xtcian

connected to the thigh bone

3/1/04

My mom goes into surgery today to get her hip replaced. She did the same thing in 1993, but the warranty just ran out, so they have to go in and give her a firmware update. Apparently the hips they're putting in people these days are WAY cooler than the ones they had ten years ago, but that's what happens when Moore's Law is in effect.

Yes, I realize I just used Moore's Law incorrectly.

When I was young, I convinced myself that there was no God because of the arbitrariness of medical invention. Put simply, I couldn't conceive of a God that would let one child die of polio in 1951 just because he wasn't around the next year when Salk discovered the vaccine. I think of Sylvia Plath, who was one Welbutrin away from keeping her head out of the oven. The sheer randomness of medical discovery unveiled to me a universe that was without a good manager.

We live in the Dark Age before the cancer cure. People will be reading about us with the same sense of disdain we have for the doctors who killed George Washington through bloodletting. My hope is that we will live long enough to see that random, arbitrary breakthrough that renders this bugaboo obsolete. Sure, we will find other ways to kill each other, but it won't have to do with any of our pancreases.

Here and now, I'm thankful for my mom's supercharged new hip made of space-age polymers. If there are any Gods, I would like to pray to the Goddess of Anesthesia, to bring her quietly in and out of the dream world while she gets her axles re-aligned.

It's Mormon Hair Week on the blog! My Aunt Marilyn, Joanie, and my mom's singing group, circa 1950