If you ever have occasion to visit the Madison Surgery Center to get some surgery done, be prepared to introduce yourself to everyone you meet by giving your first and last name and your birth date, because if you don’t, everyone’s going to ask when you were born and you’re just going to have to tell them anyway. They won’t lift a finger until you do. They can wait all day.

I’m not sure what the birthday thing is about. It seems to be the way they make sure that you’re who you say you are, probably not for the sake of being overly officious but to make sure that the thing they’re about to do to you is the right thing. Every single person I met greeted me the same way: By asking for my name and birth date while looking at the little plastic wrist band with my name and birth date printed on it, then riffing through a folder chock full o’ documents.

But while they were being so very careful and professional, they were also the friendliest and most helpful group of people I’ve had the good fortune to deal with in a long time. Three different nurses came to prepare me, one after the other, and every one of them acted as if she’d gotten out of bed that morning for the sole purpose of caring for me. Thank goodness there are people in this world who still know how to do that.

The doctor who performed the procedure stopped by my bedside just before I went in. He looked to be about thirty or thirty-five years old, wore a pair of tortoise shell glasses and, crossing his arms as he sat down, he appeared to have biceps as big around as cannons, which for some reason seemed to me to look odd on a guy who performed surgery. Maybe I don’t know enough surgeons.

“Have you ever done this before?” he asked. When I told him I hadn’t, he outlined the basic steps of what he was about to do in a quiet, measured litany that he’d obviously perfected over years and years to anticipate almost any questions I might have had. Still, when he was finished, he asked: “Do you have any questions for me?”

“Have you ever done this before?” I asked.

He allowed himself a hint of a smile. “A few thousand times.”

The hospital was freezing. The air conditioning seemed to be blasting out of control, so naturally the first thing they asked me to do was take off all my clothes and put on a flimsy paper gown. The nurses either realized that it was way too cold for me and my procedure, or they took pity on me, because just after I bagged up all my clothes and was seated again, shivering, in the big plastic chair they used to prep me, one of the nurses brought me a blanket that felt like she had just plucked it from the clothes dryer. *bliss!* Thirty minutes or so later, the nurses in the surgery gave me not one but two warmed blankies. That did almost as much as their warm bedside manner to put me at ease.

The procedure was literally over before I knew it. An RN injected me with the first portion of the sedative she was going to use, and that’s the last thing I remember until I woke up in the recovery room where My Darling B was waiting to hand me a cup of cranberry juice that I wasn’t quite awake enough to reach but wanted really bad.

When I could stand more or less unassisted, they gave me my clothes and we went home. Easy-peasy.