Doctor's Appointment or "The Big Eep"

Nervous.

Dreading. 

Dreading nothing will get done today.

Dreading I'll undergo a procedure.  Not good with lying on my back - well the last time he inclined me - and whine about the tourniquet.

It was six years ago when I came for a ganglion cyst resting on the tendon on my other thumb.

"I can give you cortisone."

"That didn't work last time."

"Then it should be excised."

"Let's do it."

Flashback eleven years before...

... In an HMO on the Long Island Jewish Hospital campus, I was referred to a hand specialist for a ganglion cyst on my left middle finger.  The cortisone shot felt cold, but other than some unpleasant side effects nothing happened.  We had to schedule an outpatient procedure in the HMO's surgical room.  The resulting experience was immortalized in an APAzine.  
In 2005 I gave him a copy of the mini-comic.  He got a kick out of it.

I don't know anyone else who walks around recording their diagnoses. He always did, except now people transcribe them for him.

Anyway he has his own place, his own building and not some shared clinic.  His own surgical equipment in the exam rooms?  He has full surgical facilities.  The one I was in six years ago was where the impromptu procedure took place.  He doesn't know yet that in the six weeks waiting for this day that I'd seen the proverbial unknown devil and had X-rays and a diagnosis, except I can no longer straighten my left thumb out as much as the other.

In the exam room.  This is an exam exam room. A laptop. Pretty screensaver I remember from back then is also on a wall mounted monitor.  He ski's I see...

Been moved to another room - definitely equipped for surgery.  I remember this room. I wonder if my description on the phone in August gave them a little heads up of what I had?

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Back at work a day later. 

He heard the 2 month history, gave me the hurts-like-hell shot, and took all of 8ish minutes for the procedure. Was rather relaxing. Then Dad and I went to a really good Kosher Deli nearby.  All this prospect about sedation for a little snip was such BS. 

I knew it would be sore today etc, but it means I get full use of my hand back, and that means everything to me.  From the first moment after the procedure I could bend my thumb again. Maybe by the end of the week I can "flick" things, hold up a cooking pot with two hands, zip up a jacket as we see 50sF for the first time since April, make a sincere fist...

Well okay, everything in its time.