donald Alexander Smith think?” I asked myself. He would consider the surgery a minor triviality in a lifetime of hard-work, fighting adversity and acquisition through skill and fairness…to die with Stainless Integrity.

Lord Strathcona, after Smith was given a baroncy, is the closest approximation to the Canadian male archetype. He and Pierre Berton are personal heroes of mine. They represent, in my opinion, a disappearing breed of Sangfroid Optimism and Resilience. Smith was a Scot who immigrated to Canada in the mid 19^th century and worked for 25 years in the Labradorean outback where he rose to the top of the HBC. Not only that, he saved all of his pennies and slowly built up majority stock control of the company and with his growing wealth, also managed to finance the building of the CPR. Indeed he drove into the ground the Last Spike (on his second try, he was a Klutz). His intense blue eyes, staring out from eye-brows that could easily anchor two tug-boats, were something to behold. The stare of profound intelligence with a hardened but not unfriendly look of determination…Craichallachie indeed!

Pierre Berton, my Canadian hero of the 20^th century, was also a determined and resilient optimist. He wrote incessantly about the same men and women I admire who built this country from a windswept, rocky, and intimidating claw, into a windswept, rocky, and intimidating community of divergent interests, complex opinion and passions of many kinds. A tapestry of culture that superseded the nascent British antecedent into a profound and truly Canadian continent that only recently has begun to erode by the intellectual truncheon of reaction and pure ‘market forces.’ Market forces that do not echo a grand vision of capitalists as Smith, or of CCF hard working writers as Berton, who both knew personal responsibility was a hand maiden of communal success and not merely a tool for personal, mammon inculcated greed and avarice in the “’ME ME ME’” and everyone else can eat CROW” mentality of the new Libertarian. . . .

All of these thoughts were swirling in my head until the lights came on in an abrupt flash of supreme efficiency. Indeed, the Shaving Lady had come to wake us up. The Shaving Lady was, I believe, a recent immigrant from the Philippines who was friendly and perfunctory. It was 6:00 AM and I was awoken by the neon light above my head (behind the bed on the wall) and the inevitable brilliant supernova that explodes in the retina and the neurons being blasted by the information detailing: “BRIGHT LIGHT..AHHH..SLEEP IS OVER.” “Gooooooood morning Mr. Goodwin, how are you?” said the Shaving Lady as she concurrently sprayed what seemed to be glacial imported water directly onto my groin area from a spray bottle…”Brahhhhhhhh” went my mind as I struggled to answer….”Uh, good good good, how are you?” … “Fine Mr. Goodwin, sorry to rush, but had to get the kids to school and the husband was late from his night shift, so I need to hurry in order to not hinder the first surgery of the day” …. She had a quick staccato English delivery, the diction was not imperfect and she began immediately to begin shaving all of my midsection for the surgery that was to follow. “Okay Mr. Goodwin, you are OK now? The nurse will be in later to take you downstairs” … in my mind I thought I was also ‘OK’ prior to being sprayed half awake and raw shaved but no matter, I was quite OK now, and may have even lost some weight in the process. I also thought about how many people have seen my penis in the past three months, I would argue that at least 5 times more people had seen its middling presence in this amount of time than in the past 30 years of my life (unless there are photos online that I am not cognizant of). The loudspeaker called out at 7:30 AM that aside from those involved in surgery, everyone else was “Welcome to join us in the Lounge for some breakfast!”…the message was always cheerful in saccharine rich voice not unlike the matrons from “Girl Interrupted”..a factor of the nut-house that was becoming all too familiar.

