Service advisory

Temporary, but sort of permanent

Heads up, guys: Starting Monday we’re doing what in the business is called a skip week. (Don’t worry, paid subscribers, you’re covered; we throw the meter until I return, and you still get your full month/year of service.)

The occasion is not a national holiday. I am having another damn operation. This one is not on my guts, though; it’s on my knee, soon to be my ex-knee. It’s TKR time!

Though not athletic, I have made good use of my legs over the years, especially in New York, where there are so many things to do and reasons to ambulate. I walked, I ran, I danced, I hopped turnstiles, stage-dove, all that. In recent years I’ve been more deskbound but until recently my mobility held up very well.

Alas, the piper has come to collect. Both my knees have been bone-on-bone for years. I get around, but the point of pain comes earlier; stairs are daunting, running injurious. I’m in a good space between too early and too late. It’s time, at least for one of them.

As carved up as I’ve been, it’s one thing to lose organs or pieces thereof and walk away clean, more or less; quite another to have to replace one of the body parts with which I was born with a piece of machinery.

I’m grateful that they can do this, mind. It’s great to live in this age of medical wonders and I feel bad for those who came before it and had to make do, and those down the road who will be denied proper treatment as we revert to barbarism and treat failing limbs and organs with homeopathy and tallow. Antibiotics and opioids rule.

But still: a prosthesis. I know it’s far from Otto Dix war casualty territory, and the effect of it probably won’t be too noticeable. Plus I do have an intraocular lens, two dental bridges, and a pin in my other knee. There’s already plenty to pick out of the tray when they burn me off.

Nonetheless I’m a little surprised at how the prospect is affecting me. I thought today of the scene at the end of Serpico, where he’s waiting with his dog for a ride to get out. Prior to that, just before the glimpse of the Knapp commission, we hear the doctor’s voice describing the effect of his injuries from his shooting: “In all probability, the hearing in your left ear won’t come back.... Your left side will feel stiff occasionally. Once in a great while you may experience some dizziness...” When I was a young and healthy kid watching that, it caught me up short; he didn’t just get shot and recover, I thought; he lost something, and it won’t come back. It fits the feeling of the movie’s end, especially with the reprise of that beautiful Mikis Theodorakis theme that hearkens back to distant and unrecoverable shores. Now I am there. Not a casualty of anything but long life. But still.

Take care, see you ‘round the bend.