Slaughterhouse and sheep

Once a lamb went to slaughterhouse and asked, "why do you slaughter the sheep?"
Slaughterhouse said,"I don't. The butcher does that".
So the lamb goes to the butcher and asks, "why do yo slaughter the sheep?"
Butcher said,"you see, those sheep make me cut them. I particularly do not like slaughtering."
"how come?" asked the lamb.
"well you see, they come to me with extra weight and sheepish look. They try very hard at being a roast chop or stew. I take pity on them & cut them. It is not easy thing to do, but I guess the sheep like it."
"oh really?" asked the lamb,"can you show me how to cut sheep?".
So the butcher slaughtered the lamb and hung him up to sell. The message of the story is: don’t waste your roast mutton chops. Remember the sheep have worked hard on it... No wait, that is not the message. The real message is 'be careful about what you ask for, most likely you will get it.'
I was thinking about this folk tale on the next day of operation quite a lot..Ok you would argue that you don't have lot of other things to do when you are in ICU, bed-ridden and entirely wired. The story sounds very familiar. I went to the doctor, told him I have cancer. I asked him what would be the treatment & he thought I am interested so he cut me open. As simple as that.

The entire surgery went on for 8 hrs and they charged me for overtime of anasthecist, the RFA guy and even the attendant in operation theatre. No wonder they forgot to cut the larger portion of tumour on the right side (their reasoning: it would have been fatalastic touching right hepatic artery; my reasoning: they were simply tired and overworked and possibly hungry too! It was well past dinner time). After such a long surgery I was anyway tired so I told them let us finish off tomorrow but they wouldn't listen. This is the problem with medical profession, they simply have no commitment to the work (unlike let us say software engineers who always carry working on the problem to next day;never finish a thing in a day,that is our motto). Well being under anasthetic and all I could not really convince them and they sewed it up and put me at the mercy of ICU nurses.
ICU, like other hospital departments is mainly run by nurses who hate their jobs and subsequently their patients. One could argue that they are so dedicated to cure the patients that they do not care for the pains of patients in the process. They do the dressing, they clean you, they give you bucketful of drugs, they inject all sorts of needles in your body, they search body cavities for disease. In short they do everything in their capacity to cure the patients. What if, some patients get wrong dosage in the process or suffer pain while dressing or get reactions of the drugs. I think it is human nature to complain, especially about small things like being unconscious. Just another day a patient next to me became chronic because of wrong dosage, and relatives were all blaming it on the poor nurse. I mean how could they, besides how could a nurse remember sophramycin for a day? For a change you try to spell it after seeing once! See how difficult that is? And doctors are always at hand in hospital, so all the ruckus was really unnecessary. Doctors could always solve such problems, e.g. In this case doctor just put him to sleep. Simple solution to simple problem. Life is much too complicated at the age of 82. He is better off without it.
The nurses being serious people, don’t laugh. You don’t joke with them. I tried once but was punished with a tablet in the lower back (literally, I am not joking). In any case the stay in ICU was more like being tested for astronauts. You have plenty of tubes coming out of your body, including one which allows you to pee and another one which allows to breathe. There are set of tubes to monitor your body performance. Sitting up or sleeping down is very painful process of entangling or dis -entangling various wires, tubes, etc.

In short you learn what an operation and aftermath feels like. The worst part is when they start removing bodily attachments. The first one to go is your anasthetic, and thus goes your painfree life. Why do they have preferenc for this, they cannot explain. My guess is that they wanted to give me special treatment and let me experience the pain first hand, unlike other patients who are kept on extra dose of painkiller out of pity. I earned my firsthand pain, what can I say? It is just my charm!

However, now I can say with atmost authority that I know what an operation is. my expertise lies in long, excruciating liver operations (patients wanting to know about less than 6hr operations or smaller than 6" scar are not entertained) with follow-on chemo or radiotherapy. We can also add ICU experiences as a feature.

I have now officially survived my operation. Agreed it is a small victory against cancer, but how many sheep can know about slaughtering and survive to tell the tale?