So, last year my wife and my mother-in-law gave me a bunch of these glow stone thingies to line the slate path in my garden. There were at least a hundred of them and they looked very cool at night. But after a while, there were less and less of them. I thought maybe they were evaporating. I realized one of the local animals must have been stealing them so I collected them up (what was left) and Bonnie used them in the bottom of a glass vase with a flower arrangement. So, now they are turning up all over the place. I think the squirrels buried them as food for the winter and when they tried to eat them, spit them out. Gonna use the rest inside. After I wash off the squirrel spit.

So, during the Sunday School hour, the kids made a headband with floppy ears that stuck up. As a prank, the ushers came down the aisle to collect the offering, all wearing a set of these bunny ears. I laughed and, to show I was not phased, used it as a transition into my sermon time. After they departed, and before the sermon, I’m thinking bunny ears, Easter. I waxed eloquent about adapting popular culture to teach spiritual truths, IE the Easter Egg and Rabbit, symbols of new life etc. Later, I found out that the ears were donkey ears. Donkey. Jesus riding. Palm Sunday. Palm smacks forehead.

If you’re searching for dignity, the hospital is not the place to look for it. In fact, heavy doses of humility if not humiliation are prescribed. I was there for my second procedure in six weeks, a bypass of the LAD, the artery they call “the widow-maker”. I’d survived a heart attack that probably should have killed me. It’s not so much in what they say as in what they don’t say as they look at the ground and shake their heads. That adventure resulted in the placement of a stent in my RCA and a failed attempt to Hoover a 15-year-old stent plugged with a blood clot. I was lined up for a bypass.

Robotic surgery and the DaVinci robot have been around for a while, used on gall bladder surgery and for other procedures around the country. But robotic heart bypass surgery is comparatively new. The doctor who did my stent insisted that I see a surgeon in Reading, PA. “She’s the best”, he said. I’m sure he was right. The procedure went well and will, no doubt, add many years to my life. That, dear folks, is a blessing.

Back to the dignity issue. What does dignity mean in a place that celebrates the post-surgery passing of gas, bowl movements that get charted, and measured urination? Not much. It’s not that they don’t try, it’s just that the situation demands so much exposure. Perhaps, if I were male supermodel material I wouldn’t have minded so much. However, at my age and in my current condition I minded. I began to mind it less, the longer I was there. Other matters such as learning to walk and breathe again seem slightly more important than needing help bathing or putting on your socks.

I guess there are situations where we have to set aside our pride and just go with it for the sake of a greater good. I’ll have to think about that some more to come up with some witty and profound life applications.