Prior to surgery I was told that I would be the last patient of the day. A fact that was explained because I was apparently the healthiest patient to be operated on that day. Well, this was an interesting development, would the surgeon be tired? I thought to myself. Would the surgeon be thinking about the new girlfriend that he just started dating? Well, as long as the wife didn’t know, who cares right? Would he be worried about the fact that his daughter is not marrying a Sikh…but some Tamil rabble who was not worthy of the substantial dowry of a well established abdominal surgeon! The shame. Distraction…that was the handmaiden of the end of a cycle of routine. Distraction was the trait that ruled the roost of the human mind at the end of day. I am not immune to this harrowing deficiency of the brain…I would often think of the fire-brewed Stone Hammer Dark Ale to be enjoyed after many hours of filing farm insurance claims or of the triple gin and soda after rustling up the pickers on the night shift in the heart-blackening warehouse job in Kingston after a 15 hour day. The difference of course that if my mind slipped into distraction and I mis-filed a claim or short-talked a subaltern in the warehouse the slight could easily be remedied with a file audit or two medium cups of coffee with a makeup-chat respectively. A surgeon being distracted by the confines of the mind at the end of a 25 surgery a day routine could lead to an artery being severed, a testicle being lopped off, a urethra being infected, a bowel being punctured, a level of anathesia being administered at too high, or even more unnerving, too low a level…an instrument being used that was un-sterilized from the last surgery, a groin area being opened on the wrong side, etc etc etc….these were the concerns as I reached for the Toronto Sun in order to distract me from the notion that my surgeon would be distracted during the hernia repair…hoo-boy, I was becoming slightly un-hinged but I quickly put these fears to rest by reassuring myself that the surgeon was a professional, this was not some bush hospital in 1876 Sudan, this was a modern facility, in Canada no less, and I was certain everything was to go according to plan at 2:00 PM, no big deal. I laid on the my bed doing the cross-word as Roommate was interrupted from his 3500th text to his Girlfriend or Hockey-Buddy or Gym-Buddy or Helicopter Mom or Weather Reporter or Professor or TA…(who knows) by the angelic nurse of the pre-op and was walked away with a rather tentative look on his face. It was around 11:30 AM and the obligatory PA system message for Lunch rang over the airwaves in my room (Please join us, except for those with surgery today, for a lunch filled with fellowship in the lounge..etc etc), I was not terribly hungry as I ate five muffins (3 Bran, two Cranberry) at the 9:30 ‘snack and bitch’ the night before and I continued to peruse the Sun with increasing annoyance at the obvious Republican-Populist-Libertarian Drivel that continued to distort reality and convince the every-man to continue to vote against his interests, to continue the ‘forward’ march into free-avarice oblivion that will destroy the social-contract, will destroy the boring, plodding, prudent, yet incredibly fiscally and socially successful Canadian model of private-public synthesis that marked our greatness for 150 years. No no no, why worry about the collapsing of the Ontario manufacturing sector or the surgical sausage incremental politics that are eroding our freedoms? Why worry about that when we can be amused and emotionally invested in the big If…could Toronto Mayor Rob Ford really lose the weight in his self-administered challenge? Yes, it seems that Distraction is the constant in all affairs these days, although some things are never new under the Sun.

As my mind was melting at the asinine incredulity of today’s idiocy in all levels of public and private life, the Angelic Pre-Op Nurse (I forget her name) came into the room and told me it was my time to be brought Downstairs to the Pre-Op area. She smiled with a strong caring apprehension, not apprehension in the worry that my procedure, and that of all the other patients would go awry, but with a apprehension of profound and genuine empathy…this nurse was the Real Deal, she obviously truly cared about her charges or patients (or she was an actress worthy of high acclaim) and she gingerly yet gently brought me downstairs while concurrently telling me what was about to happen. First, once we arrived downstairs, I was to be placed in a comfortable bed and would be administered ‘medication’, after which, she stipulated the time frame would be about 35 minutes to an hour (was I ordering a Pizza?, I thought). Then I would be brought to the operating table for the ‘simple’ hernia repair that would itself take ‘around fifty minutes’ to complete. So, the sojourn seemed to be a rather easy affair, the Polish MMA guy must have been correct in his debrief about Surgery Day, all was to be well and good. We were in the elevator (the nurse and I) and she pressed the button to the floor of the first floor lounge but pressed the button that opened the back of the elevator, the button that required the key to operate, the opening salvo of the Surgery was ominous and unsettling.

