Start Training For Next Operation

It occurred to me the other day that nurses and doctors receive extensive education and training while patients receive nothing.

Patients are thrown into the operating room with no rehearsal whatsoever. This is ridiculous. This is like performing Shakespeare without letting Julius Caesar rehearse the scene where he gets stabbed.

So, to remedy this situation, I have come up with a list of ways to prepare one’s self for a hospital surgical experience, using common household utensils. I hope you will never need it, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. Actually, in this case, it will hurt to be prepared:

At night, invite a loved one to wake you up every hour on the hour and jab you in the butt with a knitting needle.

Have your children hook up an intravenous system to infuse Tabasco sauce directly into your bloodstream with a turkey baster.

While in bed, try to heed nature’s call using nothing but a litersized Pepsi bottle.

Invite the entire neighborhood over for a chit-chat while you are wearing nothing but a backwards shirt with the buttons undone.

Hire the Orkin man to come into your bedroom and treat you for termites.

Set your kitchen timer for 45 minutes. Run down to your unheated basement, strip to your underwear, and wait until “the doctor can see you.”

Before bed every night, ducttape some plastic tubing to tender parts of your body so that if you attempt to turn over at night the tape will rip excruciatingly from your flesh.

Go out in the yard and have the lawn maintenance people irrigate you.

Invite the UPS man into your home so he can express his opinion on whether or not you are retaining water.

Invite an entire community college class into your bedroom. Ask the teacher to deliver a lecture while poking you in appropriate areas with a pointer.

Get your bicycle pump and attempt to inflate yourself.

Go out in the yard, strip naked, sit on a pop-up sprinkler head, and wait for the timer to come on.

Get out your sewing machine and try to sew your fingers together.

Invite a total stranger to sleep in the bed next to you for a week, preferably someone with a hacking cough, or even better, someone who moans or babbles incoherently.

Give the postal carrier the key to your house so sometimes he is standing at the foot of your bed staring at you when you first wake up.

Invite the neighborhood kids over to perform cute little “procedures” on you with a cordless screwdriver.

Install an intercom system in your home that blares nonsense words such as “Stat” at random intervals.

Have your spouse push you around the house in a Barcalounger trailed by a coat rack full of Evian bottles.

Don’t wash your hair for two weeks. Then put on some pajamas with the back flapping open and enter yourself as a float in the Lilac Festival Armed Forces Torchlight Parade.

Lock yourself in a room and watch game shows until you feel suicidal. Then switch to soap operas.

Practice taking your medication by attempting to swallow whole cashews.

Drink a half-bottle of Jack Daniels as an anesthetic and then start jabbering embarrassing family secrets to the plumber.

Insert certain portions of your anatomy into the trash compactor and switch it on.

And finally, jam five $1,000 bills into your kitchen disposal, one after another. Oops, you forgot to pay for your bed pan! Jam another $1,000 bill into it.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Jim Kershner The Spokesman-Review