The Best Horse Sense

This doesn’t have anything to do with horses or leadership, but I thought I would share this bit of wisdom, anyway:

If you have to have surgery, it’s not such a bad deal to do it on your birthday.

Last November, I got bucked off a horse and landed on my wrist. The surgeon had to pin together nine pieces of my radius bone. (http://picasaweb.google.com/BastaRanch/WristInjury) After three months of therapy and healing, my therapist discovered that my bicep was torn. There was so much pain and trauma in the wrist area that no one had noticed, including me, that the bicep was just a useless puddle of muscle under my skin.

My doc helped me schedule bicep repair surgery to be after my trip to San Francisco, but before my concert next week. I wanted the surgery as early as possible this week so that I have a better chance of recovering to sing in three performances next week. That scheduled day was Tuesday, March 10, which also happened to be my birthday.

So, here is why it wasn’t so bad. I made sure that everyone knew that poor,poor, pitiful me had to have surgery on my birthday. I told the receptionist at the orthopedics department. I told the surgery scheduler. I told the receptionist at the surgery department. I did my best to make sure everyone felt really sorry for me. It wasn’t that hard to summon up sympathy.

When I walked into the surgery area, the pre-op nurse, a volunteer, and my wife all sang Happy Birthday to me. A little embarrassing, but sweet.

After I got home, Nancy tucked me in bed with a percocet and a couple of dogs to cuddle. Late in the evening, I wandered into my computer to re-acquaint myself with one-handed typing. (Fortunately, you don’t have to see how many times I have to hit the backspace key.) I figured I would let my Twitter friends know about my day. I had tweeted the day before:

“I have to have surgery tomorrow to repair torn bicep tendon. Yay! On my birthday. Double Yay! Fun, fun, fun….”

By the time I got on to Twitter near midnight, I had lots of messages on Twitter and Facebook wishing me well.

If it had just been my birthday, there would have been plenty of comments, but nothing that interesting. I probably wouldn’t have even mentioned my birthday to anyone. And if it had been just a day of surgery, I would have had some sympathy and some interest, but not much more. Combining the two together, I elicited and got a lot more attention. And I have to admit, it was fun.

For an hour, I talked to friends about my injury and recovery. We talked about making my birthday like Groundhog Day where I could do it over until I got it right. I said that I would really rather do over the day of my injury until I got that day right. We talked about the relative recovery of flexors and extendors. The girls gave lots of sympathy. With the guys, I talked about the physics of momentum, mass, and velocity. There’s a difference between men and women. Who knew?

I discovered that 140 character Tweets are just about perfect for one-handed typing. I did more than 40 of them in an hour.

Last year, my 50th birthday passed by with hardly anyone noticing. On my 51st, I got a lot more love and attention. I’m not recommending surgery as a way to spice up your birthday, but a birthday is a pretty good way to make surgery go better. It was actually a pretty good day.