Perdition: Thy name is Hernia. Part Four

I was feeling confident about surgery the following day and decided to go back to the third floor Shufflers lounge and watch the Toronto Maple Leafs face-off against the exciting 2012 edition of the Calgary Flames. There are two observations to be made about the TV culture in a Hernia Hospital. The first is that I would not want to be a female patient within the confines of a hospital that caters to Hernia repair exclusively. The reasoning is simple, men suffer from a much greater instance of Hernias (my source is observation, please refer to a medical journal, and/or I will insert proof later), I would reckon that the ratio is 30 men to 2 women. This makes for female consternation with regards to TV watching, to the scent of the place, to the manners at the dinner table, to the overall functionality of the place: it caters to men. The TV problem really takes precedence over all other facets of male-dominance in the hospital. The only thing on was sports, it was absolutely the only thing that was apportioned onto the luxurious 65 inch digital High definition screen. I must confess that I am not a die hard sports fan, I like Hockey, I like skiing, some soccer, figure skating (Yes I do), proper boxing, and most individual sports. But not religiously, not in the manner that others do. I don’t analyze the standings, I don’t know immediately who was traded where, I don’t know about the assault charges or the drug addictions (although that would be interesting), I thought March Madness had to do with exams. So, it was with bemusement that I took in the real face, the true essence of the sports fan, but more than that, I witnessed the Leafs fan in action.

Back to that later, firstly though, the women who ventured into the TV area of the lounge usually lasted for, well, 35 seconds if they did not have the usual electronic appendage in the form of blackberry or Ipad. She walks in, gives the look around, no one acknowledges her presence, she asks, “So, whats on?”, ”…” , “uh, OK, well, hmm, just like at home eh? I don’t have the remote! (Nervous Laughter)”, “…, yeah, you know how it is with men (Confident laughter of men overcompensating/ trying to be apart of the ‘brotherhood’ of powerless fools)”, “ah, well (sigh, she resigns herself to her personal glowing screen and/or moves into the table and chair section)”. I say nothing, I acknowledge nothing, I look around quickly, I see failure and fraudulent bonhomie, I see men with no power, I see women longing for a strange likeness, something to validate their presence in this enclave of stench and corroded dreams. The husbands of the women eventually come, with their sons in their hockey coats, and the husbands, the visiting husbands, now take their place in the ring of hockey watching, in the ring of silence, the stubborn, bitter silence, that the wife never bought into, that this hapless family, dad driving the forklift between midnight and eight, thinking and planning for his sons eventual success in making it to the ‘show’, sometimes fuming at the son “why didn’t he take that pass right…jeez. I flooded the bloody backyard and I ran plays for five hours…and I work ten hours a day, all for Todd and Blake to screw up?! They won’t make it past ‘C’, c’mon!” All the while the wife comes home after taking calls at the insurance company, taking the “Yogurt Challenge” or some other insipid grasp at meaningless and vapid self-improvement…watching her life vanish before her eyes, the moment never even passed, it was never there. And so, she sits now, at the card table in the Hernia Hospital, playing solitaire, and staring out the window while her husband, not a patient, stews in front of the Leafs.

