THIRD TIME IN THE HOSPITAL FOR SURGERY

Now they're messing with my tail bone.  This could turn out to be a long story, but I'll try to keep it short and get it behind me.  I looked for some pictures, but they were all rather gross, so I settled for this cute little cartoon figure.
I was in Rome, Italy, studying at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas.  I developed a painful condition that pronounced itself loudly after I had been sitting for more than about five minutes.  Now for a person who is in school, that is a rather interesting condition to develop.  I did not know what it was, but I did know what it felt like.  I told my superiors what was happening to me and they could not figure out what was wrong with me.  So, they called a friend, a Swiss doctor so that he could look at me.  He came, he saw and he failed.  But before he failed, I actually let him cut me.  Yeah, with Novocaine followed by 20 minutes of cutting and pulling with a pair of pliers.  After he finished I was sore for about a month from the wound alone.  I also bled a lot.  What a mess!  I am about to exclaim and shout that I have this supreme pain in the ass, but it hurts too much.  I am reduced to silence.  I still have two more years to go in Rome, but I will tell you now, I ain't sayin' nothin' no more about this to anyone...Let alone a Swiss doctor.  So I squirmed for two more years.  After the carving of my tail stopped hurting, the tail pain took over and never left.
Let me say, that I did discover how to squirm around it, for the most part.  I did graduate, but that was not the end.  I still had about 18 hours of airplane time looking me in the eye.  Oh, yeah.  Now that was fun.
After that, I settled in to life as it should be, I thought.  Along the way, I told my new superior about my posterior pain.  He sent me to the doctor.  The doctor said, "Ouch, that must hurt."  He then proceeded to tell me that I had a fairly common condition known as a Pilonidal cyst.  It is a growth that forms at the end of your tailbone and must be excised surgically, under general anesthesia.  Can you imagine my reaction to that?  Shocked.  Dead silence.  Three complete years of pain; scraping and pulling under local freezing and now I hear this.  I tell the boss.  He says, "Get it done.  I got work for you to do and it involves driving all over the Northeast."  So off I go to hospital.
I spend one week there.  One week for a pain in the ass.  But I took advantage of it.  The third shift nurse always gave me a nice back-rub to make me comfortable before going beddie-bye.  It got to be so good that I really didn't want to leave.  One good thing, other than my lazy comfort. The pain went away.  The doctor told me that it could come back.  So far, so good.  50 years so far and still pain free.
It is a strange memory.  To have been subjected to a wrong procedure is never a pleasant feeling.  Fortunately for me, my experience was far from having the potential of killing me.  So, it was painful, but it was also comical.  When something is comical, the sufferer can always survive.  I look back on this one with a light heart.  I am quite sure that if every hospitalization were like this one, there would be a lot less pain in the world.  There might be more pains in the ass, but we can all get over those.  Trust me on this one.