So, this is old age. My right knee was causing me a lot of pain about a year ago. I went to visit an orthopedist who had rave reviews.
He shot me up three times with some kind of steroid of his own manufacture. It was expensive. But medicine is a business, so I grinned and bore it.
The second shot was far better. The pain disappeared for about a week.
Then it came back. I went in for a third shot, the most expensive of all. It hurt like crazy and did no good, as far as I could tell.
At my doctor’s suggestion, I went to see an orthopedic surgeon. He had a crisis of some kind, so I was anesthetized by an amateur with a spinal injection.
It hurt amazingly. But soon I was unconscious. I was in a deep trance. I dreamed I was in Winston Churchill’s wartime bunker with Nazi bombs falling all around me.
Somehow, I knew they were Nazi V-2 rockets. They shook the bunker insanely, but I felt safe.
At about 6 a.m., my doctor came in and showed me a picture of a super bloody knee cap. That, he said, was my knee when they started the surgery.
Then he showed me a picture of a perfectly clean knee cap. Immaculate, he told me — the perfectly repaired knee.
Hmmm. This seemed like a bit too much bragging to hit a patient with who was still under anesthesia. What was he selling?
That was last December. Now, almost a year later, my knee hurts more every day. I am essentially crippled and have to be in a wheelchair whenever I go out. I can barely get around my very own house, partly because it has stairs.
I suffer a lot.
Luckily, I have a doctor who is not imprisoned in the fraudulent war-on-drugs “Lubyanka” (Stalin’s torture chamber prison created to scare the Russian people into doing whatever he ordered done). My doctor is very careful about prescribing opiates, but he also does not like to see me suffer.
What comes next? I surely do not want another surgery if I can avoid it. I don’t want to be doped up and constipated night and day. What do I do? I am privileged to have a large swimming pool, heated like bath water. I’ll swim in it as much as I can.
Then I’ll get up with the help of my super strong nurse, Raul, get dressed, and recall some of my old dad’s wisdom.
My dad was a student in 1935-1936 of the great economist Frank Knight. That genius said he would leave his Ph.D. students with three thoughts:
- Take advantage of all subsidies.
- Never waste any time you could spend sleeping.
- How long will it be before doctors cure more people than they kill?
By the way, I was reminded of these thoughts by a lifelong friend from Silver Spring, Joel Block, genius Ph.D. in French literature from Columbia. Good to keep old friends. We have been pals since 1961, and what a great pal to have!
I guess we’ll find out. I guess I’m finding out.
Ben Stein is a writer, an actor, and a lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes hired him as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read more more reports from Ben Stein — Click Here Now.
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