The Toronto Maple Leafs are a hockey team in the National Hockey League. Their history, to a certain extent, is illustrious, but moreover, the team has been unlucky. Unlucky in management, unlucky in outcome, unlucky in coaching, unlucky in mentality, and most importantly, due to, or the reverse of these former facets of unluckiness…the team is unlucky in their fan base. Yes. I grew up on the West Island of Montreal, a veritable enclave of middle-class meritocracy and a joyful mix of Francophone, Anglophone and smatterings of Allophone 15 minutes west of downtown. I knew one Leafs fan growing up, a great friend and a hot tempered man of Irish extraction now living in Chicago, and I am not certain he remains a Leafs fan now. But really, the majority, and I mean 90%+ of my contemporaries were Habs fans..(another beast that has recently begun to turn ugly and bitter). Some friends, those who liked to turn the screws of the Habs fans..were Nordiques or Bruins fans…both were considered maladjusted contrarians and welcomed with open hearts into our circle of friends. Anyway, the point is that I knew very little of Ontario culture, and the culture of “Leafs Nation”. I have lived in Ontario in a more or less permanent fashion since the fall of 2003 and have, for the most part, tolerated the experience with fairly moderate enjoyment (I believe this is the default setting for living here).  I was friends with Art-Types and Music Geeks, and my best friend from university, like me, is a current affairs/ Personal Computer game nut and we watched sports at no time. Therefore, my experiences with the Leafs fan began only in earnest when I moved, with my girlfriend at the time, to Guelph, the town in which she grew-up.

But, really, only at the Hernia Hospital did I witness the Leafs fan in his true habitat, in his true essence. Diane Fossey would have swooned at the prospect of the experience. The game was part-way through as I lumbered gingerly onto a corduroy easy-chair and began to soak up the madness. “Ah”, I thought to myself, “excellent chairs, really plush, but not too soft, not much give, perfect really” and suddenly a man began to have, or so I thought, a terrible fit of Tourette’s: “For F__K’s Sakes..do it right you f---ken f_g_ot! Godamned fkin idiot, whadda piece of s—t…nice one Burke, great fkin job there, ya fkin f-g!!”…Whoa, what was that? A smallish red-faced man, sporting the accent of the eastern reaches of Ontario, I would say he worked in a warehouse between Brockville and Cornwall, was spouting these incredibly ridiculous and abhorrently offensive epithets at the passive and indifferent television. Then I realized, in my mirth regarding my chair, that the Flames had scored, I believe Cammalleri provided the play or set-up, and the leafs were down a goal, or something like that. He was favouring his groin, this crazed maniac, but the grimace on his visage was beyond mere pain from surgery, no, this was Twenty Year Hate, Twenty Year Bitterness….he could not have been older than me, that is to say, 31…and I would say he was happy for the first ten years of his life . . . Until that one fateful day when his grandfather and he went to the Maple Leaf Gardens for a night that would change everything, it was the winter of 1991 and the Leafs beat the North Stars 6-1. The young chap from between Brockville and Cornwall became, therefore, essentially possessed, in the demonic sense, by the demon ‘Leafs Fan’. They came close in those years, to, you know, Winning It All, as they say. But they never did, and for the next Twenty Years, picture the mug-shot composites that the police use in Oklahoma regarding the downward spiral of meth-use. The boy’s face began to harden into a grimace of absolute sour-bitterness. The Leafs fan, not the casual fair-weather fan who trades stocks in the day and rents expensive women from the Belorussian consulate at night in Toronto. No, the real fan is the guy who works a crap job for 80 hours a week with no pension, a Sour Bastard without equal. Other true blues began to start weighing in with equally incisive commentary and soon I was surrounded by a maelstrom of seething men, screaming, grunting, gesticulating, bashing, and abruptly leaving from the scene. I tried to hide my amusement and horror and I think I succeeded, my chair was in a darkened corner of the room, and besides, I was still one of the new guys, and my opinions would count for nothing in any event. However, the dark cloud of insight and realization began to pour into my mind, as it always does, and I thought as I quickly looked over at the 500 piece puzzle box with frayed corners and the ‘bookshelf’ with battered condensed reader’s digest novellas. I flashed back to the angry, bitter, and radically unhappy hockey watchers…and the insight came in strong and true: This is a Madhouse. I was to ascend out of my own chair, I was the last one in the lounge, or at least the TV area, and walked back to my room. Preparing for sleep before the Big Day, or as some of my follow patients would probably call it, Game Day.

