I arrived in Admitting at 6:30 on the morning of my hip resurfacing, feeling fragile. In the first fifteen minutes, my driver’s licence was checked twice, once at the front desk, and again by a nurse who would not have looked out of place at a United Church square dance. After leading me to a cubicle, she gave me a bag for my clothes, told me to change into hospital gear, and left.

By the time she returned, I had transformed into Mr.Patient, one smock tied in back and another in front, to protect my bare bum. She clicked a plastic bracelet around my wrist and stuck an IV needle into my arm, connecting it to a plastic bag dangling from a chrome pole with splayed toes that reminded me of a stork.

Dressed in green scrubs, Greidanus burst into the room with the focused intensity of a star hockey forward. His first item of business was to make sure I’d paid my extra fees. “A couple of guys stiffed us,” he explained. “The bureaucrats tried to murder me.” Before leaving, seconds later, he took out a marker and actually scrawled his autograph on my right hip. “Just so we get the right one,” he said with a wink.

My nurse, who had transformed into my mother, helped me to my feet, and together we wheeled my stork down the hall to the OR, a brightly lit room twice the size of a country kitchen, with a padded table in the centre and wall-to-wall stainless countertops arrayed with what looked to be a set of tools from Lee Valley.

Mats, my anaesthetist, introduced himself with Nordic good humour and injected something into my IV that made me anybody’s baby. Then he stuck a needle into my spine (which hurt, but I didn’t care), and erected a cloth screen so I couldn’t see what was going on below my chest. Beyond the partition, I didn’t exist.

At a midpoint between waking and dreaming, I listened to the muttered comments, the clink of instruments, the moist swish of God-knows-what, and I nearly wept with gratitude. All these skilled people paying attention to me, with no objective but to make me better! Whatever management has done to the art of medicine, if you do not experience regard for the human race when you’re on the table, you never will.

The metallic clank of hammer on chisel, the kind of hard whack you’d administer to crack a block of ice, shattered my euphoria. Thanks to Mats’s nuanced ministrations, I could check out at will:

I arrive at the room where souls wait while their bodies are having operations. I pass the triple bypasses and various ectomies, waiting to find out what’s left. I pass the innocents: disaster victims, genetic malfunctions, babies with holes in their hearts. Finally, I join the majority: liposuction thighs, cigarette lungs, whisky livers, joint transplants — the wear-and-tear crowd, the guys and gals who did it to ourselves…

“We’re done.”

I opened my eyes to behold Mats’s avuncular smile.