Word: braine
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...Brain surgery is a license for self-indulgence. Cancel that dentist's appointment; you've suffered enough. (Though technically, before you go under, you haven't actually suffered at all.) Take out the trash? "C'mon, honey, I've got BRAIN SURGERY next week." Writers devote a lot of creative energy to dreaming up reasons not to write. One of the all-time best came recently from Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, who told her readers that she was going to stop writing the column for a while because her husband had become Defense Minister of Poland...
...write, surgery is a few days off. But you can assume, if you are reading this, that it went well. And thank you for your concern. Now, where was I? Oh, yes, brain surgery. Thinking I would give self-deception one more shot, I tried to convince myself that dbs isn't really brain surgery. They don't crack open your skull; they just drill a couple of small holes to put the wires through. Tiny holes. Itsy-bitsy holes. Teensy-weensy little holes. The propaganda they give you when you sign up for the operation describes the holes...
...American middle-class professional of the 21st century, what is scariest about brain surgery isn't the ever present risk of disaster or even the chance of unexpected side effects. It's the danger that people will look at you differently. We are all brain snobs, and we are all-those of us over 20 or so-losing brain cells. But if you're walking around with wires in your head and batteries flanking your chest, every senior moment when you can't remember the term for, you know, when they drill holes in your skull-right, brain surgery...
...That's why my first words coming out of surgery are so important. They have got to tell the world-and convince myself-that I am all there. Of course, there are the obvious jokes about brain surgery ("Well, it wasn't exactly rocket science") and about those wires in my head ("Can you hear me now?"). There is Dada ("I am the Defense Minister of Poland. Who the hell are you?"). And slapstick ("I feel as if I've lost 10 pounds ... uh oh"). I'm still working...
Like NASA before the first moon landing, I have been soliciting advice about what to say when I wake up from brain surgery. That's right, brain surgery--it's a real conversation stopper, isn't it? There aren't many things you can say these days that retain their shock value, but that is one of them. "So, Mike--got any summer plans?" "Why, yes, next Tuesday I'm having brain surgery. How about you?" In the age of angioplasty and Lipitor, even the heart has lost much of its metaphorical power, at least in the medical context. People...