Perdition: Thy Name is Hernia Part Three

The Hernia Haven’s interior had not changed since it was inaugurated in 1970 and that did not bother me. In fact, I enjoyed the atmosphere immensely until I realized that the medical technology had not progressed either . . . First came another blood test, but since they had already performed a test on me in January, I could see those results. Not a very good situation for a Paranoid Super-Hypochondriac. Well well, my White blood cell level was .1 too low!! IT WAS FLAGGED. Oh no, not the usual reaction, such as, “hmm, maybe I cannot get surgery treatment,” for me, the reaction was “NO! CANCER! CANCER! CANCER! CANCER! I have CANCER! This is soooo typical, just so typical…go in for surgery, end up with BLOOD CANCER...I smoked that long?! It couldn’t have been that long! I am too young, this is not real. I’m fine, I’m fine...hooo…ok ok ok ok.” I mentioned this to the nurse who was too busy obtaining more blood to notice my green pallored skin and profuse sweating. “No no no old boy, mustn’t give away the game here..SANGFROID, yeah, be cool, they cannot know your possible condition.” Another blast came through though. I had lost 24 pounds in 40 days and immediately I received a mug for the ‘accomplishment’ which read “I did It!” on its side. I am fairly certain this mug is usually given to harried and nose-grindstone men who take no quarter but was finally brought to bear by a wife who poured all the Canadian down the drain saying “Just once Harold, just once, you need to do this for me! Get that weight down, fix that damn hernia and stop bitching about the Leafs!” So I, a borderline maniac with a pulse rate of 150 after looking at the blood report, smiled and said to the nurse: “Well you know, it’s a New Year and everything, haha, good excuse to get into shape.” A knowing smile as a response, a promise of a soup and sandwich after the admission procedure and by god, I was on my way.

Hernia Heaven has three levels. The main or second level holds the ‘public’ area: the main reception, the waiting room for all of the initial prospective patients who need check-ups and after noticing the price for the stay, twenty percent begin to express agitation and proceed to waddle out of the hospital as indignant as an obese flier denied three plane seats for the price of one bottom. Some are barking out orders for getting the ‘deal’ done, as if they are back in the corner office, looking down at the merciless crawl of the United Nations of Toronto, “No Assan, not twenty percent! I told those greedy bastards 19.899…do you get the difference?? That is a three million dollar margin! You want chicken feed!? No…I want a 7:45 tee-time, you know how the sun is at the Granite! You call him an ‘Asper’?! Jesus….he can’t run a treadmill!”. Quite interesting stuff if you think about it . . . The lower lever holds another ‘lounge’ which houses a Tavern Shuffleboard table (another hold over from the 70s. It’s actually a very fun game, the only other place I have seen this contraption was in a pub in Chester Nova Scotia, which I would recommend to anyone in the town to visit, and in a tavern in Westfort ON, which I would not.) The lounge also had a piano and an acoustic guitar…although I must confess the artistic types had languished into oblivion, I would have liked to have seen the lounge in 1973, yep, there is Arlo on the Guitar…shame about the Hernia though, he really should have not tried the Streaking Leopard position with Shanie that night….and, oh snap, there is Rick on the Piano, speed-balls and the Big Pink marathon sessions caught up with him, and that last bassline was once strum over the line. “No more Cane on the Brazzos,” that was a classic night in the Hernia Lounge, Rick, Arlo, and Randy (what a bore!) reminiscing about the CN Festival Express (Randy always tries to pretend he was at the venue…at least this was before the radio show), about you know, Janice, the Texas Mickeys, the smoke, the fire…all gone.

But back to 2012 where the lounge was filled with glowing screens of various sizes, bleeps, personalized ring tones, scratches, grunts, murmurs, furrowed brows, PRESSURE. No music, no smiles, no laughter, no conversation…hard looks.

