Surgery is a serious topic and especially so when you are the one going ‘under the knife’. Even though you may not actually feel anything because of the miracle of anesthesia, the anxiety that accompanies surgery can be absolutely overwhelming. However, one young man found a fun and entertaining way to fight off those pre-surgery nerves while waiting for his knee surgery to begin.
The young man’s name is Dreble and he recently shared an experience he had as a teenager. He was waiting in pre-op for his knee surgery and his doctor came in to check on him and then gave him a black sharpie to mark the correct area on his knee to be operated on. The doctor answered any questions he had and then left to prepare for the surgery. When the doctor walked out, he left the anxious teenager alone with the sharpie.
Dreble decided first to mark the knee, as he had been told to do. He drew arrows pointing to the marked knee and wrote “operate here” on his leg. He then drew several “x’s” on the opposite leg and the words “Do not touch”. Watching the clock tick slowly, and watching thirty more minutes pass, he then got an idea to write a funny comment on his back, as a joke. He asked his mom to write “If you can read this, wrong side. Flip me over.” And the comments didn’t stop there – he wrote many more including “You can’t have my appendix” and “Why are you looking up here? Focus on the knee”. Finally as the anesthesiologist entered the room, he covered with a sheet so as to not ruin the surprise.
After the surgery, the doctor checked on him and informed him that the entire day’s surgery schedule was thrown off because as they entered the operating room and uncovered him, the entire operating team was caught off guard and began laughing so hysterically that they couldn’t compose themselves for an entire thirty minutes! The doctor admitted laughing so hard that he couldn’t even hold the scalpel.
Just envisioning that scene – a room full of doctors and nurses, scrubbed and ready for surgery – all of a sudden losing their composure completely because of the comedic antics of a teenager, caught completely by surprise is enough to make anyone smile and hopefully choose to ‘pay it forward’ in days to come.
