02 February 2014

Recuperating

It's been 48 hours since I was released from the hospital and I'm pleased to say I'm recuperating well. The fact that I was in and out of the hospital, minus a gall bladder, in 36 hours is amazing. This is not a reflection of my superhuman powers, of which I possess exactly zero, but is a testament to the incredible gift that is intelligence. To be clear, I don't mean my own middling intelligence.

So what do I mean? Not so long ago, identifying a medical issue like the one I had took several days. Once identified, surgery was a highly invasive affair, followed by several days of hospitalization and weeks of painful recovery. Contrast that with my experience - issue clearly identified in less than five hours; surgery twelve hours after admittance; and home 24 hours after the surgery. In the grand scheme of things, aside from the initial onset that sent me screaming to the ER, the pain has been totally manageable. And the surgery? Not invasive at all. I have four 'stab' wounds that were used for the cameras and tools that dragged out my sick gall bladder. All in all, amazing.

Intelligence is an amazing thing. In my take, we have seen these improvements in medical care because smart people asked questions. Questions like, Can't we manage pain more effectively?' 'Is there a better way to operate?' 'How do we take x-rays to the next level?' Now I'm fairly certain the questions that got these innovations in modern medicine were not quite so simple, but you get the drift.

It's been said that the glory of God is intelligence and I'm grateful for that intelligence being used so wisely in our world today. This little medical brouhaha has reminded me clearly of that! 

But I do have one concern about the intelligence, or the lack thereof - would it have killed the people that prepped me for surgery to have shaved my whole stomach instead of the 3/4 of it that they did? Who does that? Seriously.


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