Next to the lounge lies the ‘cafeteria’ where once admitted, the patient receives his/her initial soup and sandwich, and thereafter dinner, breakfast, lunch, and the 9:00 PM snack. I sat here after kissing my wife and daughter goodbye and thoughtfully enjoyed my first taste of bread in 40 days (Turkey and Lettuce, no cheese, no mayo .. this was not a choice) and an excellent Potato and Carrot pureed cream soup with a mug of coffee and the silent call of past glories and strange adolescent memories that tend to always emerge in these moments of bizarre loneliness and sterile surroundings. The sandwich went down easy with a cup of black coffee brought to the table by a young chap with two scars running length-wise on the left side of his neck…hmmm, I would imagine that the supple life of coffee pouring may not echo the previous life of distributing other forms of stimulants, it also could simply been a case of misadventure, a mere glance, benign in intent, to a hard ruffian on the other side of Isabella. Then, in his mind’s eye it seemed like an eternity, the other youth charged across the street, and the tell tale glint appeared in the sunlight, the awful reflection of cheap Chinese stainless-steel in the midday sun and ‘whisssshh’, two quick flashes and my kind ‘coffee-man’ was on the run, blood leaping from his neck as he screamed and lurched towards the nearest clinic. Or not.

These musings come and go, and I soon realized that my orientation was about to occur on the third floor, the realm of the shufflers, or patients of the 7500 per year hernia procedures. I took the stairs, unconsciously relishing the last 24 hours or so of relative freedom and sound mobility. The stairs were carpeted and I soon came in contact with the lumbering masses of men (and some women) slowly moving up and down the vertical thoroughfare. Their eyes were strained, but the Sangfroid of these chaps was encouraging, it was similar yet certainly not equal too (not by a long long long mile) the congregation of men in wartime, everyone knew their number could be up at any time, their boots and puttees were filled with blood, grime, rot, grease. The conditions were rat infested, they were in constant discomfort, but so was everybody else, so why bitch about it? Well, this was the third floor, this was the place where I would remain, more or less, for the next 80 or so hours. The first thing that I could discern was a scent, it was different from the usual hospital variety of pot-pourri, and it was unmistakable. Feet, or more precisely, the scent of stewing and unwashed feet, the kind of scent that would greet the industrial bowling shoe cleaner or the scrub boy at the local mosque, the thick musk of feet coupled with the faint scent of anti-septic and the bowels of 72 hours of opiate induced constipation (more on that later).

I could see the nurse’s station, manned, as it were, by tough, semi-sterned looking hearty women who would not be unlike their counterparts in the doukabour communities of the northwest or the Hani peoples of the interior Chinese province of Yunnan. These women were hardened by years of dealing with cranky, farty, delirious, elderly, diabetic, filthy, sloven, leaking, foolish, absent-minded, irascible, idiotic, sometimes bigoted men who sometimes were grateful, sometimes thankful, but mainly stupid and brutish. Some men demanded cigarettes right after surgery, or stormed out of the hospital still bloodied and in their pathetic smocks, crying out that the whole thing was a scam and they deserved better, only to find themselves back in the hospital one hour later, somewhat repentant but thoroughly embarrassed by their childish explosion of infantile pouting. If anyone wants to smash the union of nurses or diminish their importance, or cut into their salaries or treat them like simple minded hand maidens to the physicians they should spend a week in any hospital but specifically spend a week in the Hernia Repair Centre and perhaps they will realize the absolute angelic disposition these women possess to deal with the horrors of the XY on a day in and day out (really, night in and night out as well) basis and will give them the respect and the Money they soundly deserve. I will be out there if any government (I give none any quarter) tries to cut into the nurses, they are amazing and I will gladly stand shoulder to shoulder with these granite souled women against the rising tide of the neo-libertarian madness that has hijacked any semblance of common civil synthesis and balance that once sustained this country though thick and thin.

But back to the third floor and the orientation. It was 4:30 PM and the ‘new guys’, e.g., the bright eyed, naïve chumps, resplendent in dress shirts, belted pants, and a haughty disposition (thoughts of the new guys were that of disgust at the unwashed veterans: “Jeez, can these guys put on some clothes, or have a shower for goodness sakes!?). The nurses shooed out the old guard and forced them to turn off the soccer game they were engrossed in watching (‘C’mon’, ‘the orientation doesn’t even matter!’, ‘who cares about the TV, they can’t even hear it’ came from the mouths of the grisly post-surgery patricians) and told us about the next day: the day of reckoning. We could not eat after midnight, no big deal for me, since I was basically not eating at all for the four or five weeks during my ‘reduction diet.’ We could not get up after surgery for four hours (‘pffft’, I thought, what nonsense, this is non-invasive, I’ll be up in 20 minutes, I have to watch the habs play the bruins’). We had to go down-stairs for ‘pre-op’ 1.5 hours prior to surgery in order to be sufficiently non-sombulent for the ‘harrowing’ surgery (‘ya right’ again I dismissed the procedure as nothing but a mosquito sting), and of course, we would be shaved and scrubbed in the AM of the Day (‘hee-hee’ went some of the boys). And that was it, we were left to our own devices until dinner was called (5:30 SHARP as I recall). Ah yes, the first meal, the chance to speculate on the next day with the new guys and also to build ‘fellowship’ with the grisly guys in track-suits and baggy work-out clothes, although there were some, ahem, ‘Mediterranean’ types in seemingly gold stitched house coats who talked into their cell-phones…Think Frank D’Angelo slanging powerdrinks at Copps Coliseum and you approach the comical disposition (inadvertent) of these legitimate businessmen.

My roommate, a 19 year old gym enthusiast from the Ottawa region, sat down and tucked into a pan-fried white fish filet (actually surprisingly excellent, as was all of the food at the hospital) with three flash-frozen white buns (think Swiss Chalet) heated just right, watching the butter melt into these buns was similar to first seeing Scarlett Johansson in Ghost-World, I was transmogrified, I was titillated, I was in a state of sensuous delirium that I sensed the Bodhisattva escalating me towards the outer rim of nirvana, and the first bite, well, that was it. Between trying to hide my ecstasy of the White Bun, and my glee at watching some of the gentlemen in their house-coat finery, my roommate got into brass tacks with one of the old guard at our table. He appeared to be a MMA fighter of Polish extraction (we all had name tags) from Toronto. He was going home the next day, so he was at the end of his cycle, tour, or stay. Roommate asked him what all us bushy-tailed new guys were thinking about, the Surgery. “Well” started Polish-MMA, “its no big deal, you know, they kinda drug you up, and they walk you into the OR and put you onto the table, you are really out of it and boom, its done, back to your room and you just sleep it off, not too bad.” Well then, that’s a relief! The curious factor throughout his explanation of how the whole operation was ‘no big deal’ was that he was holding his lower side, he kept on adjusting his loose gray sweat-suit, he had a slight grimace on his face when he reached for the pepper, his eye-brows were slightly furrowed and his eyes were tinged with the slightest evidence of blood-shottedness. At the time though, I thought not much of it, I just thought we was a ‘junk-adjuster’ that is ubiquitous in the MMA or jock trade. Not a slight mind you, just a personality trait consummate with the breed. At that, dinner ended and we saw the MMA-Polish shuffle (another red-flag ignored, hmm, maybe that’s how 911 flew under the radar, jeez, so this is what it’s like to get it wrong in the CIA) off into the ante-chamber, or the music ‘lounge’ previously explained. Roommate and I were now almost cocky about tomorrow, we thought this was going to be an absolute cake-walk, in, out, I be back jogging 10KM in less than a week…Hoorah!